Andrew Jackson

This portrait of President Andrew Jackson was painted ca. 1835 by Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl, sometimes referred to as Ralph E. W. Earl.

## President of the United States

### Vice President

John C. Calhoun (1829–1832)Martin Van Buren (1833–1837)

## Personal Details

### Born

March 15, 1767Waxhaw Settlement between North Carolina and South Carolina, British America

### Died

June 8, 1845 (aged 78)Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.

### Spouse

Rachel Jackson (b. Donelson) (m. 1794 - died on 1828)

### Parent

Elizabeth Hutchinson JacksonUnnamed Father

## Millitary Service

### Rank

Major General (U.S. Army)Major General (Tennessee Militia)

### Battles/Wars

American Revolutionary War,Red Stick War,War of 1812,First Seminole War,

## ***DESCRIPTION***

**Andrew Jackson** (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) was an American lawyer, planter, general, and statesman who served as the seventh president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. Before being elected to the presidency, Jackson gained fame as a general in the United States Army and served in both houses of the U.S. Congress. Although often praised as an advocate for ordinary Americans and for his work in preserving the union of states, Jackson has also been criticized for his racial policies, particularly his treatment of Native Americans.

Jackson was born in the colonial Carolinas before the American Revolutionary War. He became a frontier lawyer and married Rachel Donelson Robards. He served briefly in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate, representing Tennessee. After resigning, he served as a justice on the Tennessee Supreme Court from 1798 until 1804. Jackson purchased a property later known as the Hermitage, becoming a wealthy planter who owned hundreds of African American slaves. In 1801, he was appointed colonel of the Tennessee militia and was elected its commander the following year. He led troops during the Red Stick War of 1813–1814, winning the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. The subsequent Treaty of Fort Jackson required the Creek to surrender vast tracts of present-day Alabama and Georgia. In the concurrent war against the British, Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 made him a national hero. Jackson later commanded U.S. forces in the First Seminole War, which led to the annexation of Florida from Spain. Jackson briefly served as Florida's first territorial governor before returning to the Senate. He ran for president in 1824. He won a plurality of the popular and electoral vote, but no candidate won an electoral majority. The House of Representatives elected ***P*** in a contingent election with Henry Clay casting the deciding vote. Jackson's supporters alleged that there was a "corrupt bargain" between Adams and Clay and began creating their own political organization that would eventually become the Democratic Party.

Jackson ran again in 1828, defeating Adams in a landslide. In 1830, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. This act, which has been described as ethnic cleansing, displaced tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands east of the Mississippi and resulted in thousands of deaths. Jackson faced a challenge to the federal union when South Carolina threat to nullify a high protective tariff set by the federal government. Jackson threatened the use of military force to enforce the tariff, but the crisis was defused when it was amended. In 1832, Jackson vetoed a bill by Congress to reauthorize the Second Bank of the United States, arguing that it was a corrupt institution that benefited the wealthy. After a lengthy struggle, Jackson and his allies dismantled the Bank. In 1835, Jackson became the only president to pay off the national debt. He also survived the first assassination attempt on a sitting president. In one of his final presidential acts, he recognized the Republic of Texas.

In his retirement, Jackson stayed active in politics. He supported the presidencies of Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk, as well as the annexation of Texas, which was accomplished shortly before his death. Jackson's legacy remains controversial. Opinions about him are frequently polarized. He has been seen as a defender of democracy and the constitution. He has also been called a demagogue who ignored the law when it suited him. His stand against abolition and his role in the destruction of Native American societies continue to be topics of debate.

On 18 June 1812, the United States Congress declared war on the United Kingdom. The causes of The War of 1812 were primarily about maritime issues, but for the white settlers on the southern frontier, the war provided an opportunity to crush Native American resistance to encroachment on their lands, to undermine British support of the Native American tribes, and to pry Florida from the Spanish.

Jackson immediately offered to raise volunteers for the war, but he was not called to duty until after the United States military was repeatedly defeated in the American Northwest. After these defeats, in January 1813 Jackson enlisted over 2000 volunteers, who were ordered to head to New Orleans to defend against a British attack. When his forces arrived at Natchez, they were ordered to halt by General Wilkinson, the commander at New Orleans and the man Jackson accused of treason after the Burr adventure. A little later, Jackson received a letter from the Secretary of War, John Armstrong, stating that his volunteers were not needed, and that they were to be disbanded and any supplies were to be handed over to Wilkinson. Jackson refused to disband his troops; instead, he led them on the difficult march back to Nashville, earning the nickname "Hickory" (later "Old Hickory") for his toughness.

