ce. There is even some reason to believe that
he went to work as a schoolmaster; and doubtless some backwoods schools
of that period had masters as ignorant as Andrew Jackson. Finally, he
resolved to study law, and in the winter of 1784-5 started out to find
an office in which he might prepare himself for his profession. He found
a place in the office of Mr. Spruce McCay, of Salisbury, North Carolina,
an old-fashioned Southern town, where he made his home until 1788, when
he was admitted to the bar.

All that is known of his life at Salisbury accords with what is known of
his life at the Waxhaws. He was ready for a frolic or a fight at any
hour of the day or night; he excelled in such sports as required
swiftness and nerve; he was fond of practical jokes; he was not over
fond of study, and never acquired any great knowledge of the law. At
twenty, when his studies were finished, he is described as a tall,
slender young fellow, with a thin, fair face and deep blue eyes, by no
means handsome, but distinguished by considerable grace and dignity of
manner; an exquisite rider and a capital shot; of an extraordinarily
passionate temper, yet singularly swift, even when his anger was at
white heat, to seize upon the right means to protect himself or
discomfit an adversary; already somewhat of a leader, not by any
eminence of talent or knowledge, but because he had a gift of leadership
and was always intensely minded to have his way. The year of his
admission to the bar, after a brief stay at Martinsville, a small North
Carolina town, he got himself appointed solicitor, or public prosecutor,
of the western district of Tennessee, and soon set out for the West.

The appointment of so young a man to such an office seems remarkable
until one knows what Tennessee was like at that time, and what duties a
solicitor was expected to discharge. The term Tennessee is, in fact,
misleading. The region to which Jackson went still belonged to North
Carolina, though its inhabitants had but a little while before made an
attempt to set up a separate State under the name of Franklin. But of
those who made the attempt the great majority had lived in that part of
North Carolina's western lands which is now East Tennessee--a
mountainous region of which Jonesboro, a squatter town of fifty or sixty
log-houses, was the metropolis. Nashville, whither Jackson was bound,
was nearly two hundred miles west of Jonesboro, and the Nashville
settlement was as ye