Mr. John Trotwood Moore, Columbia, Tenn.—My Dear Sir: I received your letter and the magazines you sent me. I read carefully your article on what Parton calls “The murder of Dickinson,” and I enjoyed it very much. I have always thought that people who live in this age give too much importance to questions of right and wrong, to what I call “modern ideas,” or, rather, who attach too little importance to the theories of the former generations. I have lived through four generations complete, and there have been in my day marvelous changes in public opinion, and even the established theories in the churches as to whether a certain thing is right or wrong. When I was a boy in North Alabama instrumental music in a church was considered as a sacrilege, and was not allowed under any circumstances. Duelling was not more condemned than the resenting of an insult in any other way, and the old saying is perfectly true, “Times change and we change with them.” In your article about the duel you failed to notice that Mrs. Jackson, with her first husband, resided in Kentucky, but Kentucky was then a part of Virginia. In my young days I was familiar with the Hermitage grounds. For four years I was a student at what was then called Clinton College, which was in Smith County, between Carthage and Alexandria, and about forty miles east of the Hermitage on the old emigrant road from Knoxville to Nashville. I visited the Hermitage on several occasions. My grandfather lived for many years about a mile from the Hermitage, and General Jackson attended the marriage of my father and mother, and my father and several of my uncles went with General Jackson through the Creek War.