Andrew Jackson

Anyone asking who was Andrew Jackson usually begins with the hard circumstances of his childhood. He was born on March 15, 1767, in the Waxhaws region, a frontier settlement straddling the border of North and South Carolina. His parents, Andrew and Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, had emigrated from Carrickfergus in the north of Ireland two years earlier. His father died shortly before his birth, leaving Elizabeth to raise three sons among relatives in the backcountry ^[1].

The Revolutionary War tore through the Waxhaws while Jackson was still a boy, and it destroyed what remained of his family. At thirteen he served as a courier for local patriot militia. Captured by British forces in 1781, he refused an officer's order to clean his boots and received a saber slash to his head and hand, scars he carried for the rest of his life ^[1]. His brother Hugh died after the Battle of Stono Ferry, his brother Robert died of smallpox contracted in British captivity, and his mother died of illness while nursing prisoners in Charleston. By fourteen, Jackson was an orphan with a lasting hatred of Britain ^[2].

After the war he drifted, taught school briefly, and then read law in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was admitted to the bar in 1787 and the following year moved west across the mountains to the frontier town of Nashville, in what would soon become the state of Tennessee. There he built a legal practice, speculated in land, and began the climb that would carry him to national power ^[2].

Tennessee made Jackson's career. He served as prosecuting attorney for the Nashville district, helped draft the Tennessee state constitution in 1796, and that same year became the new state's first member of the United States House of Representatives. He served briefly in the United States Senate in 1797 before resigning, and from 1798 to 1804 he sat as a judge on the Tennessee Superior Court ^[3]. Alongside his legal offices he acquired land and enslaved laborers, eventually establishing the Hermitage plantation near Nashville in 1804.

His election as major general of the Tennessee militia in 1802 proved more consequential than any courtroom post. When the War of 1812 began, Jackson led Tennessee troops against the Red Stick faction of the Creek nation, crushing them at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in March 1814. The subsequent Treaty of Fort Jackson forced the Creeks to cede roughly 23 million acres of land in present-day Alabama and Georgia ^[4]. His toughness on campaign earned him the nickname Old Hickory from his soldiers.

The defining moment came on January 8, 1815, at the Battle of New Orleans. Commanding a mixed force of regulars, militia, free Black soldiers, Choctaw allies, and Baratarian privateers, Jackson repelled a British assault on the city, inflicting heavy casualties while losing comparatively few of his own men ^[4]. Though the Treaty of Ghent had already been signed in Europe, news had not yet reached America, and the victory made Jackson the most famous man in the country. In 1818 he invaded Spanish Florida during the First Seminole War, an aggressive move that helped push Spain to cede Florida to the United States in the Adams-Onis Treaty. He served briefly as Florida's first territorial governor in 1821 ^[3].

Jackson's fame translated into presidential ambition. In the four-way election of 1824 he won a plurality of both the popular and electoral vote, but no candidate secured a majority, throwing the decision to the House of Representatives. The House chose John Quincy Adams, and when Adams appointed Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House, as Secretary of State, Jackson's supporters denounced the outcome as a corrupt bargain ^[5]. The charge, whether fair or not, fueled a four-year campaign of grievance.

The rematch in 1828 was among the most abusive contests in American history, with both sides trading personal attacks, including assaults on the character of Jackson's wife Rachel. Jackson won decisively, carrying the South and West and drawing votes from newly enfranchised white men in states that had recently dropped property qualifications ^[5]. His victory is often treated as a turning point in the growth of mass political participation, and the coalition his allies assembled, organized largely by Martin Van Buren, became the Democratic Party.

Any honest account of Andrew Jackson achievements must weigh dramatic successes against grave harms. As president he claimed a mandate directly from the people and used executive power more forcefully than any predecessor. He vetoed twelve bills, more than the first six presidents combined, and insisted that the president, not Congress or the courts, was the truest representative of the national will ^[6].

