United States' attitude to Spain, with respect to Florida, as that of a bandit intent on plunder. Similarly with the subsequent temporary occupation of Amelia Island, off the Atlantic coast of East Florida, though here there is some real ground for criticism in the manner in which the occupation was effected. And in the same justifiable principle of self-defense will be found the true historical explanation of the step taken a year or so later by the man to whom, above all others, must be given the credit of bringing Spain to reason.

This was Andrew Jackson, as yet little known outside his own State of Tennessee, whither he had come from the Carolinas in 1788 as a young man of the humblest birth, without money and without friends, his sole reliance native wit and native courage. Making his home at Nashville, when it was still a crude border settlement bounded by pathless forests, he had plunged with ardor into the task, not only of gaining a livelihood, but of bettering the com

munity in which he had elected to dwell. His first occupation, that of district attorney, proved his mettle, for in those days a district attorney had to take his life in his hands, such was the lawlessness rampant in the frontier country. At Indian fighting, too, he showed himself utterly devoid of fear. And if, as was only too apparent, he displayed in his conduct with his fellows an acrimony and bluntness of speech, an over-readiness to take offense, and an uncompromising assertiveness, these were defects readily condoned in one of such manifest honesty, integrity, straightforwardness, and daring. Thus it happened that within an incredibly short time Jackson had become one of the most popular as well as one of the most respected citizens of Tennessee, and, almost as a matter of course, gravitated into politics, serving for a brief space in both Houses of Congress. But, finding himself out of his element in Washington, and longing for the free, open, and ultra-democratic life of the

Western country, he had speedily resigned, and hastened home to preside over the Supreme Court of Tennessee, to gain election as Major-General of the State militia, and to engage in business. As judge, as soldier, and as business man he had steadily augmented his reputation until his brother Tennesseans fairly came to idolize him. Their ideals, they plainly saw, were his ideals, their interests his. Like them, he held an abiding faith in the possibilities and future of the land in which they lived; like them, he felt the instinct for growth and expansion; and-what is most important in the present connection-like them he would brush aside, with fiery impatience, all that might hamper expression of that instinct.

Such was the man-imperious, impetuous, masterful, and passionate, protagonist par excellence of the spirit of the early West-who by virtue of his rank in the Tennessee militia took command, in the opening days of 1813, of a formidable force of sturdy frontiersmen, "called out for the defense of the lower country." Two years earlier, anticipating the outbreak of war with England and recognizing the possibility of Florida being occupied by the enemy for hostile purposes, Congress had authorized the President to take temporary possession of any part or all of that Spanish province "in the event of an attempt to occupy the said territory, or any part thereof,

by any foreign power." Now that war had actually arrived, Madison was determined that the contingency of foreign occupation should not arise. To this end had Jackson's army been created, an army of which Jackson himself wrote enthusiastically: "They go at our country's call to do the will of the Government. No constitutional scruples trouble them. Nay, they will rejoice at the opportunity of placing the American eagle on the ramparts of Mobile, Pensacola, and Fort St. Augustine." As luck would have it, however, the Congress of 1813 was of a different temper from the Congress of 1811, and refused to support Madison in the projected occupation, the consequence being that Jackson and his men, without having accomplished anything, were forced to march home and leave the enemy free to utilize Florida at will.

Out of this freedom flowed momentous results to Jackson and to the Nation. In the late autumn of that same year, instigated by English emissaries and armed from an English fleet, the Creek Indians took the war-path against the American settlers of the extreme South. The length and breadth of the border they harried, finally consummating, on August 30, the ghastly Fort Mims massacre, when out of five hundred and fifty refugees in a pioneer stockade four hundred perished. Burning for vengeance, Jackson and his Tennesseans flew to

arms, and now began a war within a war, and a war of extermination. All through the winter it raged and on until the spring, when, after the fearful battle of the Horseshoe, the stricken Creeks, all but annihilated, were glad to sue for peace. Then followed a brief rest for Jackson, but exceedingly brief. His splendid campaigning had won him the appointment of Major-General in the United States army to succeed "Tippecanoe " Harrison, who had resigned, and summer found him in the field again,

compelled to sail again in less magnificent array. Eager to pursue, Jackson awaited only the arrival of reinforcements, and when these came, twenty-five hundred strong, from his beloved Tennessee, he was up and off. Marching across country, with the tempestuous celerity that had already begun to attract the attention of the entire country, he appeared before Pensacola three days after his departure from Mobile, served on the Spanish Governor a summary demand for surrender, and followed this up by an

