The House of Representatives was charged with deciding between the three leading candidates: Jackson, Adams and Secretary of the Treasury William H. In a five-way race, Jackson won the popular vote, but for the first time in history, no candidate received a majority of electoral votes. At first, he professed no interest in the office, but by 1824 his boosters had rallied enough support to get him a nomination as well as a seat in the U.S. Jackson’s popularity led to suggestions that he run for president. Though many argued for Jackson’s censure, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams defended the general’s actions, and in the end, they helped speed the American acquisition of Florida in 1821. The Spanish government vehemently protested, and Jackson’s actions sparked a heated debate in Washington. Mark’s and Pensacola, he claimed the surrounding land for the United States. After his forces captured Spanish posts at St. In 1817, acting as commander of the army’s southern district, Jackson ordered an invasion of Florida. The win, which occurred after the War of 1812 officially ended but before news of the Treaty of Ghent had reached Washington, elevated Jackson to the status of a national war hero. After that campaign ended in a decisive American victory in the Battle of Tohopeka (or Horseshoe Bend) in Alabama in mid-1814, Jackson led American forces to victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans (January 1815). forces in a five-month campaign against the Creek Indians, allies of the British. Andrew Jackson's Military CareerĪndrew Jackson, who served as a major general in the War of 1812, commanded U.S. He was later chosen to head the state militia, a position he held when war broke out with Great Britain in 1812. Jackson resigned a year later and was elected judge of Tennessee’s superior court. Though he declined to seek reelection and returned home in March 1797, he was almost immediately elected to the U.S. In 1796, Jackson joined a convention charged with drafting the new Tennessee state constitution and became the first man to be elected to the U.S. Jackson grew prosperous enough to build a mansion, the Hermitage, near Nashville, and to buy slaves. He later set up his own private practice and met and married Rachel (Donelson) Robards, the daughter of a local colonel. He soon moved west of the Appalachians to the region that would soon become the state of Tennessee and began working as a prosecuting attorney in the settlement that became Nashville. Jackson read law in his late teens and earned admission to the North Carolina bar in 1787. When Jackson refused to shine one officer's boots, the officer struck him across the face with a saber, leaving lasting scars. The British invaded the Carolinas in 1780-1781, and Jackson’s mother and two brothers died during the conflict, leaving him with a lifelong hostility toward Great Britain.ĭid you know? During their invasion of the western Carolinas in 1780-1781, British soldiers took the young Andrew Jackson prisoner. The son of Irish immigrants, Jackson received little formal schooling. The exact location of his birth is uncertain, and both states have claimed him as a native son Jackson himself maintained he was from South Carolina. For some, his legacy is tarnished by his role in the forced relocation of Native American tribes living east of the Mississippi.Īndrew Jackson was born on March 15, 1767, in the Waxhaws region on the border of North and South Carolina. A supporter of states’ rights and slavery’s extension into the new western territories, he opposed the Whig Party and Congress on polarizing issues such as the Bank of the United States (though Andrew Jackson’s face is on the twenty-dollar bill). As America’s political party system developed, Jackson became the leader of the new Democratic Party. His leadership in that conflict earned Jackson national fame as a military hero, and he would become America’s most influential–and polarizing–political figure during the 1820s and 1830s.Īfter narrowly losing to John Quincy Adams in the contentious 1824 presidential election, Jackson returned four years later to win redemption, soundly defeating Adams and becoming the nation’s seventh president (1829-1837). Born in poverty, Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) had become a wealthy Tennessee lawyer and rising young politician by 1812, when war broke out between the United States and Britain.
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