Andrew Jackson

The Revolution took Jackson's entire family. His father died three weeks before he was born. His brother Hugh died of heat exhaustion after a battle in 1779. In April 1781 Andrew and his brother Robert were captured in the Waxhaws, and when a British officer ordered the boy to clean his boots he refused and took a sword across the hand and the scalp. Both brothers caught smallpox in the prison camp at Camden, and Robert died days after their mother walked them home. She then went to nurse American prisoners on the ships at Charleston, caught cholera, and died there. Jackson was 14 and alone. He tried saddlery, taught school, read law in Salisbury, and rode west.

He was a frontier prosecutor at 21, then a judge, a congressman, a senator and a major general, all before he was ever a candidate. Two terms beginning in 1829 killed the national bank, faced down South Carolina over nullification, and produced the removal law that drove the southeastern nations west at a cost that has only become clearer. All of that lives on BriefHistory, argument and consequence together. The question left over here is narrower — what the man was made of, and what it kept costing him.

In 1813 Jackson's troops destroyed a Creek town called Tallushatchee, and an orphaned infant found among the dead was sent back to Tennessee at his direction. They named him Lyncoya and raised him at the Hermitage alongside the nephew Jackson had adopted. He apprenticed the boy to a saddler, his own first trade. Lyncoya died of tuberculosis on June 1, 1828, at about 16. Six months after that Rachel died of a heart attack, days after a campaign that had spent a year calling her an adulteress for having married Jackson before her first marriage was legally dissolved. He buried her in the white gown she had bought for the inaugural ball and told the mourners that God might forgive her murderers but he never could. He did not remarry.

He was buried beside her in the Hermitage garden, in a tomb he had built 13 years before he needed it. He freed no one — the people he owned passed to his adopted son with the debts. For a century the Democratic Party filled banquet halls with Jefferson-Jackson dinners and called itself his creation, until Iowa struck both names from its own in August 2015 and two dozen state parties followed. Scholars moved the same way, and rankings that once put him near the top have slid since the 1970s. A rival tradition claims him as the first outsider president and hangs his portrait in the Oval Office. He is argued over harder now than in 1845.

Andrew Jackson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Treaty of Fort Jackson law
  Took 23 million acres from the Creek, including from Creek who had fought beside him 1814
• Indian Removal Act law
  He pushed it through Congress and signed it on May 28 1830
• Bank Veto Message speech
  Written for voters rather than for Congress, and reprinted everywhere 1832
• Nullification Proclamation speech
  Told South Carolina that disunion by armed force was treason 1832
• The Hermitage building
  A 1,000-acre cotton plantation worked by roughly 150 enslaved people 1836

• March 15, 1767 aged 0 Born in the Waxhaws three weeks after his father's death South Carolina and North Carolina have both claimed the site ever since.
• 1781 aged ~14 Captured at 14 and slashed for refusing to clean a British officer's boots He carried the scars on his hand and scalp for life.
• 1781 aged ~14 His mother dies of cholera nursing prisoners at Charleston Both brothers were already dead. He was an orphan at 14.
• 1787 aged ~20 Admitted to the North Carolina bar and sent west to prosecute
• 1794 aged ~27 Marries Rachel Donelson legally, five years after they began living as husband and wife The irregularity became a campaign weapon 34 years later.
• 1813 aged ~46 Shot in the shoulder in a Nashville tavern brawl with the Benton brothers The bullet stayed in his arm for 19 years.
• June 1, 1828 aged 61 Lyncoya, the Creek child he raised at the Hermitage, dies of tuberculosis
• December 22, 1828 aged 61 Rachel dies of a heart attack ten weeks before the inauguration She was buried in the gown bought for the inaugural ball.
• June 8, 1845 aged 78 Dies at the Hermitage of heart failure and dropsy

• John C. Calhoun 1782–1850
  Vice president and theorist of slavery and states’ rights whose doctrines intensified sectional conflict. rival
• Roger B. Taney 1777–1864
  Chief justice whose Court shaped federalism but is principally remembered for the disastrous Dred Scott decision. appointed
• Sam Houston 1793–1863
  Commander at San Jacinto who became president of the Republic of Texas and later its governor and senator. mentor
• Davy Crockett 1786–1836
  Frontiersman, soldier, and politician who became a folk hero of the American frontier. opposed by