In April 1781, a British dragoon ordered a thirteen-year-old prisoner to clean his boots. The boy refused. The officer drew his saber and slashed at the boy's head — a scar that healed but never faded. The boy was Andrew Jackson. He carried that wound for sixty-four years, and with it a political identity forged by a Revolution that had killed his mother, both brothers, and very nearly himself.
In this Andrew Jackson biography, historian Margaret Aldrich Tate follows Old Hickory — from the Scots-Irish Waxhaws, through the duels, the Creek War, the Battle of New Orleans, and the brutal 1828 election that killed Rachel Donelson Jackson, to the presidency that transformed American politics. Here are Jackson's battles against Nicholas Biddle's Bank of the United States, John C. Calhoun's nullification challenge, the Cherokee Nation's resistance in Worcester v. Georgia, and the Trail of Tears that resulted when Jackson refused to enforce the Supreme Court's ruling. This is the complete story of the man who built the modern Democratic Party, expanded executive power beyond any predecessor, and left contradictions the republic has not yet resolved.
Inside this Andrew Jackson history:
- The Charles Dickinson duel — Jackson absorbed Dickinson's ball in the chest, stood his ground, and killed his opponent in 1806; the lead lodged near his heart for nineteen years before a surgeon removed it in 1832 (Chapter 6)
- The Battle of New Orleans — January 8, 1815: British General Pakenham's army advancing into Jackson's prepared lines, suffering 2,000 casualties while Jackson lost thirteen men; the victory that made a national hero (Chapter 11)
- The Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears — the act passed 102-97, Senator Frelinghuysen argued against it for three days, the Cherokee pursued legal resistance, and Jackson refused to enforce the Supreme Court's ruling; approximately 4,000 Cherokee died on the winter march of 1838-1839 (Chapter 19)
- The Bank War — Jackson's 1832 veto message addressed to the nation, not Congress: a democratic manifesto against "artificial distinctions" that made "the rich richer and the potent more powerful" — and Nicholas Biddle's miscalculation that destroyed the Bank entirely (Chapter 21)
- The Nullification Crisis — Jackson's Proclamation asserting that "the Constitution forms a government, not a league" and that secession was treason: the constitutional argument Lincoln deployed thirty years later at far higher cost (Chapter 20)
Jackson expanded the franchise for white men while presiding over the dispossession of Native nations. He claimed to speak for the common people while owning more than a hundred enslaved Africans at the Hermitage. This Andrew Jackson biography names the suffering his actions caused and the consequences they produced — for the republic he remade and for the people it excluded.
For readers of H.W. Brands's ANDREW JACKSON: HIS LIFE AND TIMES and Jon Meacham's AMERICAN LION.