Even this was not the end of Jackson's troubles. The men whom he had retained from Cocke's command were ready to leave as soon as their term of service should expire, and the date of its expiration was near at hand. This would diminish the force in Fort Strother from fourteen hundred to six hundred men. These six hundred were militiamen, and now, as if to break down what remained of Jackson's hopes, these troops managed to find an excuse for quitting the service and going home presently. The act of the legislature by which they had been called into service was bunglingly drawn, and upon examining it the militia officers discovered that nothing whatever had been said in the law with respect to the length of time for which they should serve. Then the question arose, How long have these men engaged to serve? The men held that as no term was set by the law the lawgivers must be held to have meant the shortest time for which it was customary to call out the militia, namely, three months, and that time would end on the 4th of January. Jackson, on the other hand, held that the law set no other limit to the term of service, because it meant that the service should continue as long as the war did. The men had been called out, he said, to suppress the Creeks, and their term of service would end when they had done that, and not before--whether that should be three months or three years after their enlistment. Jackson had fourteen hundred men, of whom eight hundred had an unquestioned right to quit in the middle of January, while the remaining six hundred asserted their right to retire at the beginning of that month. The new East Tennessee troops who were on their way to him had enlisted for six months, but, as we know, were determined to serve only half of that term, a considerable part of which had already expired. Never was a commander in a sorer strait. Sent to fight a campaign and held responsible for its success, he was denied an army with which to fight at all. His commanding general urged him to activity, on the ground that the British must at any cost be shorn of the strength they had sought to secure by stimulating Indian hostilities; the British were already in Florida, threatening Mobile and New Orleans; the Seminoles in the Spanish province and the runaway negroes there were ready to take up arms and assail the Georgia borders; while in the North and West the war was prosecuted by the enemy with untiring perseverance.