Andrew Jackson – 1767-1845

Born on the frontier between North and South Carolina, Jackson lost his mother and his brother in the American Revolution, went on to become a lawyer, made and lost a fortune, killed a man in an 1806 duel in defense of his wife’s honor, became a politician, was the principal victor against the Red Stick Creeks in the Creek War, and won a glorious victory at the Battle of New Orleans (1815) in the War of 1812. Defeated by John Quincy Adams in an 1824 run for the White House, he was elected four years later and introduced an unprecedented degree of egalitarian—if sometimes raucous— democracy. It was, however, Jackson, too, who promoted the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which uprooted many thousands of Indians living east of the Mississippi, exiling them to arid lands west of the river. The Cherokee called this long, often lethal march the “Trail of Tears.”