In time, however, these early hardships passed, and some years later we see Andrew, a young man of twenty-one, now become a lawyer. He is over six feet tall, slender, straight, and graceful, with a long, slim face, and thick hair falling over his forehead and shading his piercing blue eyes. He has crossed the mountains with an emigrant party into the backwoods region of Tennessee.
The party arrived at Nashville, where their life was very much like that of Daniel Boone in Kentucky.
Young Jackson passed through many dangers without harm, and by his industry and business ability became a successful lawyer and in time a wealthy landowner.
After his marriage he built, on a plantation of one thousand one hundred acres, about ten miles from Nashville, a house which he called "The Hermitage." Here he and his wife kept open house for visitors, treating rich and poor with like hospitality. His warm heart and generous nature were especially shown in his own household, where he was kind to all, including his slaves.
[Illustration: "The Hermitage," the Home of Andrew Jackson.]
To the end of his life he had a childlike simplicity of nature. But we must not think of him as a faultless man, for he was often rough in manner and speech, and his violent temper got him into serious troubles. Among them were some foolish duels.
[Illustration: Fighting the Seminole Indians, under Jackson.]
Yet, with all his faults, he was brave and patriotic and did splendid service as a fighter in Indian wars. After one of his duels, with a ball in his shoulder and his left arm in a sling, he went to lead an army of two thousand five hundred men in an attack on the Creek Indians, who had risen against the whites in Alabama. Although weak from a long illness, Jackson marched with vigor against the Creeks, and after a campaign of much hardship, badly defeated them at Horseshoe Bend, in eastern Alabama. He thus broke for all time the power of the Indians south of the Ohio River.
Some three years later (1817) General Jackson, as he was now called, was sent with a body of troops down to southern Georgia, to protect the people there from the Seminole Indians, who lived in Florida. At this time Florida belonged to Spain. Its vast swamps and dense forests made a place of refuge from which outlaws, runaway negroes, and Indians all made a practice of sallying forth in bands across the border into southern Georgia. There they would drive off cattle, burn houses, and murder men, women, and children without mercy.