After returning to Nashville, Jackson and one of his colonels, John Coffee, got into a street brawl over honor with the brothers Jesse and Thomas Hart Benton. Nobody was killed, but Jackson received a gunshot in the shoulder that nearly killed him.

Jackson had not fully recovered from his wounds when Governor Blount called out the militia in September 1813. A faction of Muscogee (Creek) known as the "Red Sticks" had broken away from the Muscogee Creek Confederacy, which wanted to maintain peace with the United States. The Red Sticks, led by William Weatherford (also called Red Eagle) and Peter McQueen, had allied with Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief who was fighting with the British against the United States. Earlier in the summer, a party of Red Sticks had gone to Pensacola to pick up supplies from the Spanish. During their return, they defeated an ambush at Burnt Corn Creek by American militia. On 30 August, the Red Sticks avenged the ambush by attacking Fort Mims, a stockade inhabited by both white Americans and their Creek allies. They killed about 250 militia men and civilians. The attack became known as the Fort Mims massacre and started the Red Stick War.

## ***PRESIDENCY (1829-1837)***

### Reforms and rotation in office

Jackson's believed that Adam's administration was corrupt and one of first acts as president was to initiate investigations into all executive departments. The investigations revealed that $280,000 (equivalent to (equivalent to $7,125,100 in 2021) today) was stolen from the Treasury, and the reduction in costs to the Department of the Navy saved it $1 million (equivalent to $25,446,880 in 2021). One of the people caught in his investigation was the Treasury Auditor Tobias Watkins, a personal friend of Adams' who was found guilty of embezzlement. In the first year of his term Jackson asked Congress to tighten laws on embezzlement, revise laws to reduce tax evasion, and pushed for an improved government accounting system.

Jackson implemented a principle he called "rotation in office" by enforcing the Tenure of Office Act, signed by President Monroe in 1820, that limited appointed office tenure and authorized the president to remove and appoint political party associates. The previous custom had been for the president to leave the existing appointees in office, replacing them through attrition. During his first year in office, Jackson removed hundreds of federal officials, which was about 10% of all Federal employees, and replaced them with loyal Democrats. He argued that rotation in office was a democratic reform that reduced bureaucracy and corruption by preventing hereditary officeholding and made officeholders responsible to the popular will, but it functioned as political patronage, which came to be known as the spoils system.

### Petticoat affair

Jackson spent much of his time during his first two and a half years in office dealing with what came to be known as the "Petticoat Affair" or "Eaton Affair". The affair focused on Secretary of War Eaton's wife, Margaret. She had a reputation for being promiscuous, and like Rachel Jackson, she was accused of adultery. She and Eaton had been close before her first husband John Timberlake died, and they married nine months after his death. With the exception of Barry's wife Catherine, the cabinet members' wives followed the lead of Vice-president Calhoun's wife Floride and refused to socialize with the Eatons. Though Jackson defended Margaret, her presence split the cabinet, which had been so ineffective that he rarely called it into session, and the ongoing disagreement led to its dissolution.
In the spring of 1831, Jackson demanded the resignations of all the cabinet members except Barry, who would resign in 1835 when a Congressional investigation revealed his mismanagement of the Post Office. Jackson tried to compensate Van Buren by appointing him the Minister to Great Britain, but Calhoun blocked the nomination with a tie-breaking vote against it. Van Buren—along with Amos Kendall, who helped organize what would become the Democratic Party, and Francis Preston Blair, the editor of *The Globe* newspaper that served as Jackson's house organ,—would become regular participants in Jackson's Kitchen Cabinet, an unofficial, varying group of advisors that Jackson turned to for decision making even after he had formed a new official cabinet.

### Indian Removal Act

Further information: Indian removal

Jackson's presidency marked the beginning of a national policy of Native American removal. Before Jackson took office, the relationship between the southern states and the Native American tribes who lived within their boundaries was strained. The states felt that they had full jurisdiction over their territories; the native tribes saw themselves as autonomous nations that had a right to the land they lived on. Significant portions of the five major tribes in the south—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole— began to adopt white culture, including education, agricultural techniques, a road system, and rudimentary manufacturing. In the case of the tensions between the state of Georgia and the Cherokee, Adams had tried to address the issue encouraging Cherokee emigration west of the Mississippi through financial incentives, but most refused.

