His scholastic education was imperfect: _first_, at a grammar school taught by Richard Stanford, Esq., then a young New England emigrant, soon after, and for many years, and until death, a representative in Congress, noted as the life-long friend of Macon and Randolph. Afterwards he was at Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina, but finished no course of study there, his mother removing to Tennessee, where his father had acquired great landed property (40,000 acres), and intended to make Nashville his home; and now, as the eldest of the family, though not grown, the care and management of a new settlement, in a new country, fell upon him. The family went upon a choice tract of 3000 acres, on West Harpeth, twenty-five miles south of Nashville, where for several years the main care was the opening a farm in the wilderness. Wilderness! for such was the state of the country at that time within half a day's ride of the city of Nashville. "The widow Benton's settlement" was the outside settlement between civilization and the powerful southern tribes which spread to the Gulf of Mexico. The Indian wars had just been terminated, and the boundary which these great tribes were enabled to exact brought their frontier almost to the gates of Nashville--within 25 miles! for the line actually touched the outside line of the estate. The Indians swarmed about it. Their great war trace (the trace on which they came for blood and plunder in time of war, for trade in time of peace) led through it. Such a position was not to be maintained by a small family alone--a widow, and every child under age, only some twenty odd slaves. It required strength! and found it in the idea of a little colony--leases to settlers without price, for seven years; moderate rents afterwards. The tract was well formed for the purpose, being four miles square, with every attraction for settlement--rich land fine wood, living streams. Settlers came; the ground was covered over: it was called "Benton Town," and retains the name to this day. A rude log school-house, a meeting house of the same primitive structure, with roads and mills, completed the rapid conversion of this wilderness into an abode of civilization. The scholastic education of her son had ceased, but reading continued; and books of solid instruction became his incessant companions. He has been heard to say that, in no period of his life, has he ever read so much, nor with as much system and regularity, nor with the same profit and delight. History and geography was (what he considered) his light reading; national law, the civil law, the common law--and, finally, the law itself, so usually read by law students--constituted his studies. And all this reading, and study, was carried on during the active personal exertions which he gave to the opening of the farm and to the ameliorations upon it which comfort exacted.