Andrew Jackson

• 1. Introduction

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  Andrew Jackson refused to polish a British officer's boots, and the officer slashed him with a sword. The blade left scars on his left hand and head. Jackson was a boy then, captured with his brother Robert in April 1781 during the American Revolutionary War. Both brothers were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Camden, South Carolina, where they grew malnourished and caught smallpox. Robert died two days after their release. Their mother nursed Andrew back to health, then died of cholera while tending American prisoners in Charleston harbor. By age 14, the future seventh president of the United States was an orphan. How did this hot-tempered frontier orphan become a national hero, then president from 1829 to 1837, and finally one of the most polarizing figures in American memory? How did the same man pay off the national debt, survive a duelist's bullet lodged near his heart, and sign a law that forced tens of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands? The answers run through plantations and battlefields, through a contested election and a war against a bank, and through a marriage that his enemies turned into a weapon.

• 2. Frontier Lawyer And Planter

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  In 1784, Jackson left the Waxhaws region for Salisbury, North Carolina, to study law under attorney Spruce Macay. He was admitted to the North Carolina bar in September 1787, then took a post as prosecuting attorney in the Western District that would become Tennessee. On the way to that job he stopped in Jonesborough, where he bought his first slave, Nancy, who was around his age. He also fought his first duel there, firing into the air after accusing the lawyer Waightstill Avery of impugning his character.

  Nashville in 1788 gave Jackson a stage for rapid ascent. He became a protege of William Blount, one of the most powerful men in the territory, and was appointed attorney general of the Mero District in 1791. With fellow lawyer John Overton he speculated in land opened to white settlers under a 1783 act that carved into Cherokee and Chickasaw territory. He also worked as a slave trader, moving enslaved people between Nashville and the Natchez District along the Mississippi River and the Natchez Trace.

  Jackson's land speculations on promissory notes nearly bankrupted him after the Panic of 1796-1797. He sold Hunter's Hill and a 25,000-acre holding, then bought a smaller plantation near Nashville that he named the Hermitage. The Hermitage grew to 1000 acres and became one of the largest cotton-growing plantations in the state. In 1804 Jackson owned nine enslaved African Americans. By 1820 he had over 100, by his death over 150, and across his lifetime he owned a total of 300.

  Jackson claimed the paternalistic view that slavery was acceptable if the enslaved were treated humanely and their needs met. His practice told another story. In an 1804 advertisement to recover a runaway, he offered ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes any person would give the man, up to three hundred lashes, a number likely to be fatal.

• 3. The Duelist's Temper

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  Charles Dickinson fired first in their duel of May 1806. The bullet hit Jackson in the chest and shattered against his breastbone. Jackson returned fire and killed him. Their quarrel had begun over payments for a forfeited horse race and escalated over six months before they met. The killing tarnished his reputation.

  Jackson's temper drew him into other men's schemes and feuds. The former vice president Aaron Burr, fresh from mortally wounding Alexander Hamilton, stayed at the Hermitage in 1805 and drew Jackson into a plan to seize Spanish Florida and Texas. Jackson wrote in October 1806 that the United States could conquer not only Florida but all Spanish North America. He readied the Tennessee militia, yet warned officials that some conspirators might intend to break away from the United States. When Jefferson ordered Burr's arrest, Jackson's extensive paper trail kept him safe and he testified before a grand jury in 1807.

  Violence followed Jackson back to Nashville. After the War of 1812 began, he led volunteers on a hard march home from Natchez, earning the nickname Hickory, and later Old Hickory, for his toughness. Soon after, a tavern brawl with the brothers Jesse and Thomas Hart Benton left Jackson with a gunshot in the shoulder that nearly killed him. He carried that wound into the campaigns that would make his name.

• 4. From Horseshoe Bend To New Orleans

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  The Fort Mims Massacre of August 1813 set Jackson marching. The Red Sticks, a Creek Confederacy faction allied with the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, had killed about 250 militia and civilians. Jackson headed south from Fayetteville, Tennessee, in October with 2,500 militia and built Fort Strother as his base. His cavalry under General Coffee won at Tallushatchee on November 3, and Jackson won at Talladega later that month.

