Born of Scotch Irish immigrants in a remote section of the Carolinas, Andrew Jackson was a departure from the wealthy Virginia planters that preceded him as president.  His father died three weeks before Andrew’s birth, and he and his two brothers were raised by their mother in near poverty with little schooling.  His oldest brother, Hugh, died of heat stroke during a Revolutionary War battle in Charleston, South Carolina and Andrew, at age 13, joined the local militia as a patriot courier.  At age 15 Jackson and his other brother, Robert, were captured by the British; an officer slashed Andrew’s face with his sword, leaving lasting scars (visible in Sully’s portrait above), when he refused to polish his boots.  Both boys contracted small pox in prison, and Robert died.  Soon after, his mother died of cholera, leaving Andrew orphaned.

He rose from his painful childhood to become a prominent Tennessee lawyer with a hot temper and penchants for gambling on horse races, brawling in Nashville streets and dueling (Nashville attorney Charles Dickinson charged Jackson’s wife, Rachel, with bigamy because she unknowingly married Andrew before her previous divorce was finalized.  When she died from a heart attack shortly before Jackson’s inauguration, Andrew killed Dickinson in a duel.  Jackson carried two bullets in his body sustained in duels, he executed militiamen under his command and threatened to cut the ears off of senators who affronted him). 

Jackson climbed the military ranks to an appointment as Major General of the Tennessee Militia, leading troops in wars against Native American tribes and, in the War of 1812, against the British. Mad Dog Jackson, as he was nicknamed during his military days, decimated the Creek Indians (who called him sharp knife) at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and obtained land in what now is Georgia and Alabama for white settlement.  After the War of 1812 was over, at least in theory, the British tried to strengthen their position in the Ghent treaty negotiations by taking control of the Louisiana Territory.  Jackson led his soldiers to victory against the British in the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, despite that fact that his troops were outnumbered two to one.

In 1824, Jackson was nominated for president as a military hero and a voice for the common man.  He was defeated by John Quincy Adams, but ran against Adams again four years later and reversed the outcome.  During the 1828 campaign, Jackson acquired another nickname, jackass; he was sufficiently enamored of the moniker that he adopted the donkey as a symbol of his campaign.  It later became the mascot of the new Democratic Party. 

Thousands of common folk poured into Washington for Jackson’s presidential inauguration and, after his swearing in at the Capitol, Jackson rode his horse to the White House with the crowd close behind. By tradition, the executive mansion was open to the public on inauguration day and small receptions were held, but in 1829, the White House was overrun. People flooded the mansion, knocking over furniture, spilling beverages, and breaking china. A Washington socialite, Margaret Smith, later wrote, “Ladies fainted, men were seen with bloody noses and such a scene of confusion took place as is impossible to describe,— those who got in could not get out by the door again, but had to scramble out of windows.” Jackson himself was finally forced to climb out a window and escape to a local hotel.

During his administration, he extended the vote to all white male citizens, not just white landowners.  He also passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which forced Native Americans from their tribal lands, resulting in what amounted to genocide.  The Cherokee, one of the few tribes that attempted assimilation with the encroaching whites, sued against the forcible removal, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court where Justice Marshall led the court to rule in their favor. Jackson’s response was “Let them enforce it.”  In what today is known as the Trail of Tears, members of the Cherokee Nation were rounded up and transplanted westward by military force in 1838 under Jackson’s Vice President and successor, Martin Van Buren. 

Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, an 1886 tome by Benjamin Perley Poore, a newspaper correspondent, editor and author, reported that Thomas Jefferson received a 1,600 pound behemoth cheese from dairymen in western Massachusetts; Jackson’s supporters apparently felt that Old Hickory (still another nickname, this one resulting from the strength and stubbornness he demonstrated in the Battle of New Orleans) deserved equal adulation, and a group of dairy farmers from rural New York provided a mammoth wheel of cheddar cheese.  After a tour of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, the cheese arrived at the White House where Jackson displayed it in the entrance hall for a full year.  In 1837, during the last of the infamous open houses he threw as president, all comers were invited to partake of the cheese. Poore described the occasion:

“For hours did a crowd of men, women and boys hack at the cheese, many taking large hunks of it away with them. When they commenced, the cheese weighed one thousand four hundred pounds, and only a small piece was saved for the President’s use. The air was redolent with cheese, the carpet was slippery with cheese, and nothing else was talked about at Washington that day.”

The wheel of cheese disappeared within two hours, but the White House smelled of cheese for weeks.

And as for Jackson’s gustatory proclivities, they were not backwoodsy.  He employed a French chef and imported French wines to the Hermitage, his estate outside of Nashville, and he was familiar with the finer points of cooking.  As president, he used a horseshoe shaped dining table in the White House and acquired one more nickname, King Andrew, for the culinary magnificence of his banquets.  He enjoyed treating his guests to what was called “Daniel Webster’s punch,” the ingredients of which vary from recipe to recipe but could include  some or all of the following: lemon juice, sugar, brandy, claret, champagne, bananas, oranges, pineapples, cherries or strawberries.

WHITE WINES (FRENCH)

THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS (song by James Morris)

In 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip’
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans

We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’
There wasn’t as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

We looked down a river and we see’d the British come
And there must have been a hundred of ’em beatin’ on the drum
They stepped so high and they made their bugles ring
We stood behind our cotton bales and didn’t say a thing

We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’
There wasn’t as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

Old Hickory said, “We could take’em by surprise
If we didn’t fire our muskets ’til we looked’em in the eye”
We held our fire ’til we see’d their faces well
Then we opened up our squirrel guns and gave ’em….

Well, we fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’
There wasn’t as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

Yeah, they ran through the briers and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn’t go
They ran so fast that the hounds couldn’t catch ’em
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

We fired our cannon ’til the barrel melted down
So we grabbed an alligator and we fought another round
We filled his head with cannonballs ‘n’ powdered his behind
And when we touched the powder off, the gator lost his mind

We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’
There wasn’t as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

Yeah, they ran through the briers and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn’t go
They ran so fast that the hounds couldn’t catch ’em
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

Hut, two, three, four
Sound off, three, four
Hut, two, three, four
Sound off, three, four
Hut, two, three, four
Hut, two, three, four

The Battle of New Orleans lyrics © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd.