Jackson, Andrew (1767-1845)

Andrew Jackson (1767-1845)

Sources

General, governor, and president of the united states

Symbol . Even before he became the nation’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson was a living, breathing symbol of the West. As a youth fighting in the Revolutionary War, a frontier lawyer and jurist, a plantation parvenu, a military leader, and, finally, as president, Jackson’s life had a tremendous effect on the nation’s Westward expansion.

Planter-Politician . Born in the North Carolina backcountry to a family of Irish immigrants, Jackson’s childhood was interrupted by the American Revolution. Although he was only thirteen, he was captured and imprisoned by the British; all but one member of his immediate family died from war-related causes. With no family to turn to, the ambitious and troubled Jackson decided to study law and move to North Carolina’s western district (now Tennessee). The rough-hewn lawyer made friends quickly and began a political career as a delegate to Tennessee’s constitutional convention and the new state’s first elected congressman. He even served for a few months as a U.S. senator before returning home to take a seat on the state supreme court. By 1800 the young jurist had purchased several slaves and a plantation near the bustling town of Nashville.

Military Career. Jackson’s true calling was the military. As commander of a group of Tennessee volunteers in the war of 1812, he decimated the Creek Indians in Mississippi. Promoted into the regular army, Jackson led a much larger force against the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, an engagement fought after a peace treaty was signed in Europe. Jackson emerged as the war’s greatest hero. Three years later he invaded Florida to chastise the Seminoles. Despite significant controversy over his actions there—he ordered the execution of two British subjects suspected of aiding the Indians—President James Monroe named Jackson military governor of Florida in 1821.

“Old Hickory.” The governor’s reputation as an opponent of British tyranny and as a soldier who helped open millions of acres of Indian lands to white settlement made him a popular man (to many whites) in the West, a region of growing political importance in the 1820s. After a brief return to the Senate, Jackson, known as “Old Hickory,” ran for president in 1824. With tremendous Western support, he won a popular plurality but fell short of the majority necessary to claim victory. As mandated by the Constitution, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where Jackson lost the election to John Quincy Adams. Claiming publicly that the election was stolen from him as the result of a “corrupt bargain,” Jackson and his supporters built a massive coalition of Western expansionists, Southern slaveholders and Northern farmers and artisans. He won the election of 1828 in a landslide.

An Eventful Presidency . As president, Jackson held himself up as an opponent of established wealth, federally backed internal improvements, and moral reforms such as abolitionism. He also pursued a program that ruthlessly forced removal of Indians from east of the Mississippi to less-fertile land the federal government labeled Indian territory. Although Jackson refused to annex the Republic of Texas in 1836 for fear of igniting the slavery issue, he squarely set the nation on a course of geographic expansion. His career and rise to power in many ways exemplified and gave shape to the history of westward expansion in the United States.

Sources

Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984);

Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981);

Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of Empire, 1767-1821 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).