Always chafing under the lost opportunity to raise the American flag in Florida, and doubly embittered by the knowledge that England had profited thereby, almost his first move was to write to the Secretary of War for permission to invade the peninsula. No reply coming, and news reaching him that an English force had landed at Pensacola, the capital of West Florida, he resolved, with characteristic recklessness, to delay no longer. But before he could make a beginning the English themselves assumed the aggressive, sailing from Pensacola to Mobile, whence they were soon

In Fort Barrancas, near by, he found a small English garrison, but this escaped him, pausing in its flight only long enough to destroy the fort. Less than a week later he was back in Mobile, passing thence by leisurely stages to New Orleans and the battle that won him an enduring place among the heroes of American history.

What had been theoretically asserted by the President and by Congress had been translated into action by Andrew Jackson. The United States was not at war with Spain; Florida was the territory of a supposedly friendly power; yet its soil had been invaded, its flag

United States, that the sooner she let go of Florida the better. Nevertheless, order having been re-established at home and with order a resumption of diplomatic relations with America, she added Jackson's operations to the category of wrongs inflicted on her, and resumed her old course of tortuous and procrastinating diplomacy. To persuade her of the folly of this course required another concrete demonstration of the lengths to which the United States was prepared to go if self-defense demanded, and again the needed lesson was read by Andrew Jackson.

The end of the war had by no means marked the end of English influence in

name of the Indians a surrender of the lands ceded to the United States by the Creeks as the price of peace. After his departure for England, in the vain hope of securing from his Government official approval of these acts, the fort on the Apalachicola was seized by a number of fugitive slaves from Georgia and converted into a piratical stronghold of the worst description. Using it as a base, they ravaged the country for miles across the border, destroying the property of their former masters, stealing horses and cattle, rescuing criminals, and killing all who resisted them. No doubt they could find some justification for their acts in the principle of retaliation, for

the Georgians themselves were not models of law and order; but their brigandage and rapine soon became unendurable, and at the direction of the Secretary of War a message was sent by Jackson to the Governor of Pensacola demanding immediate action against them.

With this demand the Governor was either unwilling or unable to comply, and at once the wrathful Jackson resolved to act on his own account. "I have no doubt," he wrote to General Gaines, who was then building stockades and blockhouses in the adjacent territory ceded by the Creeks, "that this fort has been established by some villains for the purpose of murder, rapine, and plunder, and that it ought to be blown up regardless of the ground it stands on. If you have come to the same conclusion, destroy it and restore the stolen negroes to their rightful owners." It so happened that Gaines had ordered from New Orleans some supplies that would have to be carried past "Negro Fort,"

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a gunboat convoying the transports. The first few shots did little damage, but victory came with amazing and shocking swiftness. In the fort's magazine some seven hundred barrels of gunpowder were stored, and a red-hot ball striking this caused an explosion that ended Negro Fort" for all time, and cost the lives of almost all its defenders. No fewer than two hundred and seventy men, women, and children found an instant death, while of those still living, after the smoke had cleared away, only a pitiful minority endured the torments of their wounds. It must be added, also, that at least two of the miserable survivors were handed. over to the Indians to be cruelly tortured so long as a spark of life remained in their mutilated bodiesan apt illustration of the truth that the inhumanity of those barbarous years of border warfare was by no means confined to the enemies of the United States.

as it was popularly called; and he now instructed one of his officers, Colonel Clinch, to proceed down the Apalachicola with a body of troops and level the fort to the ground at the first sign of an attack on the transports. Coming down the river, Clinch fell in with a party of Seminoles who had their own grievances against the negroes, and he promptly pressed them into service and hurried on to the fort, near which he found the supply expedition. Excuse for hostilities was ready at hand in the fact that a boat's crew, landing for water, had lost four men in an attack by the negroes. Forthwith Clinch demanded the surrender of the fort, and, obtaining in reply a defiant blast of cannonading, opened fire from

This fearful trag.edy was but the opening act in the second Jacksonian invasion of Florida.

Fresh grounds for complaint against the Spanish authorities soon developed in a renewal of hostilities by the Seminoles, the climax coming when, in revenge for the burning of a native village by American troops, the savages ambushed and massacred nearly fifty soldiers and settlers en route up the Apalachicola. At news of this, the War Department sent orders to Jackson to raise a large force, take command in person, and spare no efforts to bring about a lasting peace. But before these orders reached him, Jackson himself had addressed to Monroe, then President, a letter seething with indignation. It would be well, he declared, to seize the whole of East Florida and hold it "as indemnity for the outrages of