Jackson persisted, however, in his effort to sell the Hermitage, offering it among others to Colonel Wade Hampton of South Carolina, who later served on his staff at New Orleans. Colonel Hampton made a trip to Tennessee and looked the property over but did not buy it, although he wrote: “I am vastly partial to your elegant seat and fine tract of land.” Perhaps the advice of young Caffery and his other friends persuaded him not to make the prospective changes; perhaps he was not able to get the desired appointment. At any rate, fortunately for Tennessee and for the country, Jackson remained at the Hermitage and was soon thereafter relieved of his melancholic frame of mind by the declaration of war against Great Britain in 1812. From then on until 1821 he found plenty of “amusement and business” in fighting the Indians and the British and the Spaniards in Florida; and for eight years he had no further cause for complaint on the score of indolence and inaction. He returned to the Hermitage the nation’s idol, and all thoughts of moving to Mississippi or anywhere else were permanently dismissed. When Jackson moved to the Hermitage tract from Hunter’s Hill his financial condition did not permit of his building immediately another such home as he had left. But Jackson had the primitive virtue of cutting his suit to fit his cloth; and so he set himself up in a comfortable but crude establishment made up of a group of log houses—a large central building, two stories high, which constituted the principal living quarters, with three adjacent log houses which were used as sleeping quarters for guests or members of the family. The main building, which, according to tradition, had in earlier days been used as a block house for defense against the Indians, was 24 by 26 feet and on the first floor had only one large room, with a huge fireplace. At the back was a lean-to containing two rooms, a pantry and a bed-room. This big room on the first floor was a combination of parlor, living room, dining room and kitchen, with all the meals cooked at the big open fireplace. Here Jackson lived for fifteen years—fifteen of the most active years of his life, years when he was carving his name as one of the really big men of the young United States. Here in this log house he entertained some of the most distinguished visitors who ever came to the Nashville settlements—President James Monroe and Aaron Burr, among others; here it was they brought him, well-nigh fatally wounded, from his duel with Charles Dickinson; and it was to this rude abode that he returned in 1815, following the Battle of New Orleans, with the plaudits of the world ringing in his ears. Also, it was while he was living here in the log Hermitage that he conducted his famous campaigns against the Indians, including his celebrated invasion of Florida which so nearly involved us in war with Spain.