It was at the old log Hermitage that Jackson received the first visit of Thomas H. Benton, the man who later became his close friend and then his enemy and then his friend again. Young Benton had been admitted to the Tennessee bar in 1804 and was practicing in Franklin, a few miles from Nashville. In 1805 he had a land title case in which were involved some legal points upon which Andrew Jackson had ruled while he was sitting on the Superior Court. These rulings had not been published, however, and so Benton saddled his horse and rode to the Hermitage to ask the ex-justice for an official report of the cases. Upon learning his errand, Jackson courteously offered to write out the opinions for him; so, with Jackson dictating and Benton transcribing, the opinion of the Superior Court was thus tardily reduced to written form. It was typical of the hospitality of the Hermitage that Benton, who had made an instantaneously good impression on Jackson, was prevailed upon to prolong his formal call to a two-days’ visit; and there was the beginning of a friendship which had a lasting and far-reaching effect upon the careers of both of them. For many years Benton was a frequenter of the Hermitage to such an extent as almost to be regarded as a member of the family; and, despite an intervening period of enmity growing out of a bloody, knock-down-and-drag-out fight, Benton’s eulogy of Jackson when he died showed the depth of his affection for the older man. A visitor of world-wide distinction who was a guest at the Hermitage was the celebrated Marquis de Lafayette. General Jackson had long been an admirer of the patriotic Marquis. Mrs. Jackson herself is authority for the statement that Jackson first saw him at Charleston “on the battlefield” when he was a boy of twelve and the Marquis was at the zenith of his great Revolutionary popularity. When Jackson was in Washington in the latter part of 1824 as a Senator he met Lafayette, in fact lived at the same tavern with him while he was there, and it was probably at that time that the Marquis was invited to visit Nashville and the Hermitage. He had previously written Jackson, soon after his arrival in this country, saying “I will not leave the United States before I have seeked and found the opportunity to express in person my high regard and sincere friendship.”