was no
sham in these victories. He fairly earned his laurels, and they so
wrought on the imagination of the people that he quickly became famous.

But before his military exploits brought him a national reputation he
had become notorious in his neighborhood as a duellist. He was always
ready to fight when he deemed himself insulted. His numerous duels were
very severely commented on when he became a candidate for the
presidency, especially in New England. But duelling was a peculiar
Southern institution; most Southern people settled their difficulties
with pistols. Some of Jackson's duels were desperate and ferocious. He
was the best shot in Tennessee, and, it is said, could lodge two
successive balls in the same hole. As early as 1795 he fought with a
fellow lawyer by the name of Avery. In 1806 he killed in a duel Charles
Dickinson, who had spoken disparagingly of his wife, whom he had lately
married, a divorced woman, but to whom he was tenderly attached as long
as she lived. Still later he fought with Thomas H. Benton, and received
a wound from which he never fully recovered.

Such was the life of Jackson until he was forty-five years of age,--that
of a violent, passionate, arbitrary man, beloved as a friend, and feared
as an enemy. It was the Creek war and the war with England which
developed his extraordinary energies. When the war of 1812 broke out he
was major-general of Tennessee militia, and at once offered his services
to the government, which were eagerly accepted, and he was authorized to
raise a body of volunteers in Tennessee and to report with them at New
Orleans. He found no difficulty in collecting about sixteen hundred men,
and in January, 1813, took them down the Cumberland, the Ohio, and
Mississippi to Natchez, in such flat-bottomed boats as he could collect;
another body of mounted men crossed the country five hundred miles to
the rendezvous, and went into camp at Natchez, Feb. 15, 1813.

The Southern Department was under the command of General James
Wilkinson, with headquarters at New Orleans,--a disagreeable and
contentious man, who did not like Jackson. Through his influence the
Tennessee detachment, after two months' delay in Natchez, was ordered by
the authorities at Washington to be dismissed,--without pay, five
hundred miles from home. Jackson promptly decided not to obey the
command, but to keep his forces together, provide at his own expense for
their food and transportation, and take th