litigious. Court day was an occasion which drew the men to the county town, forming an event in a monotonous existence, and offering society to people oppressed by isolated life. This concourse of people furnished occasion for gossip and newsmongering, and the discussion of the affairs of everybody for miles around. "Public opinion took control of everything. Local quarrels in

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volved the whole county sooner or later. ships, alliances, feuds, and animosities grew up and were intensified in such a state of society. If there was an election pending, the same concourse of people furnished an opportunity for speech-making and argument. The institution of "stumpspeaking" was born and developed in these circumstances. In the court itself the parties to the suits and the jury enjoyed a place before the public eye. The judge and the counsel made reputation day by day. The lawyers, as actual or prospective candidates for office, were directly and constantly winning strength with the electors. They passed from the bar to the stump or the tavern parlor, and employed the influence which their eloquence had won in the court room to advance the interests which they favored in the election. There are features of American democracy which are inexplicable unless one understands this frontier society. Some of our greatest political abuses have come from transferring to our now large and crowded cities maxims and usages which were convenient and harmless in backwoods county towns.

Another feature of the frontier society which it is important to notice is, that in it the lack of capital and the intimacy of personal relations led to great abuses of credit. Idleness, drink, debt, and quarrels produced by gossip have been the curses of such society. The courts and the lawyers were always busy with the personal collisions which arose where no one was allowed to practise any personal reserve, where each one's business was everybody's business, where gossip never rested, and where each one was in debt to some others.

In such a state of society the public prosecutor is the general of the advancing army of civilization. He has to try to introduce law and order, the fulfilment of contracts, and the recognition of rights into the infant society. This was the task which Jackson undertook in Tennessee. It required nerve and vigor. The western counties of North Carolina were in a state of anarchy, resulting from the attempt to set up the State of Franklin, and the population were so turbulent and lawless that the representative of legal order was at open war with them. There had been civil war in the district for four years.

The proceedings by which the State of Franklin was brought into existence were suggested and carried out upon principles and notions which can only be characterized as squatterism. The colonists at the outset, especially those of New England, took their stand on squatterism, without reflection or question. The primary standpoint or

view on which it rests is the notion that a group of people who find themselves in what the New Englanders called a "vacuum domicilium" (putting it in Latin to give it emphasis since it lacked contents) may hold a mass meeting, and create a state, without regard to the jurisdiction of some political body already existing, which has historical and legal authority over the territory in which they are. Many conflicts arose in the colonial history from the collision between squatterism and constituted authority, and three or four very important cases have occurred in the federal history.1 Franklin was the first. The conflict is always attended by big declarations about "liberty" on the part of the squatters, and when they are forced to submit to law and constitutional order, great irritation is sure to be produced.

The Indians and whites were also engaged in the final struggle of the former before yielding their hunting-grounds to the cultivation of the white man. Jackson had to travel up and down the country in the discharge of his duties, when he was in danger of his life upon the road. He brought all the required force and virtue to the discharge of the duties of this office. He pursued his way without fear and without relenting. He made strong enemies, and he won strong friends. Kendall says that Jackson settled at Nashville, because the debtors there tried to drive him away, he having taken some collection cases.2 His merits 1 See p. 446. 2 Kendall's Jackson, 90.

as prosecutor1 are vouched for by the fact that Governor Blount said of him, in reference to certain intruders on Indian lands who were giving trouble, "Let the District Attorney, Mr. Jackson, be informed. He will be certain to do his duty, and the offenders will be punished."2 As to the administration of justice in such a society, the colonial records show how slight were the guarantees of civil liberty against popular power. Allison 3 proves it again in his description of the primitive court of Tennessee and its proceedings.

Among the earliest settlers of Middle Tennessee (1780) was John Donelson, who had been killed by the Indians before Jackson migrated to Tennessee. Jackson boarded with the widow Donelson. In the family there were also Mrs. Donelson's daughter, Rachel, and the latter's husband, Lewis Robards. Robards, who seems to have been of a violent and jealous disposition, had made injurious charges against his wife with reference to other persons, and he now made such charges with reference to Jackson. Robards had been married in Kentucky under Virginia law. There was no law

1 He was appointed district attorney by Washington in 1791, after the western counties of North Carolina were ceded. The cession was made that the State might no longer be obliged to pay expenses incurred in Indian wars, which the western people were charged with provoking in order to create claims which the eastern counties must pay. Hayward, 214; Allison, 26.

2 Putnam, 351.

3 Chap. iii.

4 Putnam, 613 et seq.; Kirke, 7.

of divorce in Virginia. Robards, in 1790, petitioned the Legislature of Virginia to pass an act of divorce in his favor, making an affidavit that his wife had deserted him, and was living in adul tery with Jackson. The Legislature of Virginia passed an act authorizing the Supreme Court of Kentucky to try the case with a jury, and, if the facts proved to be as alleged, to grant a divorce.1 Robards took no action for two years. September 27, 1793, he obtained a divorce from the Court of Quarter Sessions of Mercer County, Kentucky.2 In the mean time, Jackson and Mrs. Robards, upon information of the legislative act of 1790, which they assumed, or were informed, to be an act of divorce, were married at Natchez, in July or August, 1791. In January, 1794, upon hearing of the action of the Mercer County Court, they were married again.3 The circumstances of this marriage were such as to provoke scandal at the time, and the scandal, which in the case of a more obscure man would have died out during thirty years of honorable wedlock, came up over and over again during Jackson's career. It is plain that Jackson himself was to blame for contracting a marriage under ambiguous circumstances, and for not protecting his own wife's honor by proper precautions,

1 13 Va. Stat. at Large, 227; Dec. 20, 1790.

2 The decree was for desertion and adultery. It is given in full in Truth's Advocate, 17. (1828.)

8 Telegraph Extra, p. 33. 1828.

Report of a Jackson committee in