by H. W. Brands
It took Jackson time to discover the wisdom in his mother’s advice about avoiding quarrels. While still recuperating from smallpox, he lived with his uncle Thomas Crawford, who also hosted a Captain Galbraith of the American army commissary. The captain possessed, by Jackson’s later account, “a very proud and haughty disposition,” which didn’t sit well with the boy. “He had a habit of telling anecdotes in which he always figured as the hero. He had a way of telling them that was ludicrous, and I could mimic him so closely that anyone in the next room would think Galbraith himself was talking. He was a Highland Scotchman, one of the few Whig”—that is, rebel—“Highlanders, and he had a broad Caithness brogue, which I could imitate perfectly. Finally, one day he happened to overhear me at this amusement, and took me to task for, as he put it, insulting a man so much older and so much superior; a man—or ‘mon,’ as he called it—who had so often risked his life for the country. Upon this I remarked that commissaries were not famous for risking their lives, and probably all the killing he had ever done was beef-critters and sheep to feed the real fighting men of the army.”
This enraged Galbraith, who threatened to horsewhip the boy. Jackson had defended his honor against a British combat officer—and bore the scars to prove it—and he refused to be chastised by an American mess master. “I immediately answered that I had arrived at the age to know my rights, and although weak and feeble from disease, I had courage to defend them, and if he attempted anything of that kind I would most assuredly send him to the other world.”
In later years, when Jackson acquired a reputation for dueling, his enemies exaggerated this affair into an attempted assassination, of an American army officer no less. Jackson dismissed such tales as ludicrous. “It was too foolish to talk about, merely a difficulty between a pompous man and a sassy boy.” Yet Jackson’s Uncle Thomas didn’t want any fights among the houseguests, and he made Jackson apologize for poking fun at the elder man. Jackson grudgingly complied. “But I never liked him and avoided him after that.”
Jackson left the Crawford house a short while later. The mature Jackson economized on truth when he said that his mother’s memory was his only starting capital in life. Not long after her death he learned that his paternal grandfather had died in Scotland and left him “three hundred or four hundred pounds sterling,” by Jackson’s recollection. This was no huge fortune—being equivalent to perhaps forty thousand dollars in the early twenty-first century—but it was far more than Jackson had ever seen or expected to call his own.
To claim the windfall he had to travel to Charleston. The British still occupied the city but rather less confidently than before, as the fighting had taken an unexpected turn. Cornwallis followed his successful campaign in the South with a foray into Virginia, where he hoped to corner Washington and end the war. But it was Washington—and his French allies—who did the cornering, pinning Cornwallis against the Chesapeake at Yorktown and compelling the surrender of his army. This hardly decided the overall contest between the United States and Britain; separate British forces still controlled New York, Charleston, and other parts of America, with reserves in Canada and the West Indies. But the Yorktown debacle caused the ministry in London to recalculate the balance between cost and benefit in continuing the war, and before long British diplomats were meeting in Paris with American envoys to negotiate terms of peace.
In December 1782, while the negotiations continued, the British evacuated Charleston. Jackson joined the small flood of refugees who returned to their homes upon the British departure. The city showed the effects of the occupation, yet even in its tattered condition it was the most exciting place Jackson had ever visited. Its taverns welcomed a man with ready money, and its sporting community introduced the country boy to gambling: on cards, on horses, on dice. The result was predictable; within weeks Jackson’s money was gone.
Significantly, though, the one gambling story that survives from this period has Jackson winning. According to this tale, he had already frittered away his cash and fallen in debt to his landlord when he ventured into an establishment where the dice were rolling. One player, admiring Jackson’s fine horse (horses being another indulgence from this period, and one from which Jackson never recovered), offered to bet two hundred dollars against the animal, on one roll of the dice. Jackson couldn’t resist. Shaking the bones, he cast them across the felt—and won. “I had new spirits infused into me,” he declared many years later. Jackson was president at the time of the telling, and as the country’s chief magistrate he wished to avoid giving a bad impression, so he quickly added, “From that moment to the present time I have never thrown dice for a wager.”
Having run through his money, the young man—he was not yet sixteen years old—returned to the Waxhaw. He reentered school briefly before deciding—to the later hilarity of those who considered him the epitome of ignorance—to teach school. His time at the front of the class made no lastingly apparent mark, for good or ill, on his pupils, and it afforded Jackson neither the psychic nor the financial rewards to inspire him to continue in that line.
He might have turned to farming, having inherited the two hundred acres his father had killed himself clearing. (Elizabeth had perfected the title after her husband’s death.) Perhaps the circumstances of his father’s demise were enough to put Jackson off husbandry. Perhaps his taste of the high life of Charleston spoiled him for the plodding career of a farmer. Perhaps he simply felt the stirrings of the ambition that would characterize his whole adult life—the desire, in part, of the unfavored child to win the esteem of others. From whatever combination of reasons, he chose to become a lawyer.
The war was finally over by now. In September 1783 the British and American diplomats at Paris signed a treaty by which Britain formally acknowledged American independence and ceded title to a domain stretching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from Canada to Florida.
