GENERAL ANDREW JACKSON
(1767-1845).

206.  Andrew Jackson and the War of 1812; his birthplace; his school; wrestling-matches;[1] firing off the gun.—­The greatest battle of our second war with England—­the War of 1812—­was fought by General Andrew Jackson.

He was the son of a poor emigrant who came from the North of Ireland and settled in North Carolina.[2] When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Andrew was nine years old, and his father had long been dead.  He was a tall, slender, freckled-faced, barefooted boy, with eyes full of fun; the neighbors called him “Mischievous little Andy.”

He went to school in a log hut in the pine woods; but he learned more things from what he saw in the woods than from the books he studied in school.

He was not a very strong boy, and in wrestling some of his companions could throw him three times out of four; but though they could get him down without much trouble, it was quite another thing to keep him down.  No sooner was he laid flat on his back, than he bounded up like a steel spring, and stood ready to try again.

He had a violent[3] temper, and when, as the boys said, “Andy got mad all over,” not many cared to face him.  Once some of his playmates secretly loaded an old gun almost up to the muzzle, and then dared him to fire it.  They wanted to see what he would say when it kicked him over.  Andrew fired the gun.  It knocked him sprawling; he jumped up with eyes blazing with anger, and shaking his fist, cried out, “If one of you boys laughs, I’ll kill him.”  He looked as though he meant exactly what he said, and the boys thought that perhaps it would be just as well to wait and laugh some other day.

[Illustration:  ANDY AND THE GUN.]

[Footnote 1:  Wrestling (res’ling).]

[Footnote 2:  He settled in Union County, North Carolina, very near the South Carolina line.  See map in paragraph 140.  Mecklenburg Court House is in the next county west of Union County.]

[Footnote 3:  Violent:  fierce, furious.]

207.  Tarleton’s[4] attack on the Americans; how Andrew helped his mother.—­When Andrew was thirteen, he learned what war means.  The country was then fighting the battles of the Revolution.  A British officer named Tarleton came suddenly upon some American soldiers near the place where young Jackson lived.  Tarleton had so many men that the Americans saw that it was useless to try to fight, and they made no attempt to do so.  The British should have taken them all prisoners; but, instead of that, they attacked them furiously, and hacked and hewed them with their swords.  More than a hundred of our men were left dead, and a still larger number were so horribly wounded that they could not be moved any distance.  Such an attack was not war, for war means a fair, stand-up fight; it was murder:  and when the people in England heard what Tarleton had done, many cried Shame!