Eighteenth Street, Madison relieved his despair by sacking Armstrong and accepting the
resignations of the Navy and Treasury secretaries. But where was he, and America, to look for a
savior?
The savior soon-one might say instantly-appeared, but in a human shape that Madison, his
mentor Jefferson, and the whole of the Virginia ruling establishment found mighty uncongenial,
the very opposite of the sort of person who, in their opinion, should rule America. By 1814
Andrew Jackson, the twelve-year-old boy who had been marked for life by a British officer's
sword, had made himself a great and powerful man, of a distinctively new American type. It is
worth looking at him in some detail, because to do so tells us so much about life in the early
republic. At seventeen, a hungry, almost uneducated orphan, he had turned to a life in the law. In
frontier Tennessee, 'lawyering' was in practice a blend of land-grabbing, wheeler-dealing, office-
seeking, and dueling. The frontier was rapidly expanding, rough, violent, and litigious. Jackson
became a pleader in a court, attorney-general for a local district, then judge-advocate in the
militia. Ten years later he was already deep in land-speculation, the easiest way for a penniless
man to become rich in the United States, but he was almost ruined by an associate's bankruptcy.
His breakthrough came in 1796, when he helped to create the new state of Tennessee, first as
congressman, then as senator. He took office as a judge in the state's Superior Court and founded
the first Masonic lodge in Nashville, where he settled in 1801, soon acquiring the magnificent
estate of the Hermitage near by. His key move, however, was to get himself elected as major-
general of the militia, the power base from which he drove his way to the top.
Jackson was known as a killer. His first duel, fought when he was twenty-one, arose from
mutual court-room abuse-a common cause-and ended with Jackson firing into the air. But
thereafter, like Burr, he usually shot to kill. Jackson fought many duels on account of his
marriage, in 1790, to Rachel Robards, an older divorced woman, a substitute mother, whom he
loved passionately and fiercely defended until her death. Rachel's divorce proved invalid and the
Jacksons, jeered at, were forced to go through a second marriage ceremony. In 1803, when
Jackson was a senior judge in Knoxville, the governor of the state, John Sevier, sneered at
Rachel and accused Jackson of taking a trip to Natchez with another man's wife.'Great God!'
responded Jackson, `do you dare to mention her sacred name?' Pistols were drawn-the men being
aged fifty-eight and thirty-six respectively-and shots were fired but only a passer-by was injured.
Ten days later, however, there was another, bloodier gunfight with various members of Sevier's
family. In 1806 Jackson fought a formal duel with Charles Dickinson, being wounded himself
and leaving his opponent to bleed to death. In 1813 Jackson was involved in a series of knock-on
duels and fights which led to a violent melee in the streets of Nashville, fought with swordsticks,
guns, daggers, and bare fists-Thomas Hart Benton, later a famous senator, was another of those
involved-the participants rolling, bleeding and bruised, in the dust. Most of Jackson's duels, in
which he faithfully carried out his mother's dying injunction, struck a squalid note.
The duels left Jackson's body a wreck. Tall and thin (six feet one, weighing 145 pounds), with
an erect body crowned by an upstanding thatch of bright red hair, Jackson had a drawn, pain-
lined face from which blue eyes blazed furiously, and his frame was chipped and scarred by the
marks of a violent frontier existence. Dickinson's bullet broke two of Jackson's ribs, buried itself
in his chest carrying bits of cloth with it, could never be extracted, and caused a lung abscess
which caused him pain for decades. In the Benton duel he was hit in the shoulder, barely saved
his arm, and, again, the ball could not be prized out, remaining embedded in the bone and
provoking osteomyelitis. In 1825 Jackson, who was accident-prone, stumbled on a staircase,