nd that he was born in South Carolina; but
there is no certainty of the fact. His early life was very obscure, and
he himself was uncertain of his birth-place, though he believed it was
South Carolina. He remembered the removal of his family from South
Carolina, and many of the incidents of the war of the Revolution
transpiring there; but more especially those occurring in North
Carolina, to which the family removed. Judge Alexander Porter, of
Louisiana, was an Irishman, and from the neighborhood where were born
and reared the parents of Jackson. His own father was brutally executed
at Vinegar Hill, by sentence of a drum-head court martial, in 1798, and
his family proscribed by the British Government. With his uncle, the
Rowans, the Jacksons, and some others, he emigrated to America, and
settled at Nashville, Tennessee. The Jacksons were of the same family,
and distantly connected with General Jackson. Great intimacy existed
between this family and General Jackson for many years.

Judge Porter, of whom I shall hereafter have something to say, visited
Europe a short time before his death, and made diligent search into the
history of the Jackson family, without ascertaining anything
positively: he learned enough to satisfy his own mind that Andrew
Jackson was born in Ireland, and brought to the United States by his
parents when only two years old. This was also the opinion of Thomas
Crutcher, who came with General Jackson to Nashville, and it was also
the opinion of Dr. Boyd McNary and his elder brother, Judge McNary, who
believed he was four years older than he supposed himself to be.

The McNarys came with him from North Carolina. On the trip a difficulty
occurred between Boyd McNary and Jackson, which never was
reconciled--both dying in extreme old age. Boyd McNary stopped at
Lexington and read medicine, forming there the acquaintance of Mr. Clay
and Felix Grundy. The intimacy which sprang up between Clay and McNary
was as ardent and imperishable as the hatred between himself and
Jackson, enduring until death. Jackson was enterprising and eminently
self-reliant; in all matters pertaining to himself, he was his own
counsellor; he advised with no man; cool and quick in thought, he
seemed to leap to conclusions, and never went back from them. An
anecdote relative to his parting from his mother in his outset in life,
illustrates this as prominent in the attributes of his nature at that
time. The writer heard him narrate t