occasions in defense of what they considered to be their personal
honor. In young Andrew Jackson these characteristics appeared in a
superlative degree. He was mischievous, willful, daring, reckless.
Hardly an escapade took place in the community in which he did not
share; and his sensitiveness and quick temper led him continually into
trouble. In his early teens he swore like a trooper, chewed tobacco
incessantly, acquired a taste for strong drink, and set a pace for
wildness which few of his associates could keep up. He was
passionately fond of running foot races, leaping the bar, jumping,
wrestling, and every sort of sport that partook of the character of
mimic battle--and he never acknowledged defeat. "I could throw him
three times out of four," testifies an old schoolmate, "but he would
never _stay throwed_. He was dead game even then, and never _would_
give up." Another early companion says that of all the boys he had
known Jackson was the only bully who was not also a coward.

Of education the boy received only such as was put unavoidably in his
way. It is said that his mother taught him to read before he was five
years old; and he attended several terms in the little low-roofed log
schoolhouse in the Waxhaw settlement. But his formal instruction never
took him beyond the fundamentals of reading, writing, geography,
grammar, and "casting accounts." He was neither studious nor
teachable. As a boy he preferred sport to study, and as a man he chose
to rely on his own fertile ideas rather than to accept guidance from
others. He never learned to write the English language correctly,
although he often wrote it eloquently and convincingly. In an age of
bad spellers he achieved distinction from the number of ways in which
he could spell a word within the space of a single page. He could use
no foreign languages; and of the great body of science, literature,
history, and the arts he knew next to nothing. He never acquired a