ly years. It is clear, however,
that he was a mischievous, high-spirited boy, and often got into
trouble. At least one anecdote is thoroughly in keeping with his career
in manhood. Some of his playmates, so the story goes, once loaded a gun
to the muzzle and gave it him to fire. As they expected, it kicked him
over, but they missed the fun they looked for. He sprang to his feet
white with rage, and exclaimed, with an oath, "If one of you laughs,
I'll kill him!"--and no one laughed. The oath itself is not an
unimportant part of the story, for it may as well be said at once that
Andrew Jackson, until near the end of his life, had many such vices as
swearing. He not only swore, but he frequently quarrelled and fought; he
was at one time given to betting, particularly on horses; he drank, and
he used tobacco constantly. All of these habits were common in the
society to which he was born, and he did not escape them. But some
things he did escape. He hated debt all his life, and was willing to do
almost anything rather than incur it. He had the greatest reverence for
women, and bore himself towards them with a courtesy and tenderness, a
knightly purity of thought and word and deed, which the finest
gentleman of the most ancient society in the world could not have
surpassed.

When this pleasing fact is stated, one's thoughts turn naturally to his
widowed mother, as to the most natural source of such an excellence in
the son. All we know of her does indeed indicate that her influence on
him was both strong and good: but we know very little. She was a simple,
uncultivated person, like most of her neighbors, but her conduct during
the harrowing scenes of the revolutionary war makes us think she was in
some respects extraordinary. The struggle was nowhere rougher and
fiercer than it was in the Carolinas. The notorious Colonel Tarleton
operated in the Waxhaws neighborhood, and many dreadful stories of
suffering and cruelty belong to that country and that time. The Jackson
family had their full share of the fighting and the suffering. The two
older boys, Hugh and Robert, enlisted. Young "Andy" himself, when he was
barely in his teens, carried a musket. He and Robert were captured, and
were released through the efforts of their mother, who brought about an
exchange of prisoners. Soon afterwards, she went on a long and heroic
journey to Charleston to nurse the sick Americans confined on the
British prison ships there; and there she fe