  The Tallapoosa River saw the decisive blow. In 1814 Jackson's combined force of 3,000 men, including Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek allies, attacked a Red Stick fort at Horseshoe Bend held by about 1,000. The Red Sticks were overwhelmed. Nearly all their warriors were killed and almost 300 women and children were taken prisoner. The Treaty of Fort Jackson then required all Creek, even those who had stayed allies, to surrender 23,000,000 acres.

  New Orleans tested Jackson against a far larger enemy. He arrived on the 1st of December 1814, declared martial law, and built his force to about 5,000 by allying with Jean Lafitte's smugglers and raising units of free and enslaved African Americans and Creeks, paying non-white volunteers the same as whites. General Edward Pakenham led some 10,000 British soldiers, many veterans of the Napoleonic Wars.

  The climactic assault came on January 8. The British charged Jackson's parapets and were cut down, suffering over 2,000 casualties, including Pakenham, against 71 Americans. The Treaty of Ghent had already been signed in December 1814, but the victory made Jackson a national hero. On the 27th of February 1815, he received the Thanks of Congress and a Congressional Gold Medal.

• 5. Florida And The Seminoles

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  Prospect Bluff, a former British post Americans called the Negro fort, held more than a thousand former Royal and Colonial Marines, escaped slaves, and indigenous peoples. American enslavers saw it as a threat to their property and a possible source of insurrection. Jackson ordered Colonel Duncan Clinch to take it in July 1816. Clinch destroyed the fort and killed many of its garrison.

  In December 1817, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun ordered Jackson to lead a campaign with full power to conduct the war as he thought best, beginning the First Seminole War. Jackson wrote to President James Monroe that if it were signified to him through any channel that possession of the Floridas was desirable, in sixty days it would be accomplished. He invaded, captured the Spanish fort of St. Marks, and occupied Pensacola.

  Two British subjects, Robert Ambrister and Alexander Arbuthnot, were captured working with the Seminoles. After a brief trial, Jackson executed both, causing an international incident with Britain. Calhoun wanted him censured for acting without a declaration of war, but Secretary of State John Quincy Adams defended him, believing the occupation would push Spain to sell Florida.

  Spain did cede Florida in the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, in exchange for the United States assuming American citizens' claims and renouncing claims to Texas west of the Sabine River. In February 1819, a congressional investigation exonerated Jackson. His campaign helped convince the Seminoles to sign the Treaty of Moultrie Creek in 1823, surrendering much of their Florida land.

• 6. The Corrupt Bargain

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  In the presidential election of 1824, Jackson won a 42-percent plurality of the popular vote and a plurality of electoral votes, taking 99 from the South, West, and Mid-Atlantic. He was the only candidate to win states outside his regional base. Because no candidate reached the majority of 131 electoral votes, the House of Representatives held a contingent election under the Twelfth Amendment.

  Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, was eliminated as only the top three electoral winners qualified. Clay saw a Jackson presidency as a disaster and threw his support behind John Quincy Adams, who won on the first ballot. Adams then appointed Clay as Secretary of State. Jackson's supporters cried that the two had struck a corrupt bargain, and from that grievance they began building the coalition that became the Democratic Party.

  The 1828 rematch turned brutal and personal. Jackson was accused of being the son of an English prostitute and a mulatto, and was accurately labeled a slave trader. Pamphlets called the Coffin Handbills accused him of having murdered 18 white men, including the militiamen he had executed for desertion. Jackson and Rachel were attacked for living together as husband and wife before her divorce from Captain Lewis Robards was finalized in 1793; they had married in January 1794.

  Rachel did not live to enter the White House. She had been under stress throughout the election and fell ill just as Jackson prepared to leave for Washington. She died of a stroke or heart attack a few days later. Jackson blamed his enemies, saying at her funeral, May God Almighty forgive her murderers, as I know she forgave them. I never can.

• 7. Removal Of The Tribes

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  Worcester v. Georgia tested the limits of Jackson's removal policy in 1832. Georgia had arrested missionaries for entering Cherokee territory without a permit, and the Cherokee called the arrests illegal. The Court under Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Georgia's law over the Cherokee was unconstitutional. Horace Greeley alleges Jackson responded that John Marshall had made his decision, but now let him enforce it. The quote may be apocryphal, but Jackson refused to use the federal government to enforce the ruling.

