evidence: A LINE from Andrew Jackson has been making the rounds lately: "One man with courage makes a majority." This aphorism is today known as Jackson’s most famous saying. It adorns T-shirts, mugs and posters. The ACLU and the Christian Coalition invoke it. Politicians repeat it endlessly, including, recently, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But did Jackson really say it? Curiously, although everyone has heard it quoted from him and therefore "knows" that he said it, no one can pinpoint when or where. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, a standard source, attributes it to Jackson without naming time or place. Still more curiously, this memorable phrase appears in no biography of Jackson or history of his era. Certainly Jackson’s many splendid biographers would not have let a gem like this slip past them. [...] On the title page of each volume, Parton placed the epigraph "Desperate Courage Makes One a Majority." He framed it within quotation marks but not in any way to suggest that Jackson himself had said it. In fact, Parton did not mean it as a compliment, and Jackson, were he alive to see it, certainly would not have taken it as such. Parton did not admire Jackson. He thought him a headstrong ignoramus whose desperate courage overrode other men’s good sense.