Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845)
was the seventh President
of the United States (1829–1837). He was born into a recently immigrated Scots-Irish farming family of relatively modest
means, near the end of the colonial era. He was born somewhere near the
then-unmarked border between North and South Carolina. During the American
Revolutionary War Jackson, whose family supported the revolutionary cause, acted as a
courier. He was captured, at age 13, and mistreated by his British captors. He
later became a lawyer, and in 1796 he was in Nashville and helped found the
state of Tennessee. He was elected to the U.S.
House of Representatives, and then to the U. S. Senate. In 1801, Jackson was appointed colonel in the
Tennessee militia, which became his political as well as military base. Jackson
owned hundreds of slaves who worked on the Hermitage
plantation which he acquired in 1804. Jackson killed a man in a duel in 1806, over
a matter of honor regarding his wife Rachel. Jackson gained national fame through his role
in the War of 1812, where he won decisive victories over the
Indians and then over the main British invasion army at the Battle
of New Orleans.
Jackson's army was sent to Florida where, without orders, he deposed the small
Spanish garrison. This led directly to the treaty which
formally transferred Florida from Spain to the United States.
Nominated
for president in 1824, Jackson narrowly lost to John
Quincy Adams. Jackson's supporters then founded what became the Democratic Party. Nominated
again in 1828, Jackson crusaded against Adams and the "corrupt
bargain" between Adams and Henry Clay he said cost him the 1824 election.
Building on his base in the West and new support from Virginia and New York, he
won by a landslide. The Adams campaigners called him and his wife Rachel
Jackson "bigamists"; she died just after the election and he called
the slanderers "murderers," swearing never to forgive them. His struggles
with Congress were personified in his personal rivalry with Henry
Clay, whom Jackson deeply disliked, and who led the opposition (the
emerging Whig Party). As president, he
faced a threat of secession from South Carolina over the
"Tariff of Abominations" which Congress had
enacted under Adams. In contrast to several of his immediate successors, he
denied the right of a state to secede from the union, or to nullify federal
law. TheNullification Crisis was
defused when the tariff was amended and Jackson threatened the use
of military force if South Carolina (or any other state) attempted to secede.
Congress
attempted to reauthorize the Second Bank of the United
States several years before the expiration of its charter, which he opposed.
He vetoed the renewal of its charter in 1832, and dismantled it by the time its
charter expired in 1836. Jackson's presidency marked the beginning of the
ascendancy of the "spoils system" in American politics. Also, he
supported, signed, and enforced the Indian Removal Act, which relocated a number of
native tribes toIndian Territory (now Oklahoma).
He faced and defeated Henry Clay in the 1832 Presidential Election,
and opposed Clay generally. Jackson supported his vice president Martin
Van Buren, who was elected president in 1836. He worked to bolster
the Democratic Party and helped his friend James
K. Polk win the 1844 presidential election.
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