All of them were what may fairly be called
patricians, men of birth and breeding; they were the possessors of a
certain culture and refinement, were descended from well-known families,
and there seemed every reason to believe that the administration of the
country would be continued in the hands of such men. For what other
class of men was fitted to direct it? Then, suddenly, the people spoke,
and selected for their ruler a man from among themselves, a man whose
college was the backwoods, whose opinions were prejudices rather than
convictions, and yet who was, withal, perhaps the greatest popular idol
this country will ever see; whose very blunders endeared him to the
people, because they knew his heart was right.
* * * * *
On the fifteenth day of March, 1767, in a little log cabin on the upper
Catawba river, almost on the border-line between North and South
Carolina--so near it, in fact, that no one knows certainly in which
state it stood--a boy was born and christened Andrew Jackson. His father
had died a few days before--one of those sturdy Scotch-Irish whom we
have seen emigrating to America in such numbers in search of
a land of freedom. The boy grew up in the rude backwoods settlement,
rough, boisterous, unlettered; at the age of fourteen, riding with
Sumter in the guerrilla warfare waged throughout the state against the
British, and then, captured and wounded on head and hand by a
sabre-stroke whose mark he bore till his dying day, a prisoner in the
filthy Camden prison-pen, sick of the small-pox, and coming out of it,
at last, more dead than alive.
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