the town of Salisbury, North Carolina; and, after three years of
intermittent study, he was admitted to practice in the courts of the
State. The instruction which he had received was not of a high order,
and all accounts agree that the young man took his tasks lightly and
that he learned but little law. That he fully sustained the reputation
which he had gained in the Waxhaws is indicated by testimony of one of
Macay's fellow townsmen, after Jackson had become famous, to the
effect that the former student had been "the most roaring, rollicking,
game-cocking, card-playing, mischievous fellow that ever lived in
Salisbury."

Upon his admission to the bar the irresponsible young blade hung out
his shingle in Martinsville, Guilford County, North Carolina, and sat
down to wait for clients. He was still less than twenty years old,
without influence, and with only such friends as his irascible
disposition permitted him to make and hold. Naturally business came
slowly, and it became necessary to eke out a living by serving as a
local constable and also by assisting in a mercantile enterprise
carried on by two acquaintances in the town. After a year this
hand-to-mouth existence began to pall. Neither then nor in later life
did Jackson have any real taste or aptitude for law. He was not of a
legal turn of mind, and he was wholly unprepared to suffer the
sacrifices and disappointments which a man of different disposition
would have been willing to undergo in order to win for himself an
established position in his profession. Chagrin in this restless young
man was fast yielding to despair when an alluring field of action
opened for him in the fast-developing country beyond the mountains.

The settlement of white men in that part of North Carolina which lay
west of the Alleghanies had begun a year or two after Jackson's birth.