Andrew Jackson was born in the Waxhaw settlement that was a community of Scotch-Irish
immigrants along the border between North and South Carolina. His birthplace is in dispute,
but he considered himself a South Carolina native. His father died before his birth and Andrew's
mother and her three small boys moved in with her Crawford relatives. Jackson attended local
schools and receiving an elementary education.
The Revolutionary War ended Jackson's childhood and wiped out his remaining immediate family.
Fighting in the Carolina backcountry was especially savage, with ambushes,
massacres, and sharp skirmishes. Jackson's oldest brother Hugh enlisted in a patriot regiment
and died at Stono Ferry, apparently from heatstroke. Too young for formal soldiering, Andrew
and his brother Robert fought with American irregulars. In 1781, they were captured and
contracted smallpox, from which Robert died shortly after their release. While trying to
retrieve some nephews from a British prison ship, Andrew's mother also became ill and died.
Jackson was an orphan and a hardened veteran by the age of fifteen and Jackson drifted, taught school a little,
and then read law in North Carolina. After admission to the bar in 1787, he accepted an offer
to serve as public prosecutor in the new Mero District of North Carolina, with its seat at
Nashville. Jackson arrived in 1788 and he thrived in the new frontier town. He built a legal
practice, entered into trading, and started acquiring land and slaves.
Andrew became interested in Rachel Robards who was the vivacious daughter of the late John Donelson,
one of Nashville's founders. The Donelsons were a prominent Nashville clan. Rachel was married
but separated from her husband. In 1791, she and Jackson began living
as man and wife. They married formally in 1794 after Robards procured a divorce in Kentucky.
His relationship with Rachel came back to haunt Jackson in his presidential campaigns. Opponents
charged him with bigamy and wife-stealing. Jackson's defenders then claimed that he and Rachel
had believed she was already divorced and free to remarry in 1791. Frontier Nashville saw nothing
wrong in their liaison at the time.
Rachel's marriage to Robards was already irretrievably broken, and Jackson was a man of prospects.
Andrew and Rachel's marriage was a perfect love match. The couple remained devoted to each
other throughout their lives.
Jackson's rise in politics was rapid and attested to his strength of character.
He was a delegate to the Tennessee constitutional convention in 1795,
Tennessee's first congressman, and then a senator. He resigned his Senate post after
one year to take a job as judge of Tennessee's superior court. In 1802
he challenged Governor John Sevier for election as major general in command of the state
militia. Jackson's senior by more than twenty years, Sevier was a veteran of the Revolution
and of many Indian campaigns, and the state's leading politician. Jackson beat him for the
generalship, but the aftermath brought the two men to a showdown in the streets of Knoxville,
followed by preparations for a duel but no shots were fired.
Jackson's hot temper, hurtful sense of honor, and sensitivity to insult caused him to be involved
in many fights and brawls. In 1806 what started as a minor misunderstanding over a horse
race, ended in a duel with pistols between Jackson and Charles Dickinson. Dickinson, a crack
shot, fired first and hit Jackson in the chest. Jackson gave no sign of being hurt but calmly
stood his ground, aimed carefully, and killed his foe. Jackson carried Dickinson's bullet for
the rest of his life. Later, in 1812, Jackson fought in a Nashville street brawl against the
Benton brothers, he took a bullet that nearly cost him an arm.
Jackson was steadfast to his friends and brave in a fight. Many considered him
a violent and dangerous man, and this hurt his further political advance. Jackson
resigned his judgeship in 1804 and devoted his efforts thereafter to his militia command
and his business ventures. He speculated in land, acquired slaves, bred and raced horses,
and engaged in merchandising. In 1804, he bought a cotton plantation outside Nashville
called The Hermitage. Andrew and Rachel would live there the rest of their lives.
The Hermitage
Jackson's political career had apparently reached an end by mid-life. He did not want
higher office but wanted military action. Potential foes were everywhere: the Indian tribes
near Tennessee's borders, the Spanish in Florida and Mexico,
and Jackson's old enemy, the British. Jackson's yearning for activity led him to
befriend Aaron Burr when Burr came through Tennessee in 1805, seeking recruits for
his shadowy schemes of conquest. Jackson left Burr in time to avoid imputations
of treason, but he was still eager for the field. With outrage, he watched as
Presidents Jefferson and Madison tried to win redress from Great Britain for its
violations of American sovereignty and interests.
In June of 1812, the United States finally declared war on Great Britain. That November,
a Tennessee force was ordered to the defense of New Orleans. Jackson led two thousand men
as far as Natchez. While in Natchez, he received a War Department communication dismissing his
troops without pay or provisions. Jackson held the command together
for the return home. His willingness to share his men's privations on this march earned
him the nickname "Old Hickory."
