conscientious; and, as one writer has remarked, bad grammar, incorrect pronunciation, and violent denunciation did not shock the judges of that day or divert the mind of juries from the truth.  Traveling almost constantly over the wretched roads and through the dark forests, dodging Indians, swimming his horse across torrential streams, sleeping alone in the woods with hand on rifle, threatened by desperate wrongdoers, Andrew Jackson became the best-known figure in all western Tennessee and won at this time a great measure of that public confidence which later became his chief political asset.

Meanwhile the rapid growth of population south of the Ohio River made necessary new arrangements for purposes of government.  In 1790 the region between the Ohio and the present States of Alabama and Mississippi, having been turned over to the Nation by its earlier possessors, was erected into the “Southwest Territory,” and in 1791 the northern half became the State of Kentucky.  In 1793 the remainder of the Territory set up a Legislature, and three years later delegates from the eleven counties met at Knoxville to draw up a new frame of government with a view to admission to statehood.  Jackson was a member of this convention, and tradition has it that it was he who brought about the selection of the name Tennessee, an Indian term meaning “The Great Crooked River,” as against Franklin, Washington, and other proposed designations for the new State.  At all events, upon the admission of the State in 1796, he was chosen as its sole representative in the lower branch of Congress.

In the late autumn of that year the young lawmaker set out for the national capital at Philadelphia, and there he arrived, after a journey of almost eight hundred miles on horseback, just as the triumphs of the Democrats in the recent presidential election were being duly celebrated.  He had not been chosen as a party man, but it is altogether probable that his own sympathies and those of most of his constituents lay with the Jeffersonians; and his appearance on the floor of Congress was an omen of the fast-rising tide of western democracy which should never find its ultimate goal until this rough but honest Tennesseean should himself be borne into the presidential chair.

Jackson’s career in Congress was brief and uneventful.  After a year of service in the House of Representatives he was appointed to fill the unexpired term of William Blount in the Senate.  But this post he resigned in 1798 in order to devote his energies to his private affairs.  While at Philadelphia he made the acquaintance not only of John Adams, Jefferson, Randolph, Gallatin, and Burr, but of his future Secretary of State, Edward Livingston, and of some other persons who were destined to be closely connected with his later career.  But Jackson was not fitted for a legislative body either by training or by temperament.  He is recorded as speaking in the House only twice and in the Senate