well. He may not be learned, or cultured; he may be even unlettered and
rough; he may be stained by vulgar defects and vices which are fatal to
all dignity of character; but there must be something about him which
calls out the respect and admiration of those with whom he is
surrounded, so as to give him a start, and open a way for success in the
business or enterprise where his genius lies.

Such a man was Andrew Jackson. Whether as a youth, or as a man pursuing
his career of village lawyer in the backwoods of a frontier settlement,
he was about the last person of whom one would predict that he should
arise to a great position and unbounded national popularity. His birth
was plebeian and obscure. His father, of Scotch-Irish descent, lived in
a miserable hamlet in North Carolina, near the South Carolina line,
without owning a single acre of land,--one of the poorest of the poor
whites. The boy Andrew, born shortly after his father's death in 1767,
was reared in poverty and almost without education, learning at school
only to "read, write, and cipher;" nor did he have any marked desire for
knowledge, and never could spell correctly. At the age of thirteen he
was driven from his native village by its devastation at the hands of
the English soldiers, during the Revolutionary War. His mother, a worthy
and most self-reliant woman, was an ardent patriot, and all her
boys--Hugh, Robert, and Andrew--enlisted in the local home-guard. The
elder two died, Hugh of exposure and Robert of prison small-pox, while
Andrew, who had also been captured and sick of the disease, survived
this early training in the scenes of war for further usefulness. The
mother made her way on foot to Charleston, S.C., to nurse the sick
patriots in the prison-ships, and there died of the prison fever, in
1781. The physical endurance and force of character of this mother
constituted evidently the chief legacy that Andrew inherited, and it
served him well through a long and arduous life.