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Authors: Winston Groom
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aboard British prison ships in Charleston Harbor. At their parting, his mother gave young Andrew some advice: “Make friends by being honest and keep them by being steadfast. Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue for slander—settle them cases yourself!”
These words, like his scars, remained hard and dear to Andrew Jackson all his life, for it wasn’t long before he learned that his mother had died of cholera contracted aboard the prison ships. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Charleston, leaving him little to remember her by except those parting words and the pitiable bundle of her belongings that had arrived along with word of her death. Andrew Jackson, at the age of fifteen, was alone in the world—as he vividly remembered it, an orphan of the British war.
For the next three years, by all accounts, Jackson lived a dissolute life with no one to guide him or take care of him. He became a sort of glorified Huckleberry Finn, gambling, smoking, drinking, and, in his case, racing fine thoroughbred horses acquired with a small inheritance that his grandfather in Ireland had left him. Two years after the war ended, Jackson decided he wanted to be a lawyer and “read” law with a prominent attorney in Salisbury, North Carolina, where he lived above a tavern and, according to local residents, merrily dissipated himself, as the saying goes, with wine, women, and song.
Despite all this, in 1787 Jackson, now twenty, received his license to practice law. He had grown into a man just short of handsome, above six feet tall, lean and somewhat gaunt with deep, piercing, steel-blue eyes and a great shock of reddish-brown hair on his forehead. Perceptively, Jackson concluded that the Tennessee territory on the western side of the Alleghenies was a smart place to start a legal practice. Tennessee was still largely Indian land,* 17 settled by Americans just eighteen years earlier—and then by just one person, a man named William Bean. But raw new territories often provided spectacular opportunities for men learned in law, since there were always boundary disputes and property sales to be settled, wills and deeds to be drawn up, even the territorial laws themselves had to be written—all this in addition to the defense or prosecution of the abnormally large number of killers, thieves, and other miscreants who tended to inhabit such wildernesses.
Within a year Jackson was appointed to the post of territorial prosecutor and within another he was made United States attorney general for the territory. He settled in a dingy little hamlet consisting of about fifty primitive log houses on the Cumberland River at what is now the city of Nashville.
Tennessee was where Jackson fought his first duel, also within a year of his arrival,* 18 and within yet another he met and married his wife, twenty-two-year-old Rachel Robards. The circumstances of this last were to cause Jackson much trouble (and dueling) throughout his life, because both he and Rachel had relied on reports from Kentucky—where her first husband had gone after he left her—that a divorce had been granted there. When that news proved to be untrue, occasionally rude comments were circulated by the ambitious Jackson’s growing number of detractors to the effect that he was an adulterer and she a bigamist, and Jackson spent no small amount of time challenging any and all of these assertions.
As time went by Jackson progressed from prosecutor to judge, at the same time acquiring vast amounts of land in the area, upon which, using slave labor, he raised cotton, corn, and wheat and eventually built his splendid mansion, the Hermitage. He also built up one of the finest stables of racehorses in the South, winning (or losing, as the case sometimes was) large sums of money. Almost from the moment of his arrival in Tennessee Jackson’s career was meteoric. In 1796 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives; in 1797 he was elected to the U.S.
These words, like his scars, remained hard and dear to Andrew Jackson all his life, for it wasn’t long before he learned that his mother had died of cholera contracted aboard the prison ships. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Charleston, leaving him little to remember her by except those parting words and the pitiable bundle of her belongings that had arrived along with word of her death. Andrew Jackson, at the age of fifteen, was alone in the world—as he vividly remembered it, an orphan of the British war.
For the next three years, by all accounts, Jackson lived a dissolute life with no one to guide him or take care of him. He became a sort of glorified Huckleberry Finn, gambling, smoking, drinking, and, in his case, racing fine thoroughbred horses acquired with a small inheritance that his grandfather in Ireland had left him. Two years after the war ended, Jackson decided he wanted to be a lawyer and “read” law with a prominent attorney in Salisbury, North Carolina, where he lived above a tavern and, according to local residents, merrily dissipated himself, as the saying goes, with wine, women, and song.
Despite all this, in 1787 Jackson, now twenty, received his license to practice law. He had grown into a man just short of handsome, above six feet tall, lean and somewhat gaunt with deep, piercing, steel-blue eyes and a great shock of reddish-brown hair on his forehead. Perceptively, Jackson concluded that the Tennessee territory on the western side of the Alleghenies was a smart place to start a legal practice. Tennessee was still largely Indian land,* 17 settled by Americans just eighteen years earlier—and then by just one person, a man named William Bean. But raw new territories often provided spectacular opportunities for men learned in law, since there were always boundary disputes and property sales to be settled, wills and deeds to be drawn up, even the territorial laws themselves had to be written—all this in addition to the defense or prosecution of the abnormally large number of killers, thieves, and other miscreants who tended to inhabit such wildernesses.
Within a year Jackson was appointed to the post of territorial prosecutor and within another he was made United States attorney general for the territory. He settled in a dingy little hamlet consisting of about fifty primitive log houses on the Cumberland River at what is now the city of Nashville.
Tennessee was where Jackson fought his first duel, also within a year of his arrival,* 18 and within yet another he met and married his wife, twenty-two-year-old Rachel Robards. The circumstances of this last were to cause Jackson much trouble (and dueling) throughout his life, because both he and Rachel had relied on reports from Kentucky—where her first husband had gone after he left her—that a divorce had been granted there. When that news proved to be untrue, occasionally rude comments were circulated by the ambitious Jackson’s growing number of detractors to the effect that he was an adulterer and she a bigamist, and Jackson spent no small amount of time challenging any and all of these assertions.
As time went by Jackson progressed from prosecutor to judge, at the same time acquiring vast amounts of land in the area, upon which, using slave labor, he raised cotton, corn, and wheat and eventually built his splendid mansion, the Hermitage. He also built up one of the finest stables of racehorses in the South, winning (or losing, as the case sometimes was) large sums of money. Almost from the moment of his arrival in Tennessee Jackson’s career was meteoric. In 1796 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives; in 1797 he was elected to the U.S.
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