Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee lawyer, planter and militia general, became a national hero by defeating the British at New Orleans in 1815 and was the country's seventh president, holding office for two terms from 1829. He gave his name to a new style of mass party politics and fought the national bank and South Carolina's attempt to nullify federal law. He was also a slaveholder who held hundreds of people in bondage, and as president he carried out the forced removal of tens of thousands of Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi.

Jackson was born on 15 March 1767 in the Waxhaws, on the border of North and South Carolina; his exact birthplace is uncertain. His father had died weeks earlier. During the American Revolution he and his brother Robert served as militia couriers and were captured in 1781; a British officer slashed him with a sword when he refused to clean his boots. Both caught smallpox in a prison camp; Robert died days after their release, and their mother died soon after, leaving Andrew an orphan at fourteen.

Jackson qualified as a lawyer in 1787 and moved to Nashville, where he prospered through law, land speculation and trade, including the trafficking of enslaved people. He married Rachel Donelson, served briefly in both houses of Congress for the new state of Tennessee and sat as a judge from 1798 to 1804. At the Hermitage, his cotton plantation near Nashville, the number of people he enslaved rose from nine in 1804 to more than 150 by his death, about 300 over his lifetime. He ordered harsh punishments for those who ran away. He killed Charles Dickinson in a duel in 1806.

In the War of 1812, Jackson led Tennessee militia against the Red Stick Creeks, who were allied with Tecumseh. At Horseshoe Bend in 1814 his army overwhelmed a fortified Red Stick town, killing almost all its warriors. The Treaty of Fort Jackson that he then imposed forced all Creeks, including those who had fought on his side, to cede some 23 million acres. On 8 January 1815 he crushed a British assault on New Orleans, which cost the British over 2,000 casualties against 71 American. In 1818 he invaded Spanish Florida in the First Seminole War, an action that helped push Spain to cede Florida.

Jackson won the most popular and electoral votes in the 1824 presidential election, but without a majority, the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams. Claiming a "corrupt bargain", Jackson's supporters built the coalition that became the Democratic Party, and he won decisively in 1828. Rachel died shortly before his inauguration, after attacks on their marriage during the campaign.

Jackson replaced many federal officials with loyal supporters, a practice later called the spoils system. In 1830 he signed the Indian Removal Act. Through treaties often obtained by bribery, fraud and intimidation, his administration removed about 70,000 Native Americans from east of the Mississippi, and thousands died; the Cherokee removal known as the Trail of Tears was carried out under his successor. Many historians describe the policy as ethnic cleansing. When South Carolina declared federal tariffs void in 1832, Jackson denounced nullification and secession and won a Force Bill alongside a compromise tariff. He vetoed the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States and withdrew federal deposits from it, and in January 1835 the national debt was paid off. In 1835 he denounced abolitionists and asked Congress to ban the mailing of anti-slavery literature to the South.

Jackson retired to the Hermitage in 1837, as land speculation brought on a financial panic. He backed the annexation of Texas and the election of James K. Polk, and died on 8 June 1845. He has been seen both as a champion of ordinary citizens and as an autocrat who ignored the law; his standing in historians' rankings has fallen in recent decades, and in 2016 the government announced plans to replace his portrait on the twenty-dollar bill with one of Harriet Tubman.

Our 1815 map shows the United States just after his victory at New Orleans, with Florida still Spanish.