In the first days of Jackson's presidency, some of the southern states had passed legislation extending state jurisdiction to Native American lands. Jackson supported the states' right to do so. His position was later made clear in the 1832 Supreme Court test case of this legislation, *Worcester v. Georgia*. Georgia had arrested a group of missionaries for entering Cherokee territory without a permit; the Cherokee declared these arrests illegal. The court under Chief Justice John Marshall decided in favor of the Cherokee: imposition of Georgia law on the Cherokee was unconstitutional. Horace Greeley alleges that when Jackson heard the ruling, he said, "Well, John Marshall has made his decision, but now let him enforce it." Although the quote may be apocryphal, Jackson made it clear he would not use the federal government to enforce the ruling.

Jackson used the power of the federal government to enforce the separation of the Native American tribes and whites. In May 1830, Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act through Congress. It gave the president the right to negotiate treaties to buy tribal lands in the eastern part of the United States in exchange for lands set aside for Native Americans west of the Mississippi, as well as broad discretion on how to use the federal funds allocated to the negotiations. The law was supposed to be a voluntary relocation program, but it was not implemented as one. Jackson's administration often achieved agreement to relocate through bribes, fraud and intimidation, and the leaders who signed the treaties often did not represent the entire tribe. The relocations could be a source of misery too: the Choctaw relocation was rife with corruption, theft and mismanagement that brought great suffering to that people.

In 1830, Jackson personally negotiated with the Chickasaw, who quickly agreed to move. In the same year, Choctaw leaders signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek; the majority did not want the treaty but complied with its terms. In 1832, Seminole leaders signed the Treaty of Payne's Landing, which stipulated that the Seminole would move west and become part of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy if they found the new land suitable. Most Seminole refused to move, leading to a second Seminole War in 1835 that lasted six years. Members of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy ceded their land to the state of Alabama in the Third Treaty of Washington of 1832. Their private ownership of the land was to be protected, but the federal government did not enforce this. The government did encourage voluntary removal until the Creek War of 1836, after which almost all Creek were removed to Oklahoma territory. In 1836, Cherokee leaders ceded their land to the government by the Treaty of New Echota. Their removal, known as the Trail of Tears, was enforced by Jackson's successor, Van Buren.

Jackson also applied the removal policy in the Northwest. He was not successful in removing the Iroquois Confederation in New York, but when some members of the Meskwaki (Fox) and the Sauk triggered the Black Hawk War by trying to cross back to the east side of the Mississippi, the peace treaties ratified after their defeat reduced their lands further.

During his administration, he made about 70 treaties with American Indian tribes. He had removed almost all the Native Americans east of the Mississippi and south of Lake Michigan, about 70,000 people, from the United States; though it was done at the cost of thousands of Native American lives lost because of the unsanitary conditions and epidemics arising from their dislocation, as well as their resistance to expulsion. Jackson's implementation of the Indian Removal Act contributed to his popularity with his constituency. He added over 170,000 square miles of land to the public domain, which primarily benefited the United States' agricultural interests. The act also benefited small farmers, as Jackson allowed them to purchase moderate plots at low prices and offered squatters on land formerly belonging to Native Americans the option to purchase it before it was offered for sale to others.

### Nullification crisis

Jackson had to confront another challenge that had been building up since the beginning of his first term. The Tariff of 1828, which had been passed in the last year of Adams' administration, set a protective tariff at a very high rate to prevent the manufactoring industries in the Northern states from having to compete with lower-priced imports from Britain. The tariff reduced the income of southern cotton planters: it propped up consumer prices, but not the price of cotton which had severely declined in the previous decade. Immediately after the tariff's passage, the *South Carolina Exposition and Protest* was sent to the US Senate. This document, which had been anonymously written by John C. Calhoun, asserted that the constitution was a compact of individual states and when the federal government went beyond its delegated duties, such as enacting a protective tariff, a state had a right to declare this action unconstitutional and make the act null and void with the borders of that state.

Jackson suspected Calhoun of writing the *Exposition and Protest*, and opposed his interpretation. Jackson argued that Congress as a whole had full authority to enact tariffs and that a dissenting state was denying the will of the majority. He also needed the tariff, which generated 90% of the federal revenue, to achieve another of his presidential goals, eliminating the national debt. The issue developed into a personal rivalry between the two men. For example, during a celebration of Thomas Jefferson's birthday on April 13, 1830, the attendees gave after-dinner toasts. Jackson toasted: "Our federal Union: It must be preserved!" – a clear challenge to nullification. Calhoun whose toast immediately followed, rebutted: "The Union: Next to our Liberty, the most dear!"

As a compromise, Jackson supported the Tariff of 1832, which reduced the duties from the Tariff of 1828 by almost half. The bill was signed on July 9, but failed to satisfy extremists on either side. On November 24, South Carolina had passed the Ordinance of Nullification, declaring both tariffs null and void and threatening to secede from the United States if the federal government tried to use force to collect the duties. In response, Jackson sent warships to Charleston harbor, and threatened to hang any man who worked to support nullification or secession.

