onstitution had been
ratified by the ninth State, and that the various legislatures were
preparing to choose electors, who would undoubtedly make George
Washington the first President of the Republic.

Less than ten years old, Nashville had now a population of not over
two hundred. But it was the center of a somewhat settled district
extending up and down the Cumberland for a distance of eighty or
ninety miles, and the young visitor from the Waxhaws quickly found it
a promising field for his talents. There was only one lawyer in the
place, and creditors who had been outbid for his services by their
debtors were glad to put their cases in the hands of the newcomer. It
is said that before Jackson had been in the settlement a month he had
issued more than seventy writs to delinquent debtors. When, in 1789,
he was appointed "solicitor," or prosecutor, in Judge McNairy's
jurisdiction with a salary of forty pounds for each court he attended,
his fortune seemed made and he forthwith gave up all thought of
returning to his Carolina home. Instead he took lodgings under the
roof of the widow of John Donelson, and in 1791 he married a daughter
of that doughty frontiersman. Land was still cheap, and with the
proceeds of his fees and salary he purchased a large plantation called
Hunter's Hill, thirteen miles from Nashville, and there he planned to
establish a home which would take rank as one of the finest in the
western country.

The work of a frontier solicitor was diverse and arduous. A turbulent
society needed to be kept in order and the business obligations of a
shifty and quarrelsome people to be enforced. No great knowledge of
law was required, but personal fearlessness, vigor, and
incorruptibility were indispensable. Jackson was just the man for the
business. His physical courage was equaled by his moral strength; he
was passionately devoted to justice; he was diligent and
conscientious; and, as one writer has remarked, bad grammar, incorrect
pronunciation, and violent denunciation did not shock the judges of
that day or divert the mind of juries from the truth. Traveling almost
constantly over the wretched roads and through the dark forests,
dodging Indians, swimming his horse across torrential streams,
sleeping alone in the woods with hand on rifle, threatened by
desperate wrongdoers, Andrew Jackson became the best-known figure in
all western Tennessee and won at this time a great measure of that
public confidence which