Andrew Jackson was born an orphan at the age of fourteen, a status that forged the iron will and unyielding hatred of aristocracy that would define his life. His father died three weeks before his birth in the Waxhaws region of the Carolinas, leaving his mother Elizabeth to raise three sons alone. The family had emigrated from Ulster, Ireland, in 1765, carrying with them a deep-seated resentment toward the British that Elizabeth passed directly to her children. During the Revolutionary War, Andrew and his older brother Robert served as couriers for the Patriot forces. In April 1781, British troops occupied the home of a Crawford relative where the boys were staying. A British officer demanded that Andrew polish his boots. When the boy refused, the officer slashed him with a sword, leaving permanent scars on his left hand and head. Robert also refused and was struck on the head. Both boys were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Camden, South Carolina, where they suffered from malnutrition and contracted smallpox. They were released in a prisoner exchange in late spring, but Robert died just two days after arriving home. Elizabeth, having lost two sons, volunteered to nurse American prisoners of war on British prison ships in Charleston. She contracted cholera and died shortly thereafter, leaving Andrew alone in the world. This early trauma instilled in him a lifelong belief that the British represented tyranny and that the American republic was under constant threat from internal and external enemies.
The Dueling Lawyer
Andrew Jackson's military career elevated him from a regional lawyer to a national hero through a series of brutal victories against Native Americans and the British. In 1813, following the Fort Mims Massacre by the Red Sticks, a faction of the Creek Confederacy, Jackson led 2,500 militia south to destroy the Red Sticks. His campaign was a scorched-earth strategy that included burning villages and starving women and children. At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in January 1814, his combined force of 3,000 men, including Cherokee and Choctaw allies, overwhelmed a Red Stick fort manned by 1,000 warriors. Almost all the warriors were killed, and nearly 300 women and children were taken prisoner and distributed to Jackson's Native American allies. The victory broke the power of the Red Sticks, and Jackson imposed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, which required all Creek, including allies, to surrender vast tracts of land in Alabama and Georgia. He then moved to Florida, defeating Spanish and British forces at the Battle of Pensacola in November 1814. This campaign prompted Spain to negotiate the cession of Florida to the United States, finalized in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819. His greatest triumph came at the Battle of New Orleans on the 8th of January 1815. Despite the Treaty of Ghent having been signed weeks earlier, Jackson's forces of 5,000 men, including free and enslaved African Americans and Creeks, repelled a British assault of 10,000 soldiers. The British suffered over 2,000 casualties, including General Edward Pakenham, while the Americans lost only 71. This victory made Jackson a national hero and earned him the Congressional Gold Medal, but his subsequent