ANDREW JACKSON
Seventh President of the United States
March 15, 1767 - June 8,
1845
Andrew Jackson's family
moved from Ireland in the 1760's. His father
was killed shortly before Andrew was born, so his widowed mother raised
Andrew and his two older brothers in the home of a relative.
When he was thirteen years old he joined the
Continental Army as a courier.
He and his brother were captured by the British. Once when he refused
to polish the shoes of a British officer, the officer hit him with a
sword and left scars that would remain the rest of his life. There were
inward unseen scars also as a result of the war because he lost his
older brother, and his mother also died during the war as a result of
cholera.
When he was fifteen years
old he received an inheritance from his
grandfather in Ireland, but being young and inexperienced he was unable
to handle the windfall and spent the entire amount in a week's time.
He studied law and became a lawyer at the age of 20. He headed west to
Tennessee to seek his fortune. His destination was Nashville and there
he met Rachel Robards, a young woman who had married at age seventeen
and was estranged from her husband. She thought her husband had
obtained a divorce and she and Andrew ran away to Natchez, Mississippi
and married. Unfortunately, she was mistaken about the finality of the
divorce. They returned home after six months only to find out they were
not legally married. Her husband then sued for divorce on the grounds
of adultery, the first such case in the state. When the divorce was
final she and Jackson were married a second time, this time legally.
In 1796 he served in Congress as a State Representative from the state
of Tennessee.
In 1805 there was a dispute over a bet on a horse he
had with a Mr.
Erwin. A duel ensued between Jackson and Mr. Erwin's son-in-law Charles
Dickinson. It was agreed that Dickinson would shoot his pistol first.
His shot hit Jackson and wounded him, but he didn't die. Jackson's
first attempt to fire failed, and he took dead aim again and fired a
fatal shot at Dickinson. The man survived for a few hours, but
subsequently died. The bullet would remain in Jackson the rest of his
life and cause him a lot of pain and trouble.
In 1812 the United States
declared war on Great Britain. Andrew Jackson
was the commander of the Tennessee militia. Their mission was to defeat
the Creek Indian warriors who had sided with the British. At one point
Jackson's soldiers threatened to mutiny. He said he would kill them if
they left. Previous threats had been carried out, so the mutiny did not
occur.
In March 1814 he cornered the Creek Indians in Alabama. Not
one of the 1,000 Creek Indians surrendered, but all were killed in the
Battle of Horseshoe Bend.
The Tallapoosa River ran red with the blood of those who had been
slaughtered. Sam Houston who fought alongside Jackson agonized over the
events that took place that day.
Andrew Jackson was known as "Old Hickory". He was as tough as
a hickory stick and had an unbending will. Yet there was a soft side to
him also. On a march he preferred to walk with the troops and let the
wounded soldiers ride on the horses.
The British were threatening New Orleans. It was here
that the last major battle of the War
of 1812 would take place. Jackson teamed up with the French privateer
and pirate, Jean Lafitte
and the free blacks of New Orleans. He had about 4,500 men and was
outnumbered three-to-one by the British. The British thought it was
going to be easy to defeat the American troops there, but they were
surprised when Jackson and his troops stood their ground. The British
would lose hundreds of men, but Jackson only had 8 soldiers killed and
13 wounded. After 1815 the British left the Americans alone.
Jackson, now a celebrity, went back home to Tennessee
and his wife
Rachel. They never had children of their own, but adopted one of
Rachel's nephews and named him Andrew Jackson Jr. He adopted a young
Creek Indian child, Lyncoya, after his parents had been killed by
Jackson's troops. He died at the age of 17 the same year Rachel died.
They also raised
other nephews. Rachel's life was different than she had imagined it
would be when she married him. She did not anticipate having to spend
so much time by herself. She once said her husband spent "less than
one-fourth of his time under his own roof ".
Andrew Jackson became a
wealthy man. He owned a lot of land he called
The Hermitage*.
He grew cotton which was worked by over a hundred black slaves. Jackson
was the master and cotton, rice, and tobacco fueled the economy at the
time.
More land was needed to grow more cotton. This had devastating
consequences for the Indians who lived on the land, as we shall see
later on.
Florida was owned by Spain. In 1817 Jackson invaded Florida in
pursuit of Indians. He had been instructed by President Monroe not to
do so, but he did it anyway.