His most famous political battle was the war against the Second Bank of the United States. Jackson viewed the bank as an engine of privilege that concentrated financial power in unaccountable hands. In July 1832 he vetoed the bill rechartering it, framing the veto as a defense of ordinary citizens against moneyed elites, and he won reelection that fall over Henry Clay in part on that issue. He then withdrew federal deposits from the bank, effectively killing it ^[6]. Admirers saw a blow for democracy; critics blamed the move for contributing to the financial panic that struck in 1837, shortly after he left office.

Jackson also faced down the gravest constitutional crisis between the founding and the Civil War. When South Carolina declared the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void within its borders, Jackson answered with his Proclamation to the People of South Carolina in December 1832, denying any state's right to nullify federal law or to secede. Congress passed the Force Bill authorizing military enforcement, while a compromise tariff engineered by Clay allowed both sides to step back ^[7]. His firm stand preserved the Union's authority, and in 1835 the federal debt was paid off entirely, the only time that has happened in American history ^[6].

The darkest chapter of his presidency was Indian removal. Jackson championed and signed the Indian Removal Act of May 1830, which authorized the exchange of Native lands in the East for territory west of the Mississippi. Under this policy and its successors, tens of thousands of Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole people were pressured or forced from their homelands. The Cherokee removal of 1838 to 1839, carried out under his successor, became known as the Trail of Tears; thousands died on the journey ^[8]. When the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that Georgia law had no force in Cherokee territory, Jackson declined to act in support of the decision.

Jackson's marriage was both the center of his emotional life and a source of scandal. He married Rachel Donelson Robards in 1791, believing her divorce from her first husband was final. It was not, and the couple remarried in 1794 after the divorce was legally completed. Political enemies revived the episode for decades, and Jackson fought duels over insults to Rachel's honor. In an 1806 duel he killed the lawyer Charles Dickinson and took a bullet near his heart that was never removed ^[2]. Rachel died in December 1828, weeks after his election and before his inauguration, a loss Jackson blamed bitterly on the campaign attacks against her.

The couple had no biological children but raised several wards, including an adopted son, Andrew Jackson Jr., and Lyncoya, a Creek orphan Jackson brought home after the Creek War. At the Hermitage, his cotton plantation outside Nashville, Jackson's wealth rested on the labor of enslaved people; at his death about 150 men, women, and children were held in bondage there ^[9]. Tall, gaunt, and frequently ill from old wounds and disease, he was famous for a temper that could be genuine or theatrical as the occasion required.

Jackson left office in March 1837, passing the presidency to his chosen successor, Martin Van Buren, and retired to the Hermitage. Retirement did not mean silence. He followed politics closely, defended his record against critics, and pressed hard for the annexation of Texas, which Congress approved in the final months of his life ^[3].

His health, poor for decades, deteriorated steadily. He suffered from chronic pain, tuberculosis, and dropsy, and in January 1835 he had survived the first attempted assassination of a sitting American president when both of Richard Lawrence's pistols misfired at the Capitol ^[6]. Jackson died at the Hermitage on June 8, 1845, at the age of 78, and was buried in the garden beside Rachel ^[1].

Few figures in an Andrew Jackson biography divide historians as sharply as the man himself. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries he was celebrated as the champion of the common man, the general who saved New Orleans, and the president who broke the bank and faced down nullification. The label Jacksonian Democracy attached itself to the whole era of expanding white male suffrage and mass party politics ^[5]. His face has appeared on the twenty-dollar bill since 1928.

Modern assessments give far greater weight to the costs of his policies. The Indian Removal Act and the suffering that followed are now central to his historical reputation, as is his lifelong slaveholding ^[8]. In 2016 the Treasury Department announced plans to place Harriet Tubman on the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving Jackson's image, a proposal that remains in progress ^[10]. Whether judged as a democratizer, an authoritarian, or both at once, Jackson expanded the presidency into an office that could speak for a national electorate, and every strong president since has worked within the space he opened. Basic Andrew Jackson facts, from the frontier orphan to the Hermitage grave, still frame one of the sharpest arguments in American memory.