A Nation Rising by Kenneth C. Davis

greatest American general since George Washington. But that is not where the legend of Jackson began. It really started when he pursued the Indians who had attacked Fort Mims, promising as he set out, “Long shall the Creeks remember Fort Mims in bitterness and in tears.”
    It was not an empty threat.
    The man who would track down William Weatherford was not given to words that were not backed by action. Since childhood, he had seen the violence of the world and often responded in kind. “Commanding, shrewd, intuitive, yet not especially articulate, alternately bad-tempered and well-mannered, Jackson embodied the nation’s birth and youth,” wrote Jon Meacham in American Lion . “Jackson was fond of well-cut clothes, racehorses, dueling, newspapers, gambling, whiskey, coffee, a pipe, a pretty woman, children and good company…. Depending on the moment, he could succumb to the impulses of a warlike temperament or draw on his reserves of unaffected warmth.” 6
    Born in 1767, in South Carolina, Andrew Jackson had survived a brutally harsh and violent early life, coming of age in the unforgiving world of the colonial frontier and witnessing some of the most savage warfare of the American Revolution. His Scots-Irish father, also Andrew, arrived in America in 1765 with his wife Elizabeth and their two sons: Hugh, two years old when they arrived; and Robert, aged six months. While working the fields on a hardscrabble farm, the father dropped dead in February 1767, leaving behind a pregnant wife and the two young boys. Elizabeth Jackson moved in with relatives, and Andrew was born a month later, on March 15, 1767. He spent his early years in the home of relatives, the Crawfords.
    Obviously bright, but with a boyhood reputation as a bit of a hell-raiser, Andrew Jackson balked at school. His mother’s hope that he might go into the ministry was far from realistic. As Jackson’s biographer Robert Remini once noted, “For one thing he swore a blue streak, fine, lovely, bloodcurdling oaths that could frighten people half to death. Also, he was wild and reckless…. There was an air of uneasy restlessness about him, an exuberance that found outlets in outrageous tricks and games. Every now and then, he showed an ugly side that labeled him a bully. Although not acoward, he would purposely terrorize people if angered or if it suited his needs.” 7
    When the Revolution came to South Carolina, Andrew Jackson saw war and its depredations at their worst. In 1779, his brother Hugh, then sixteen years old, was killed in battle at Stono Ferry. The following year, British forces under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton—a notorious officer known as “Bloody Ban” or “the Butcher”—descended on Charleston, South Carolina. They laid waste to the town, by many accounts inflicting a vicious massacre that left more than 100 Americans dead, many after they had tried to surrender.
    Then, in April 1781, Andrew and his brother Robert were taken prisoner. There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—that a British officer ordered the Jackson boys to clean his boots. Both defiantly refused, supposedly asserting that as prisoners of war they weren’t required to do this. Jackson later claimed that the officer hit him and Robert with a sword for their defiance. They were then taken to a British prison camp in Camden, where their mother eventually won their release by pleading with the British. But on the trip home, Robert died; the head wound he had received from the officer’s blow had become infected.
    Not long after that, Jackson’s mother went off to nurse some American prisoners who were being held on a British ship in Charleston harbor. Andrew Jackson never saw her again. Elizabeth Jackson fell ill with cholera and died in 1781, the year that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown and the war came to an end. At age fourteen, Andrew Jackson was orphaned. He