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.

Funny facts about us presidents