With the Paris treaty the struggle for North America entered a new phase. The British were by no means eliminated from the contest; they still controlled Canada and were allied with Spain, which held title to Florida and Louisiana. But the Americans now entered the struggle as independent actors, with a nation and a government of their own. Their hold on the Atlantic slope, where the vast majority of their three and a half million people lived, on farms and in villages and in a handful of cities, was secure.
Yet beyond the mountains, where the forests ran down nearly unbroken to the Mississippi, their hold was tenuous to nonexistent. Some of the Indians noticed the withdrawal of the British and sensed in it the same sort of trouble that had followed the withdrawal of the French. As the Americans, freed from the restrictions on western settlement that had helped provoke the war, prepared to push into the great valley, the Indians prepared to resist.
The legal profession, in the 1780s as later, was to American society what the clergy and the military were to certain other countries and cultures: an avenue of advancement for those with talent and ambition but with neither wealth nor connections. Protestant America had no church hierarchy to speak of, precluding the priestly route to success, and it had no standing army, making a military career unappealing. Yet every society requires means for the humble able to get ahead, lest their frustrated ambitions destabilize the status quo. In America, the law long served that purpose.
In the 1780s the law was almost as much a frontier as the western reaches of the national domain. The Revolution had displaced the principal lawyers of the country, who tended to be Tories and now attempted to construct new practices in Canada or England. It also created an entirely new set of laws, with each state writing a constitution (some states more than one), and the nation as a whole doing the same. Although the English common law still formed the basis for much of the day-to-day work of lawyers, that body of precedents had to be reinterpreted in light of the utterly un-English, un-common-law notion that the basic laws of the land (of the states and the nation) could be drafted de novo and superimposed on centuries of case law like a legal deu
s ex machina. What did all this mean? How would the new system work? This was for the lawyers to argue and the judges—lawyers themselves, in nearly all cases—to decide.
If law was a frontier, law on the frontier was doubly so. In the cities the standards of legal training were well understood and were enforced—as law or guild practice—by persons and institutions attached to the status quo. In the towns and villages of the interior, the standards were more haphazard, more like the standards that had allowed Andrew Jackson to become a teacher. A young man would apprentice with an attorney, who might or might not pay attention to what the young man was learning. When the apprentice thought he could talk his way past a board of examiners, who might or might not examine his expertise closely, he struck out on his own.
The arrangement suited Jackson. In the late winter of 1785, shortly before his eighteenth birthday, he apprenticed himself to Spruce Macay, a lawyer in Salisbury, North Carolina, two days’ ride from the Waxhaw. Macay’s primary qualification for pedagogy was his modest library of law books, a prerequisite for anyone wishing to take on apprentices, of whom he maintained a small but steady supply. Jackson and his fellow attorneys-in-training, including an ambitious fellow named John McNairy, lived in the village tavern, which doubled as a rooming house for long-term visitors on low budgets. Jackson and the others spent days in Macay’s crowded office, filing papers, finding precedents, tracing statutes, running errands, and doing whatever else was needed to keep the practice running. If Macay devoted much time to instructing his charges in the law, he did so unobtrusively. Osmosis was his educational philosophy.
By nights Jackson and the others acted like the unattached, irresponsible young men they were. They drank, gambled (perhaps at dice, Jackson’s later denial notwithstanding, but certainly at cards, horses, and cocks), and played practical jokes, in the poor taste typical of practical jokes. Jackson invited two prostitutes to a Christmas ball the local dancing school put on. His humorous intention, such as it was, got lost in the cloud of scandal that arose when the two scarlet women—a mother and daughter—accepted the invitation and appeared at the event. The proper ladies of the town were shocked, the mother and daughter were embarrassed, and Jackson was compelled to explain himself. To the respectables he said he meant no harm, that he didn’t think the strumpets would actually attend. What he said to the mother and daughter went unrecorded.
Around Salisbury Jackson acquired a reputation as a wild thing going quickly wrong. Years after he left, the townsfolk remembered an evening when Jackson and his friends toasted their mutual health and then, lest the glasses be used for less noble purposes, hurled them into the fire. With the logic of apprentice lawyers, they reasoned that the same argument compelled them to hurl the chairs they sat on into the fire. And then the table. And then the drapes, and everything else in the room that wasn’t nailed down. The building survived the pyrotechnics, but barely. Decades later an acquaintance from that period asserted that the people of Salisbury were fairly certain that Andrew Jackson would come to no good in life. “None of them believed he would ever settle down. Most of them thought he would get himself killed before he was many years older.” An elderly matron of the village, upon hearing that Jackson was running for president, demanded, “What? Jackson for president? Jackson? Andrew Jackson? The Jackson that used to live in Salisbury? Why, when he was here he was such a rake that my husband would not bring him into the house. . . . If Andrew Jackson can be president, anybody can!”
