Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson, also known as Old Hickory, was the hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, and eventually was elected as the 7th president of the United States.

       Andrew Jackson was the first public figure to reach the White House from the lower classes of society.   Early in his political career he aligned himself with states rights advocates and Thomas Jefferson.   He was a man you crossed at your peril.  He killed three men, carried two bullets in his body (from duels), endured bladder surgery at the age of 71 without anesthesia.

       Jackson, a notoriously dishonest Indian treaty commissioner, came to the White House determined to remove Indians from the eastern forests.  At Jackson's urging, Congress passed (by one vote) the Indian Removal Act (1830) that eventually resulted in the Trail of Tears, in which thousands of Cherokees died on a forced march from their treaty-protected homelands in Georgia and Tennessee, to the new Indian Territory in Oklahoma. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/removal.htm

       As governor of Florida he distinguished himself by accomplishing almost nothing outside the further alienation of the Seminoles and Creeks, and laying the groundwork for what some have called the most dishonorable treaties with Indians in our nation's history.

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