Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson (born March 15, 1767, Waxhaws region, South Carolina [U.S.]—died June 8, 1845, the Hermitage, near Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.) was a military hero and the seventh president of the United States (1829–37). He was the first U.S. president to come from the area west of the Appalachians and the first to gain office by a direct appeal to the mass of voters. His political movement has since been known as Jacksonian Democracy.

Early life

Jackson was born on the western frontier of the Carolinas, an area that was in dispute between North Carolina and South Carolina, and both states have claimed him as a native son. Jackson maintained that he was born in South Carolina, and the weight of evidence supports his assertion. The area offered little opportunity for formal education, and what schooling he received was interrupted by the British invasion of the western Carolinas in 1780–81. In the latter year he was captured by the British. Shortly after being imprisoned, he refused to shine the boots of a British officer and was struck across the face with a sabre. His mother and two brothers died during the closing years of the war, direct or indirect casualties of the invasion of the Carolinas. This sequence of tragic experiences fixed in Jackson’s mind a lifelong hostility toward Great Britain. After the end of the American Revolution, he studied law in an office in Salisbury, North Carolina, and was admitted to the bar of that state in 1787. In 1788 he went to the Cumberland region as prosecuting attorney of the western district of North Carolina—the region west of the Appalachians, soon to become the state of Tennessee.

When Jackson arrived in Nashville, the community was still a frontier settlement. As prosecuting attorney, Jackson was principally occupied with suits for the collection of debts. He was so successful in these litigations that he soon had a thriving private practice and had gained the friendship of landowners and creditors. For almost 30 years Jackson was allied with this group in Tennessee politics. Jackson boarded in the home of Col. John Donelson, where he met and married the colonel’s daughter, Rachel Robards (Rachel Jackson).

Tennessee politics

Jackson’s interest in public affairs and in politics had always been keen. He had gone to Nashville as a political appointee, and in 1796 he became a member of the convention that drafted a constitution for the new state of Tennessee. In the same year he was elected as the first representative from Tennessee to the U.S. House of Representatives. An undistinguished legislator, he refused to seek reelection and served only until March 4, 1797. Jackson returned to Tennessee, vowing never to enter public life again, but before the end of the year he was elected to the U.S. Senate. His willingness to accept the office reflects his emergence as an acknowledged leader of one of the two political factions contending for control of the state. Nevertheless, Jackson resigned from the Senate in 1798 after an uneventful year. Soon after his return to Nashville he was elected a judge of the superior court (in effect, the supreme court) of the state and served in that post until 1804. In 1802 Jackson had also been elected major general of the Tennessee militia, a position he still held when the War of 1812 opened the door to a command in the field and a hero’s role.

At a glance: the Jackson presidency

Military feats

In March 1812, when it appeared that war with Great Britain was imminent, Jackson issued a call for 50,000 volunteers to be ready for an invasion of Canada. After the declaration of war, in June 1812, Jackson offered his services and those of his militia to the United States. The government was slow to accept this offer, and, when Jackson finally was given a command in the field, it was to fight against the Creek Indians, who were allied with the British and who were threatening the southern frontier. In a campaign of about five months, in 1813–14, Jackson crushed the Creeks, the final victory coming in the Battle of Tohopeka (or Horseshoe Bend) in Alabama. The victory was so decisive that the Creeks never again menaced the frontier, and Jackson was established as the hero of the West.

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In August 1814, Jackson moved his army south to Mobile. Though he was without specific instructions, his real objective was the Spanish post at Pensacola. The motive was to prepare the way for U.S. occupation of Florida, then a Spanish possession. Jackson’s justification for this bold move was that Spain and Great Britain were allies in the wars in Europe. At Mobile, Jackson learned that an army of British regulars had landed at Pensacola. In the first week in November, he led his army into Florida and, on November 7, occupied that city just as the British evacuated it to go by sea to Louisiana.

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Jackson then marched his army overland to New Orleans, where he arrived early in December. A series of small skirmishes between detachments of the two armies culminated in the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815, in which Jackson’s forces inflicted a decisive defeat upon the British army and forced it to withdraw. The news of this victory reached Washington at a time when morale was at a low point. A few days later, news of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent (Belgium) between the United States and Great Britain on December 24, 1814, reached the capital. The twin tidings brought joy and relief to the American people and made Jackson the hero not only of the West but of a substantial part of the country as well.

After the close of the war, Jackson was named commander of the southern district. He entrusted the command of the troops in the field to subordinates while he retired to his home at the Hermitage, near Nashville. He was ordered back to active service at the end of December 1817, when unrest along the border appeared to be reaching critical proportions. The instructions given Jackson were vague, and he ordered an invasion of Florida immediately after taking active command. He captured two Spanish posts and appointed one of his subordinates military governor of Florida. These bold actions brought an immediate and sharp protest from Spain and precipitated a cabinet crisis in Washington. The staunch defense of Jackson by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams saved Jackson from censure and hastened the U.S. acquisition of Florida.

Presidential prospects

Jackson’s military triumphs led to suggestions that he become a candidate for president, but he disavowed any interest, and political leaders in Washington assumed that the flurry of support for him would prove transitory. The campaign to make him president, however, was kept alive by his continued popularity and was carefully nurtured by a small group of his friends in Nashville, who combined devotion to the general with a high degree of political astuteness. In 1822 these friends maneuvered the Tennessee legislature into a formal nomination of their hero as a candidate for president. In the following year this same group persuaded the legislature to elect him to the U.S. Senate—a gesture designed to demonstrate the extent of his popularity in his home state.

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In the election of 1824 four candidates received electoral votes. Jackson received the highest number (99); the others receiving electoral votes were John Quincy Adams (84), William H. Crawford (41), and Henry Clay (37). Because no one had a majority, the House of Representatives was required to elect a president from the three with the highest number of votes. Crawford was critically ill, so the actual choice was between Jackson and Adams. Clay, as speaker of the House, was in a strategic and perhaps decisive position to determine the outcome, and he threw his support to Adams, who was elected on the first ballot. When Adams appointed Clay secretary of state, it seemed to admirers of Jackson to confirm rumors of a “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Clay. Jackson’s friends persuaded him that the popular will had been thwarted by intrigues, and he thereupon determined to vindicate himself and his supporters by becoming a candidate again in 1828.

In the election of 1828 Jackson defeated Adams by an electoral vote of 178 to 83 after a campaign in which personalities and slander played a larger part than in any previous U.S. national election. Jackson and his wife, Rachel, despite their long marriage, had been vilified in campaign pamphlets as adulterers. The basis was that Rachel Jackson was not legally divorced from her first husband at the time she and Jackson were wed. When they discovered their mistake they remarried, but the damage had been done. Jackson’s hour of triumph was soon overshadowed by personal tragedy—his wife died at the Hermitage on December 22, 1828. Retiring and religious, she had avoided the public eye, and the scabrous attacks had hurt her deeply. Jackson had these words inscribed on her tombstone: “A being so gentle and yet so virtuous, slander might wound, but could not dishonor.” She had dreaded becoming the hostess of the President’s House, saying that she would “rather be a doorkeeper in the House of God than live in that palace.”

Rachel Jackson’s niece, Emily Donelson, the wife of Andrew Jackson Donelson, served as the president’s hostess until 1836. At times, Sarah Yorke Jackson, the wife of Andrew Jackson’s adopted son, also served as his hostess.