Jackson, Andrew
(b. March 15, 1767; d. June 8, 1845) Victor of the Battle of New Orleans; general of the War of 1812; Seventh U.S. president (1829–1837).
Andrew Jackson was born to Scottish-Irish immigrant parents and grew up on the Carolina frontier. As a boy, he fought in the Revolution with patriot irregulars and was captured. By his own later account, a British officer slashed him with a sword for refusing to clean his boots, leaving a permanent scar.
After the war, Jackson read law in North Carolina and in 1788 moved west to Nashville. In the new state of Tennessee, he won quick political promotion, and in 1802 was elected major general of the state militia. Jackson thirsted for the field, offering his men for service against every possible foe, including the Burr conspirators, the Spanish, the British, and the border American Indian tribes.
Congress declared war against Britain in June 1812, and in November Jackson's Tennessee troops were ordered to New Orleans. Jackson led two thousand men as far as Natchez, where he received an abrupt order dismissing them without pay or provisions. On his own responsibility, Jackson held the command together for the return home. His willingness to share his men's privations on this march earned him the name "Old Hickory."
In 1813 Jackson was ordered to suppress a group of hostile Creek in Mississippi Territory (later the state of Alabama). Commanding Tennessee troops and allied Indians, Jackson penetrated into the heart of Creek territory and fought a series of engagements. At Horseshoe Bend in March 1814, he destroyed the main Creek force. His victories paved the way for later treaties—some negotiated by Jackson himself—in which the Creek and other southern tribes (including those who had fought alongside Jackson) relinquished millions of acres to the United States.
Jackson's success against the Creek won him a commission as U.S. Major General in charge of defending the Gulf Coast. Jackson beat off a British strike at Mobile and drove the British from their post in Spanish (and ostensibly neutral) Pensacola, Florida. The main encounter came in January 1815 at New Orleans, where Jackson's motley force of regulars, militia, free blacks, and pirates repulsed an invading army of British veterans. In the main action, a frontal assault on Jackson's lines astride the Mississippi on January 8, the British lost two thousand men; the Americans, only a few dozen.
With its astounding casualty ratio and stirring (though apocryphal) image of American backwoods riflemen picking off British regulars, the Battle of New Orleans passed instantly into patriotic myth. Unbeknownst to both sides, the battle was fought two weeks after the Treaty of Ghent and did not affect the war's outcome. Still, for Americans it put a crown of glory on what had been a frustrating and humiliating military effort. Jackson himself became a hallowed hero, a living symbol of republican martial prowess.
Jackson remained in the postwar army as one of its two major generals. In 1818, in pursuit of a raiding band of Seminole, he led a force into Spanish Florida, captured Spanish bastions at St. Marks and Pensacola, and arrested and executed two British nationals. Jackson's unauthorized invasion sparked a diplomatic furor and a congressional investigation. But it served American ends by nudging Spain to cede Florida in an 1819 treaty.
In 1821 Jackson resigned his commission. He served briefly as Florida governor and in 1824 stood for the presidency. Jackson's military background furnished both his prime qualification for the presidency and his main handicap, for virulent controversy had accompanied battlefield successes throughout his army career. Jackson's stern sense of discipline, his obsession with personal honor, and his explosive temper had embroiled him in endless quarrels with both superiors and subordinates. As a commander he had sometimes defied civil authority. Outside the army he had fought duels and street brawls. To some Americans, he seemed a paragon of martial purity and forthrightness, a simple soldier called from retirement to rescue his country from devious and corrupt politicians. But to others he was a mere warrior chieftain, bloodthirsty and capricious, a tyrant and bully in the mold of Caesar or Napoleon.
Jackson led the vote in the multicandidate election of 1824, but lost to John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives. In 1828 Jackson defeated Adams. Jackson's two-term presidency, like his generalship, was bold and steeped in controversy. His conduct in office was hailed as decisive and denounced as high-handed, furnishing evidence for both sides in the enduring argument over the fitness of military characters for the presidency.