On December 10, Jackson issued a proclamation against the "nullifiers", stating that he considered "the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed". South Carolina, the president declared, stood on "the brink of insurrection and treason", and he appealed to the people of the state to reassert their allegiance to that Union. Jackson also denied the right of secession: "The Constitution ... forms a government not a league ... To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States are not a nation." On December 28, Calhoun, who had been elected to the U. S. Senate, resigned as vice president.

Jackson asked Congress to pass a "Force Bill" authorizing the military to enforce the tariff. It was attacked by Calhoun as despotism. Meanwhile, Calhoun and Clay began to work on a new compromise tariff. Jackson saw it as an effective way to end the confrontation, but insisted on the passage of the Force Bill before he signed. On March 2, he signed into law the Force Bill and the Tariff of 1833, both of which passed on March 1, 1833. The South Carolina Convention then met and rescinded its nullification ordinance, but nullified the Force Bill in a final act of defiance. Two months later, Jackson reflected on South Carolina's nullification: "the tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question".

### Panic of 1837

Despite the economic boom following Jackson's victory in the Bank War, land speculation in the west caused the Panic of 1837. Jackson's transfer of federal monies to state banks in 1833 caused western banks to relax their lending standards; the Indian Removal Act made large amounts of former Native American lands available for purchase and speculation. Two of Jackson's acts in 1836 contributed to the Panic of 1837. One was the Specie Circular, which mandated western lands only be purchased by money backed by specie. The act was intended to stabilize the economy by reducing speculation on credit, but it caused a drain of gold and silver from the Eastern banks to the Western banks to address the needs of financing land transactions. The other was the Deposit and Distribution Act, which transferred federal monies from eastern to western state banks. Together, they left Eastern banks unable to pay specie to the British when they recalled their loans to address their economic problems in international trade. The panic drove the U.S. economy into a depression that lasted until 1841.

## ***POST-PRESIDENCY (1837-1845)***

In 1837, Jackson retired to the Hermitage and immediately began putting its affairs in order, as it had been poorly managed in his absence. Though Jackson was in ill health and had lost some of his popularity because he was blamed for the Panic of 1837, he remained influential in national and state politics.

Jackson supported an Independent Treasury system as a solution to the panic, which would hold the money balances of the government in the form of gold or silver and would be restricted from printing paper money to prevent further inflation. This system was implemented in 1846. The depression still continued, and Van Buren became unpopular. The Whig Party nominated war hero William Henry Harrison and former Democrat John Tyler for the 1840 presidential election. They used a campaign style similar to that of the Democrats: Van Buren was depicted as an uncaring aristocrat, while Harrison's war record was glorified, and he was portrayed as a man of the people. Jackson campaigned loyally for Van Buren in Tennessee. He favored James K. Polk as vice presidential candidate, but no candidate for that office was chosen.

To Jackson's dismay, Harrison won the 1840 election with the Whigs capturing majorities in both houses of Congress. Harrison died only a month into his term, and was replaced by Tyler. Jackson was encouraged because Tyler was not bound to party loyalties. Tyler angered the Whigs in 1841 when he vetoed two Whig-sponsored bills to establish a new national bank. Jackson and other Democrats praised Tyler, but Tyler's entire cabinet, except Daniel Webster, resigned.

Jackson lobbied for the annexation of Texas, insisting that it belonged to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. He thought that annexation would cause national division over slavery, but feared the British could use Texas as a base to threaten the United States. Jackson wrote several letters to Texas president Sam Houston, urging him to wait for the Senate to approve annexation and explaining how much Texas would benefit as a part of the United States. Tyler signed a treaty of annexation in April 1844, but it became associated with the expansion of slavery and was not ratified. Henry Clay, the Whig nominee for the 1844 presidential election, and Van Buren, Jackson's preferred candidate for the Democratic Party, both opposed annexation. Disappointed by Van Buren, Jackson convinced Polk, who was to be Van Buren's running mate, to run as the Democratic Party's presidential nominee instead. Polk defeated Van Buren for the nomination, and Jackson convinced Taylor not to run as an independent by bringing him back into the Democratic Party. Polk won the election, the senate passed a bill to annex Texas, and it was signed on March 1, 1845.

Jackson died of dropsy and heart failure at 78 years of age on June 8, 1845. He was surrounded by family and friends at his deathbed, and his last words were, "Oh, do not cry. Be good children and we will all meet in Heaven." He was buried in the same tomb as his wife Rachel.