On the day in 1829 that he was inaugurated president, Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) invited his supporters to celebrate with him at the White House. The reception that followed—a raucous, drunken bash—caused a minor scandal and thousands of dollars of damage to the executive mansion.
Jackson’s rowdy inaugural party—the president was eventually forced to escape the White House by a secret exit to avoid the mob—symbolized the massive political earthquake that his election represented. He was the first president who was not an Easterner, who lacked a college education, and who was not born wealthy.
Born in Waxhaw, South Carolina, Jackson grew up in the shadow of the American Revolution. His family was killed during the war, and Jackson spent time in a prisoner-of-war camp, where he developed an intense loathing for the British.
After the war, Jackson moved to Tennessee, where he took up practice as a lawyer (in the eighteenth century, no law degree was required). He also fought in wars against Native Americans and returned to service in the War of 1812 to fight the British. Jackson’s exploits in the war—he led the Americans to victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815—brought him national attention. He ran for president in 1824 against John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) and won the recorded popular vote, but did not get a majority of Electoral College votes. His supporters were outraged when the House of Representatives declared Adams the winner; Jackson spent the next four years agitating for electoral reform and defeated Adams in 1828.
As president, Jackson focused attention on the needs of the western and southern farmers who had elected him. He pursued the “removal” of Indians from the South, a demand of whites, and rescinded the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, which he and his supporters viewed as a tool of the Eastern financial elites. Jackson’s tenure also coincided with an intensification of regional divisions over the issue of slavery. Though Jackson was himself a slaveholder and sympathetic to the South, he was an opponent of the states’ rights doctrine and sent federal troops to South Carolina to enforce an unpopular tax law.
Although enormously popular, Jackson retired after two terms to his plantation, the Hermitage, near Nashville. He remained a powerful behind-the-scenes figure in national politics, offering advice to his successors and helping to build his Democratic Party, until his death at age seventy-eight.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- When Jackson moved to Tennessee, it was part of the state of North Carolina. The region was split off and admitted to the Union as a separate state in 1796.
- Jackson acquired a 640-acre plantation in 1804. He initially called the farm Rural Retreat, but then changed its name to the Hermitage. It was recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
- One of Jackson’s officers in the War of 1812 was Davy Crockett (1786–1836), the famous frontiersman who would die at the Battle of the Alamo during the Texas Revolution.