  In May 1830 Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which Congress had narrowly passed. It let the president negotiate treaties to buy eastern tribal lands in exchange for lands west of the Mississippi. Though framed as voluntary, it was carried out through bribes, fraud, and intimidation, and the leaders who signed often did not represent their whole tribe. The Choctaw relocation was rife with corruption, theft, and mismanagement.

  Treaty after treaty followed. In 1830 the Chickasaw agreed to move and Choctaw leaders signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. In 1832 Seminole leaders signed the Treaty of Payne's Landing, and most Seminoles refused to go, leading to a Second Seminole War in 1835 that lasted six years. Cherokee leaders ceded their land in the 1836 Treaty of New Echota, and their removal, the Trail of Tears, was enforced by Jackson's successor, Van Buren.

  The scale of removal was enormous. Across his administration Jackson made about 70 treaties with American Indian tribes and removed almost all Native Americans east of the Mississippi and south of Lake Michigan, about 70,000 people, at the cost of thousands of lives lost to epidemics and dislocation. The policy added over 170,000 square miles to the public domain and proved popular with his constituency, who could buy the opened land cheaply.

• 8. Union, The Bank, And A Debt Paid

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  South Carolina put Jackson's devotion to the union to the test. The Tariff of 1828 had cut into southern cotton planters' income, and Calhoun anonymously wrote the South Carolina Exposition and Protest arguing a state could nullify a federal act. At a Jefferson birthday dinner on the 13th of April 1830, Jackson toasted, Our federal Union: It must be preserved. Calhoun answered, The Union: Next to our Liberty, the most dear.

  The crisis nearly turned to force. On the 24th of November 1832, South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification and threatened to secede. Jackson sent warships to Charleston harbor and threatened to hang any man working for nullification or secession. The standoff eased when he signed the Force Bill and the compromise Tariff of 1833 on March 2. South Carolina rescinded its ordinance but defiantly nullified the Force Bill.

  Jackson fought a parallel war against the Second Bank of the United States, run by Nicholas Biddle, which he saw as a fourth branch of government serving an elite money power. By the 1832 election Biddle had spent over $250,000 on pamphlets, lobbying, and loans to editors and congressmen. After a recharter bill passed, Jackson vetoed it on the 10th of July 1832, then won reelection by a landslide with 55 percent of the popular vote and 219 electoral votes. His opponents, calling him King Andrew the First, formed the Whig Party, and the Senate censured him in March 1834.

  In January 1835, Jackson paid off the national debt, the only time in U.S. history it has been accomplished. It was retired through tariff revenue, careful funding of internal improvements, and the sale of public lands. Between 1834 and 1836 land sales spiked, peaking in 1836 at eight to twelve times a typical year. That same speculative boom helped bring on the Panic of 1837, which drove the economy into a depression lasting until 1841.

  On the 30th of January 1835, Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter from England, aimed a pistol at Jackson as he left the United States Capitol. It misfired. Lawrence drew a second pistol, and it misfired too. Jackson beat at his attacker with his cane until others restrained Lawrence, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity. It was the first attempt to assassinate a sitting president in United States history.

  Jackson's household at the Hermitage was crowded with family by adoption and guardianship. He and Rachel had no children together but adopted Andrew Jackson Jr., the son of Rachel's brother Severn Donelson. They raised nephews including Andrew Jackson Donelson, served as guardians for orphaned children, and counted three Indigenous members, Lyncoya, Theodore, and Charley. For the only time in U.S. history, two women, Emily Donelson and Sarah Yorke Jackson, served simultaneously as unofficial first lady for the widower president.

  Texas remained Jackson's unfinished business. Wary that Texas had legalized slavery and might divide the Democrats, he waited until the last full day of his presidency, the 3rd of March 1837, to recognize the Republic of Texas. After leaving office he kept lobbying for annexation and steered the 1844 nomination to fellow Tennessean James K. Polk over Martin Van Buren. The Senate passed a bill to annex Texas, signed on the 1st of March 1845.

  Jackson died at the Hermitage on the 8th of June 1845, at age 78, of dropsy, tuberculosis, and heart failure. His deathbed was surrounded by family, friends, and slaves, and he was recorded saying, Do not cry; I hope to meet you all in Heaven, yes, all in Heaven, white and black. He was buried in the same tomb as Rachel. Scholars once ranked him high among presidents, but his reputation declined in the late 20th century and his ranking has fallen in the 21st.