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 later became his chief political asset.

Meanwhile the rapid growth of population south of the Ohio River made
necessary new arrangements for purposes of government. In 1790 the
region between the Ohio and the present States of Alabama and
Mississippi, having been turned over to the Nation by its earlier
possessors, was erected into the "Southwest Territory," and in 1791
the northern half became the State of Kentucky. In 1793 the remainder
of the Territory set up a Legislature, and three years later delegates
from the eleven counties met at Knoxville to draw up a new frame of
government with a view to admission to statehood. Jackson was a member