Taking them by surprise was a trademark trait of Andrew Jackson, not merely as the military leader and hero of the 1959 song who fought the British in 1814 at the Battle of New Orleans, but also as the American president who came to the office with none of the patrician gloss of his predecessors. Old Hickory, as he was known because of his renowned toughness, was a president of the masses, not the elite. Born three weeks after his father unexpectedly died, Jackson already had a year of military service in by the age of 14. That was the year, 1781, when he became an orphan following the death of his mother, who had been nursing her sons and other prisoners of war during a cholera outbreak in the waning days of the American Revolution. When a British officer ordered the teenage soldier to polish his boots, Jackson refused. A more temperate youth might have chosen another path other than defiance. But Jackson had the legendary temper of the redhead, and when the officer used his sword on the boy, Jackson was left with physical scars and a hatred of the British.
He did not have an easy youth. His frontier upbringing denied him a formal education, but as he said: "it is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word." Despite his lack of education, he managed to study enough law to make a living at it, and became active in Tennessee politics and in military service.
By 1812, the United States again faced the British in battle, but this time Jackson defeated the Redcoats at the Battle of New Orleans. After the war, when Seminole war parties in Florida crossed the border into America, Jackson crossed into the Spanish territory and captured Pensacola, infuriating the Spanish who regarded his attack as an invasion by another country. But in the end, Florida became an American possession and Jackson was named military governor.
Jackson's reputation as a leader made him a presidential candidate in 1824, but he lost the election. The next election, which he won, cost him even more. During the 1828 campaign, he and his adored wife Rachel Donelson Jackson were the targets of gossip because Rachel had not been divorced from her first husband when she married her second. Once becoming aware that her first husband had neglected to file the papers, Jackson rectified the mistake and the couple remarried, but the damage to her reputation was done.
The presidential campaign was not the first time that the couple faced the accusation. Years earlier, in 1803, the governor of Tennessee had referred to it. Jackson responded to the insult to his wife by beating Rachel’s accuser with a walking stick and the next day, challenging him to a duel. But the scandal of the campaign exceeded Rachel’s stamina, as one newspaper editorial inquired of its readers, “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?"
Rachel died on December 22, 1828 and Jackson assumed the presidency without his First Lady.
Jackson’s two terms in office were as tumultuous as his earlier life had been because he was a man of action, not thought. As he put it,
The seventh president of the United States had a reputation for an unbridled temper that matched his courage, a sense of honor so fierce that he killed men in duels to defend it, and a reputation for sentimentalism and violence. After six presidents who regarded personal decorum as a requisite for the office, Andrew Jackson transformed the American political landscape.
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