k"
described by England's greatest bard as bespeaking little sleep of
nights, but much of ambition, self-reliance, and impatience of control.
His lip and eye denoted the man of unyielding temper, and his very hair,
slightly silvered, stood erect like quills round his wrinkled brow, as
if they scorned to bend. Some sneered, it is true, at what they called
a military tyro, at the impromptu general who had sprung out of the
uncouth lawyer and the unlearned judge, who in arms had only the
experience of a few months, acquired in a desultory war against wild
Indians, and who was, not only without any previous training to his new
profession, but also without the first rudiments of a liberal education,
for he did not even know the orthography of his own native language.
Such was the man who, with a handful of raw militia, was to stand in
the way of the veteran troops of England, whose boast it was to have
triumphed over one of the greatest captains known in history. But those
who entertained such distrust had hardly come in contact with General
Jackson, when they felt that they had to deal with a master-spirit.
True, he was rough hewn from the rock, but rock he was, and of that kind
of rock which Providence chooses to select as a fit material to use in
its structures of human greatness. True, he had not the education of a
lieutenant in a European army; but what lieutenant, educated or not,
who had the will and the remarkable military adaptation so evident in
General Jackson's intellectual and physical organization, ever remained
a subaltern? Much less could General Jackson fail to rise to his proper
place in a country where there was so much more elbow-room, and fewer
artificial obstacles than in less favored lands. But, whatever those
obstacles might have been, General Jackson would have overcome them all.
His will was of such an extraordinary nature that, like Christian faith,
it could almost have accomplished prodigies and removed mountains. It is
impossible to study the life of General Jackson without being convinced
that this is the most remarkable feature of his character. His will had,
as it were, the force and the fixity of fate; that will carried him
triumphantly through his military and civil career, and through the
difficulties of private life. So intense and incessantly active this
peculiar faculty was in him, that one would suppose that his mind was
nothing but will--a will so lofty that it towered into sublimity. In