[1] Jackson first saw action near Charleston in June 1776, when his regiment fought off General Sir Henry Clinton's attempted attack on Fort Sullivan.

The unit then spent a long period garrisoning the city of Charleston, during which Charles Cotesworth Pinckney assumed command of the 1st South Carolina.

Late in 1777, Jackson was part of the detachment that made an ill-conceived and poorly conducted expedition against St. Augustine in British East Florida under Major General Robert Howe.

When Laurens was sent to France in 1781 armed with a memorial written by Washington outlining why a sizable loan (25 million livres) was needed, he took Thomas Paine and Jackson, who had a good command of French.

For six weeks, they dealt unsuccessfully at Versaille with Foreign Affairs Minister Vergennes, a longtime diplomat who wanted England tied up in an American war but knew the precarious situation of France's own finances.

He then applied to be personal secretary to George Washington when he became President of the United States, writing that he had unpaid expenses as a Continental officer and that business was "not congenial to [his] temper."

They declined to invest their scant funds in Maine land; but Jackson wrote a very favorable report on them back to the United States.

He returned to the United States in the summer of 1795 and married Elizabeth Willing, Mrs. Bingham's sister, in November; they were the oldest daughters of Thomas Willing, a rich Philadelphia merchant, related to the Shippens.

Jackson succeeded Henry Knox in 1799 as secretary general[4] of the Society of the Cincinnati, a group of former Continental Army officers.

Congress was to pass such a bill in 1826, fifty years after independence, but Jackson was not associated with it; his last public appearance was welcoming the Marquis de Lafayette to Philadelphia in 1824.