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.
T he 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.
T he 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
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.
T he 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.
T he 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
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