The people of the Mississippi Valley welcomed the adventure with enthusiasm.

It was to be aimed against a European power presumably friendly, but the sheer love of conquest and old grudges to settle were motives which brushed argument aside.

Andrew Jackson was the major general of the Tennessee militia, and so many hardy volunteers flocked to follow him that he had to sift them out, mustering in at Nashville two thousand of whom he said: "They are the choicest of our citizens.

They go at our call to do the will of Government.

No constitutional scruples trouble them.