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Andrew Jackson: The Populist President

Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) was an American military officer and politician who served as the seventh president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. From humble beginnings as a frontier lawyer in Tennessee, he rose to national prominence after his victory at the Battle of New Orleans (8 January 1815). He ran for president on a populist platform, supported by the new Democratic Party, and won election in 1828. During his two terms, Jackson worked to strengthen the power of the presidency as he dealt with major incidents such as the Bank War and the Nullification Crisis. He signed the Indian Removal Act, which displaced tens of thousands of Native Americans and has often been considered an example of ethnic cleansing. He left office in 1837 but continued to exert significant influence over national politics until his death in 1845.

Early Life

Jackson was born on 15 March 1767 in Waxhaws, a frontier community bestriding the border between North and South Carolina; both states have claimed him as a native son, though the evidence indicates that he was most likely born in South Carolina. He was the third child of Andrew Jackson Sr. and Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, a pair of Presbyterian Scotch-Irish immigrants who had made the Atlantic crossing to the Carolinas only two years before. He never knew his father, as the senior Andrew Jackson had unexpectedly died three weeks before the birth of his namesake. With nowhere else to turn, the newly widowed Elizabeth Jackson took her three sons and moved in with her sister and brother-in-law, the Crawfords, who put her to work as a housekeeper. The Crawfords were much wealthier than the Jacksons, and, growing up on their plantation, young Andrew always felt like an outsider. "His childish recollections were of humiliating dependence and galling discomfort," a relative would later recall (quoted in Meacham, 9).

Elizabeth Jackson's experiences in Ireland had given her a strong hatred for the British, which she passed on to her sons. It was hardly surprising, then, that, after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), her oldest son, Hugh, sided with the Patriots and joined a militia company. He would never come home, dying of heat exhaustion shortly after the Battle of Stono Ferry in June 1779. The following year, the war came to the Jacksons' doorstep; the British seized Charleston in May 1780, unleashing a wave of brutal violence throughout South Carolina as Patriot and Loyalist militias butchered one another in the backcountry. "Men hunted each other like beasts of prey," wrote a future Jackson partisan (quoted in Meacham, 11). Although they were both only teenagers, Jackson and his surviving brother Robert aided the Patriot militias, drilling with them and carrying messages for them. In April 1781, the two brothers were captured by a party of British soldiers. When Jackson refused a humiliating order from the British officer to clean his boots, the officer slashed him with his saber, leaving lifelong scars on the boy's hands and face.

The Jackson brothers were then sent to a prisoner-of-war camp at Camden, where they languished for weeks in the scorching heat, packed tightly in with other disease-ridden prisoners. They were eventually released in a prisoner exchange, but Robert had contracted smallpox during their confinement and died only two days after returning home. As if this were not tragic enough, Jackson's mother died later that year, having contracted cholera while nursing injured soldiers in Charleston. At only 14 years old, Jackson was now the only surviving member of his family. He blamed the British for the deaths of his mother and brothers, and for the rest of his life carried a deep-seated hatred for all things he associated with Britain, including privilege and aristocracy. After the war, Jackson briefly returned to Waxhaws, where he worked as a saddler before going to Salisbury, North Carolina, to study law. He passed the state bar in 1787 and, the following year, set himself up in the western district of North Carolina, which would soon become the state of Tennessee.

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