At the beginning of 1787, several weeks before his twentieth birthday, Jackson decided that he had learned all Spruce Macay could teach him. He determined to complete his legal education under the guidance of Colonel John Stokes, a Revolutionary War veteran who had lost a hand in the fighting. For prosthesis Stokes employed a silver knob, with which he tapped his desk while reading and hammered the jury box when arguing cases in court. Stokes was a capable lawyer, one of North Carolina’s best, which may have been why Jackson sought him out. Or it may have been his reputation for bravery under fire, which Jackson considered no less important. What Jackson learned from Stokes is also problematic. Perhaps the old soldier simply taught Jackson to believe in himself, for just six months later Jackson stood before a two-judge board of the North Carolina Superior Court of Law and Equity to be examined for fitness to practice law. Noting that Jackson “is sufficiently recommended to us as a person of unblemished moral character”—quite likely Stokes was the recommender—“and upon examination had before us, appears to possess a competent degree of knowledge in the Law,” the board admitted Jackson “to plead and practice as an Attorney.”
One young man who entered the legal profession in the western districts during the early years of the American republic announced his practice with a statement of principles:
1. I will practice law because it affords me opportunities of being a more useful member of society.
2. I will turn a deaf ear to no man because his purse is empty.
3. I will advise no man beyond my comprehension of his cause.
4. I will bring none into law who my conscience tells me should be kept out.
5. I will never be unmindful of the cause of humanity; and this comprehends the widows, fatherless, and those in bondage.
6. I will be faithful to my client, but never so unfaithful to myself as to become a party in his crime.
7. In criminal cases I will not underrate my own abilities, for if any client proves a rascal, his money is better in my hands, and if not, I hold the option.
8. I will never acknowledge the omnipotence of the Legislature, or consider their acts to be law beyond the spirit of the Constitution.
9. No man’s greatness shall elevate him above the justice due to my client.
10. I will not consent to a compromise where I conceive a verdict essential to my client’s future reputation or protection, for of this he can not be a complete judge.
11. I will advise the turbulent with candor, and if they will go to law against my advice, they must pardon me for volunteering it against them.
12. I will acknowledge every man’s right to manage his own cause if he pleases.
Andrew Jackson might not have phrased his view of the legal profession just so, but the combination of idealism and practicality, of collective and personal advancement, that the notice conveyed did in fact inform his approach to the law—and to much of his life. Like very many men in the young nation, Jackson believed that what served the public good served him, and often vice versa. A lawyer could make a mark, and a living.
But the lawyer needed clients. As one of the first he chose himself. The “unblemished moral character” to which the examining judges referred soon seemed a figure of speech, for within two months of being licensed to practice in the courts of North Carolina, Jackson found himself haled into court to answer a charge of trespass and destruction of property. The details of the case are murky. The fact that Jackson had four codefendants suggests the kind of bacchanalian wrecking that had led him to sacrifice the tavern furniture as a burnt offering. The five young men were released on their own recognizance and the case never went to trial, indicating an out-of-court settlement. Jackson certainly sighed in relief, knowing that conviction could have led to his disbarment before he fairly commenced his legal career.
But business was slow. Jackson traveled many miles across the piedmont searching for clients. He hired himself out to Randolph County when it required the indictment of one Samuel Graves. Jackson described how Graves “did with force and arms affecting to act under the authority of an execution seize into his possession and expose to sale one brown mare & saddle of the price of five pounds.” What came of the indictment is unclear, but apparently the county liked the way Jackson worked, for it retained him in at least one other case. In Richmond, in Surry County, he took the other side of a criminal case, defending a man charged with theft. The accused and his lawyer were about equally hard up, and Jackson consented to take the case for a contingency: he wou
ld be paid only if he got an acquittal. He lost the case. He lived for a time in Martinsville, where some friends operated a general store, and he probably helped out there for a small wage.
But his income fell short of his expenses. He departed an inn owned by a man named John Lister, having not paid his bill. Lister halfheartedly tried to collect but then gave up—only to be reminded of the debt and the debtor after Jackson became famous fighting the British. Local tradition indicates that Lister retrieved the old bill and wrote across it: “Paid at the battle of New Orleans.”
Though he was slow to make his mark as a lawyer, Jackson made an impression as a young man. “I often met him at parties, balls and other social occasions,” Anne Jarret Rutherford recalled many years later. Annie Jarret was a proper young lady of Salisbury during Jackson’s residence there and in fact saw him on the day he received his law license. “We all knew that he was wild among his own sex, that he gambled and was by no means a Christian young man.” But he was far from the worst in the neighborhood. “He had no very bad habits; he was never known to be drunk or boisterous or rude even among his own associates.” The frequency of his quarrels was overstated. “But this I must say—when he did have a quarrel it was apt to be a serious matter.”
Jackson’s appearance stuck in Annie Jarret’s memory.
He always dressed neat and tidy and carried himself as if he was a rich man’s son. The day he was licensed he had on a new suit, with broadcloth coat, ruffled shirt and other garments in the best of fashion. The style of powdering the hair was still in vogue then; but he had his abundant suit of dark red hair combed carefully back from his forehead and temples and, I suspect, made to lay down smooth with bear’s oil. He was full six feet tall and very slender, but yet of such straightness of form and such proud and graceful carriage as to make him look well-proportioned.
