Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 612 pages of information about Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader.

Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 612 pages of information about Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader.

The Etowah campaign terminated the military services of General Sevier.  Hereafter, we will have to record his not less important agency in the civil affairs of Tennessee.

[Footnote 40:  A native of Tennessee.  His Annals contain much valuable material.]

* * * * *

=_Charles Gayarre, 1805-._= (Manual, p. 490.)

From the “History of Louisiana.”

=_135._= GENERAL JACKSON AT NEW ORLEANS.

His very physiognomy prognosticated what soul was encased within the spare but well-ribbed form which had that “lean and hungry look” described by England’s greatest bard as bespeaking little sleep of nights, but much of ambition, self-reliance, and impatience of control.  His lip and eye denoted the man of unyielding temper, and his very hair, slightly silvered, stood erect like quills round his wrinkled brow, as if they scorned to bend.  Some sneered, it is true, at what they called a military tyro, at the impromptu general who had sprung out of the uncouth lawyer and the unlearned judge, who in arms had only the experience of a few months, acquired in a desultory war against wild Indians, and who was, not only without any previous training to his new profession, but also without the first rudiments of a liberal education, for he did not even know the orthography of his own native language.  Such was the man who, with a handful of raw militia, was to stand in the way of the veteran troops of England, whose boast it was to have triumphed over one of the greatest captains known in history.  But those who entertained such distrust had hardly come in contact with General Jackson, when they felt that they had to deal with a master-spirit.  True, he was rough hewn from the rock, but rock he was, and of that kind of rock which Providence chooses to select as a fit material to use in its structures of human greatness.  True, he had not the education of a lieutenant in a European army; but what lieutenant, educated or not, who had the will and the remarkable military adaptation so evident in General Jackson’s intellectual and physical organization, ever remained a subaltern?  Much less could General Jackson fail to rise to his proper place in a country where there was so much more elbow-room, and fewer artificial obstacles than in less favored lands.  But, whatever those obstacles might have been, General Jackson would have overcome them all.  His will was of such an extraordinary nature that, like Christian faith, it could almost have accomplished prodigies and removed mountains.  It is impossible to study the life of General Jackson without being convinced that this is the most remarkable feature of his character.  His will had, as it were, the force and the fixity of fate; that will carried him triumphantly through his military and civil career, and through the difficulties of private life.  So intense and incessantly active this peculiar faculty was in him, that one would suppose

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Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.