Two British officers were killed. Henry Clay called on Congress to
censure Jackson, but they refused.
In 1824 Jackson aspired to the presidency of the United
States, but John Quincy Adams also wanted to become president. In those
years the electoral college chose the president. In the
election
of 1824 Andrew Jackson had more popular and electoral votes than
Adams, but the
election was thrown into the the House of Representatives and John
Quincy Adams was elected.
Four years later Jackson again ran against John Quincy Adams and used
the press and vigorous campaigning to win the popular vote. They
organized rallies to stir up the popular vote revolutionizing the
election process.
During this time Rachel's divorce proceedings which had
occurred three decades before were brought out and a smear campaign was
underway; one of the dirtiest campaigns in all American history. The
opposition called her "Jezebel".
Jackson blamed Henry Clay for all the ugly things that were being
rehashed in hopes of discrediting him, but evidently it backfired and
Jackson was elected by a landslide.
But it was a hollow victory for Andrew. His beloved Rachel died of a
heart attack in December of 1828 before Jackson was inaugurated in
March of 1829. In his mind John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay had been
responsible for her death. Rachel's niece Emily would serve as hostess
in the White House. The Jacksonian Era had begun.
Farmers and tradesmen came to Washington to celebrate his inauguration
in 1829.
They were a rowdy group and Washington insiders were aghast. They
called it a "riot". His enemies feared Jackson would become "King of
America".
His motto seemed to be To the victor belong the spoils, and he
certainly employed the "spoils
system".
One of his first acts was to fire dozens of federal employees, some who
had been there since the days of George Washington. In their place he
appointed people who had supported him. One such appointment of John
Eaton as Secretary of War rocked his administration when Eaton became
involved in an affair with Peggy O'Neal Timberlake. The effects of the
Eaton Affair were so far-reaching that the vice-president and all
Jackson's cabinet resigned before it was over.
John Calhoun, Jackson's vice-president favored slavery and
asserted that states could disregard federal law if they deemed the law
unconstitutional. He called the theory nullification,
the exercising of state's rights. They tried to get Jackson's support.
The Nullifiers at a dinner in 1830 sought his support, but in his
words, "Our federal union! It must be preserved!". He would not tear
apart the nation.
South Carolina threatened to leave the nation and start a civil war.
Henry Clay got a compromise bill that would avert the tariff they
opposed.
In 1835 New York Abolitionists
started sending pamphlets urging an end to slavery, but a lot of the
mail was burned. Even though it was against the law to tamper with the
mail, Jackson encouraged postmasters to destroy the mail his opponents
were attempting to send.
Jackson in order to further the expansion of the frontier west
supported the Indian Removal Act in 1830. The Cherokee Indians liked to
live a harmonious way of life, and many of them embraced the white
man's way according to Jefferson's advice to them, but they still had
to move. The Supreme Court ruled in the Cherokee's favor, but Jackson
said to ignore it. Ironically these same people had fought with
Jackson. The removal of the Cherokees, known as The Trail of Tears is a
low point in American history. In Georgia they had to leave houses and
could only take the clothes on their backs. More than 2,000 of them
died on the trail. They referred to the president as "Jackson the
Devil".
There was a central bank called The Bank of the
United
States.
Jackson didn't trust the bank and during his second term as president
he vetoed a bill to renew the bank's charter, took all the money out of
the bank and parceled it out to state banks run by his friends.
This cartoon shows Jackson fighting the "monster bank".
In 1832 Jackson and
Martin Van Buren founded the Democratic Party.
The cartoonists had been portraying Andrew Jackson as a "Jackass" in
derision. The donkey ultimately became the symbol of the Democratic
Party. Thomas Nast, a Republican and famous political cartoonist is
generally credited with first designating the political parties with
the Democratic donkey and Republican elephant.
In 1835 there was an assassination attempt on
Jackson's life. A
deranged man, Richard Lawrence, fired two shots at him, but both failed
to ignite. The man was declared insane and put in an institution.
Martin Van Buren
succeeded Andrew Jackson as president and Jackson
returned to the Hermitage. Upon leaving office he said,"After eight
years as president I have only two regrets. That I have not shot Henry
Clay or hanged John C. Calhoun."
Biography at
gardenofpraise.com