In Washington’s campaigns more than one of the Jacksons won rank and reputation; and when peace was established they married into influential families.  Nor was the next generation less successful.  Judges, senators, and soldiers upheld the honour of the name, and proved the worth of the ancestral stock.  They were marked, it is said, by strong and characteristic features, by a warm feeling of clanship, a capacity for hard work, and a decided love of roving.  Some became hunters, others explorers, and the race is now scattered from Virginia to Oregon.  A passion for litigation was a general failing, and none of them could resist the fascination of machinery.  Every Jackson owned a mill or factory of some sort—­many of them more than one—­and their ventures were not always profitable.  Jackson’s father, among others, found it easier to make money than to keep it.  Generous and incautious, he became deeply involved by becoming security for others; high play increased his embarrassments; and when he died in 1827 every vestige of his property was swept away.  His young widow, left with three small children, two sons and a daughter, became dependent on the assistance of her kinsfolk for a livelihood, and on the charity of the Freemasons for a roof.  When Thomas, her second son, was six years old, she married a Captain Woodson; but her second matrimonial venture was not more fortunate than her first.  Her husband’s means were small, and necessity soon compelled her to commit her two boys to the care of their father’s relatives.

1831.

Within a year the children stood round her dying bed, and at a very early age our little Virginian found himself a penniless orphan.  But, as he never regretted his poverty, so he never forgot his mother.  To the latest hour of his life he loved to recall her memory, and years after she had passed away her influence still remained.  Her beauty, her counsels, their last parting, and her happy death, for she was a woman of deep religious feeling, made a profound impression on him.  To his childhood’s fancy she was the embodiment of every grace; and so strong had been the sympathy between them, that even in the midst of his campaigns she was seldom absent from his thoughts.  After her death the children found a home with their father’s half-brother, who had inherited the family estates, and was one of the largest slave-owners in the district.  Their surroundings, however, could hardly be called luxurious.  Life on the Ohio was very different from life on the coast.  The western counties of Virginia were still practically on the frontier of the United States.  The axe had thinned the interminable woods; mills were busy on each mountain stream, and the sunny valleys were rich in fruit and corn.  But as yet there was little traffic.  Steam had not yet come to open up the wilderness.  The population was small and widely scattered; and the country was cut off as much by nature as by distance from the older civilisation