In the fall of 1813, warlike Creeks known as "Red Sticks" had overwhelmed and slaughtered
more than four hundred whites. Jackson led a force of Tennesseans and allied Indians deep
into the Creek homeland, where he fought a series of engagements. At the culminating battle
of Horseshoe Bend in March 1814, Jackson annihilated the main Creek force. The campaign
broke the Creeks' power of resistance and subdued the other Southwestern tribes.
Over the next few years, Jackson negotiated treaties by which the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws,
and Cherokees surrendered millions of acres of land in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and west Tennessee.
After this success as a militia commander, Jackson was commissioned a United States major general
in May 1814 and given command of the southern frontier. The British were planning an attack on New Orleans,
strategic gateway to the American interior. To block them, Jackson assembled a force of regulars,
volunteers, militia, free blacks, and pirates. The British made landfall and advanced to near the city,
where Jackson had fortified a line straddling the Mississippi River. On January 8, 1815, British General
Sir Edward Pakenham led a frontal assault on Jackson's position. In the main attack on the east bank,
Jackson's men mowed down the advancing enemy with artillery and rifle fire. British casualties exceeded
two thousand. Jackson loss was thirteen dead, fifty-eight wounded, and a few missing.
Neither side knew that the Treaty of Ghent had ending the war two weeks earlier,
so the battle had no effect on the outcome. Still, this epic victory, with its incredible
casualty ratio and its stirring image of American frontiersmen defeating hardened British
veterans, passed immediately into patriotic legend. Jackson was now a hero.
Jackson remained in the regular army after the war. Late in 1817, he received orders to
subdue the Seminole Indians. Jackson effected a lightning conquest of
Florida itself. He captured its bastions at Saint Marks and Pensacola and arrested, tried,
and executed two British nationals whom he charged with abetting the Indians. Foreign
diplomats and some congressmen demanded that Jackson be repudiated and punished for his
unauthorized invasion, but at the urging of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams,
President James Monroe stood firm. Jackson's action served American by nudging Spain
to cede Florida in an 1819 treaty.
Jackson resigned his army commission and was appointed governor of the new Florida Territory
in 1821. He presided over the transfer of authority from the Spanish, then resigned and went
home to Tennessee, where his friends were planning to nominate him for the presidency in 1824.
In a confused, four-candidate presidential race in 1824, Jackson led the popular and electoral
vote but lost in the House of Representatives, to John Quincy Adams. Jackson challenged Adams
again in 1828 and defeated him in a campaign which centered on Jackson's image as a man of
the people battling aristocracy and corruption. Jackson easily defeated Henry Clay in 1832.
Jackson took office amid mounting acrimony over the "American System"
program of fostering economic development through transportation subsidies and through
protective tariffs on imports to aid American manufacturers. Many Southerners believed
these policies promoted Northern growth at their expense. Jackson curbed the American
System by vetoing road and canal bills beginning with the Maysville Road in 1830. However,
in 1832 the state of South Carolina declared the existing tariff unconstitutional, null
and void. The state took steps to block tariff collections within its borders. Though he
favored a lower tariff, Jackson acted quickly to uphold federal supremacy, by force,
if necessary. In a ringing proclamation, he declared the Union indivisible and branded
nullification as treason. Congress reduced the tariff in 1833, defusing the crisis.
The Second Bank of the United States was a corporation chartered by Congress to provide
a national paper currency and manage the government's finances. Jackson believed such a
bank to be dangerous and unconstitutional. In 1832, he vetoed
a bill to extend the Bank's charter beyond its scheduled expiration in 1836. Jackson's
veto message counterposed the plain people against the Bank's privileged
stockholders. The next year Jackson moved the federal government's deposits from the
Bank to state-chartered banks, triggering a brief financial panic and prompting the
Senate to censure him in 1834. Jackson then launched a broader assault against
all forms of government-granted privilege, especially corporate charters. His Farewell
Address in 1837 warned of insidious "money power."
Jackson's Bank War shaped the platform and
rhetoric of his new Democratic party. By casting himself
as the people's tribune against the moneyed elite and their tools in government,
he introduced an enduring theme in American politics.
Jackson replaced many government
officials on partisan grounds, inaugurating the "spoils system." Catering to his core
regional constituency of Southern planters and Western frontiersmen, he condemned
antislavery agitation, favored cheaper public lands, and strong-armed Indian tribes
into moving to the west of the Mississippi. In a confrontation between Georgia and the
Cherokee Nation, Jackson backed state authority against tribal sovereignty.
Jackson wielded executive powers vigorously, vetoed
more bills than all his predecessors combined, and frequently shuffling his cabinet members.
Jackson was strong-willed and sharp-tempered, he was a fierce patriot and rabid partisan,
Jackson was always controversial, both as a general and as President. He personalized disputes
and demonized opponents. Yet behind Jackson's towering rages, there were often shrewd
calculations of their political effect.
