Andrew Jackson (4 page)

Establishing ownership of land in the backcountry was often a problem, and had been for decades. The problem originated in the difference between Indian and European conceptions of property ownership. To the extent most Indian tribes “owned” land, they did so communally. Communal ownership of land wasn’t historically unknown in Europe, and it still served as the basis for “commons” and other general-use zones. But in European societies where the cultivation of crops provided the principal sustenance of the people—rather than merely supplementing hunting and gathering, as among most Indians—individual ownership of specified pieces of ground had long since become the norm. When Europeans, with their individualistic ideas of land ownership, entered Indian lands unclaimed by any individual Indians, it was tempting for the Europeans to assume that no one owned the land and that it was available for the taking.

Even when the Europeans acknowledged Indian ownership, problems arose from differences between their notions of governance and those of the Indians. Not surprisingly, given the importance the Europeans placed on land titles, governments in Europe considered the control of land a central responsibility. Entire bodies of law, and the institutions of government that supported them, had grown up around the establishment and transfer of titles to land. The Indians had their own forms of government, which dealt with matters of war and peace but rarely with issues relating to land ownership. Consequently, on those occasions when European officials sought to purchase land from the Indians, it was by no means always clear which Indians had the authority to sell it. Sometimes the Europeans, acting in good faith, paid certain members of a tribe for what they thought was title to land, only to have other members dispute the deal. At least equally often the Europeans acted in bad faith, essentially bribing complaisant tribesmen to sell land both parties knew the sellers had no right to alienate.

Nor were the difficulties of ownership confined to official relations between the indigenes and the immigrants. Settlers from the colonies often headed toward the frontier and simply started farming on lands that appeared unoccupied and unclaimed. These “squatters” typically acted as though the labor of clearing and planting a piece of ground gave them title to it, and they could be as jealous of trespassers—Indian or white—as any legally sanctioned landowners. They were the bane of the colonial governments, for though they refused to recognize restrictions on their squatting activities, they demanded protection from those governments when their squatting provoked resistance from the Indians, as it often did.

In a different, though not necessarily less troublesome, category than the squatters were the speculators. Unlike the squatters, the speculators intended not to make homes on the frontier but merely to make money. Their strategy was to acquire title to large tracts of land, either directly from the Indians or, after that practice was outlawed (because of the abuses it invited), from the colonial governments or from the British Crown. They then sent out surveyors, who mapped their holdings and wrote up legal descriptions. Finally they sold the lands, ideally at a handsome profit, to settlers. Temptations to corruption and manipulation arose at every step of the process. Indians could be coerced into selling. Colonial assemblies could be bribed. The British Crown could be lobbied. And honest complications often occurred in the surveying, from sloppiness or lack of funds to do the job right. Moreover, because the speculators were commonly resented as profiteers, squatters were hardly more respectful of their titles than of Indians’ titles. And because years could pass between the grant of titles to the speculators and the development of the properties covered by the titles, squatters could build homes and raise families on the properties before anyone objected or even noticed.

W
hether Andrew Jackson simply squatted on the property on Twelve Mile Creek or made some prior arrangement with the man who claimed title to the tract is unclear. The only document that survives regarding the conveyance of title from Thomas Ewing, the legal owner, is dated three years after Andrew started clearing and planting the property. And this document reveals the casual approach to surveying that vexed land titles in the backcountry for many years. The property was described as “200 acres . . . beginning at a White Oak south side of the Creek by a small Branch & runs thence N 10 E 180 poles”—a pole was a rod, or sixteen and a half feet—“to a Red Oak by a small Branch hence N 80 Wst. 180 poles to a R.O. then S 10 W 180 poles to a Red Oak thence to the beginning.”

Whether or not he legally owned the land, Andrew acted as though he did or soon would. Especially in the early years of transforming a wilderness tract into a productive property, frontier farming was interminably laborious. From spring to autumn, the normal round of plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting kept a man busy every daylight moment. But it was after the crops were in that the really hard work began, for there was always more of the forest to be cleared and prepared for the plow. The pines that grew from the red soil of the Waxhaw weren’t especially large or unkind to the ax, but they were many and had to be felled one by one.

Andrew’s incentives to labor increased during the family’s second year in America. Hugh was three years old and Robert one when Elizabeth informed her husband that she was pregnant again. During the winter of 1766–67, through cold rains and intermittent snows, Andrew attacked the forest with redoubled energy. The baby would arrive before spring; he wanted to have several more acres ready for the plow by then.

His desire exceeded his strength. He injured himself while working—family tradition said he was trying to lift a log heavier than one man could handle—and he was forced to bed. Something else must have been involved, perhaps including general exhaustion from extended overwork, for he fell ill and died.

Not all in the Waxhaw were working as hard that winter as Andrew Jackson. With snow covering the ground and ice coating the roads, time passed slowly for many of his neighbors. In part for this reason they were happy to give poor Andrew the full honors of a wake and a proper funeral procession, both of which required libations of the sort that could fortify a man against the cold of the season and the chill thoughts of his own mortality. So well fortified were the members of the procession that, according to local story, Andrew’s coffin fell from the wagon on the way to the graveyard and wasn’t missed till the procession reached the burial ground. With some embarrassment and more whiskey, the pallbearers retraced their steps and recovered the body, which was belatedly committed to the red clay. Andrew Jackson, who had crossed the ocean to claim his share of Adam’s bequest and broken his body to make a few hundred acres his own, now slept in an eight-foot plot that would be his forever.

P
erhaps Elizabeth was comforted by this thought. She needed the comforting, for she faced the daunting prospect of bringing a third child, suddenly fatherless, into a world where the protection and support of a man were almost essential to the survival of his wife and children. Fortunately, she could turn to her sisters and their husbands (demonstrating her and Andrew’s prudence in planting themselves near kin). After the funeral, and as the day of her delivery drew near, she and the boys moved in with Jane and James Crawford. There, on the morning of March 15, 1767, Elizabeth gave birth to a son she named for her late husband. (The Crawford house was located just across the border in South Carolina. In later years, after the younger Andrew Jackson became famous, North Carolinians eager to adopt him articulated a version of the nativity story that had Elizabeth stopping at the home of a second sister, in North Carolina, en route to the Crawfords, and there giving birth. The subject of the story himself never credited it, always claiming South Carolinian birth, even after South Carolina sided with his enemies.)

The Crawford home became the Jackson home. By an arrangement that almost certainly was never formalized but simply evolved, Elizabeth assumed the role of housekeeper and second mother to the eight Crawford children, in exchange for her and her own three boys’ maintenance. The responsibilities of her role, and perhaps the emotional burden of living upon her relations, seem to have reinforced a sober, Calvinist streak; from dawn to dusk she rarely let a minute slip unfilled by some useful task.

Sundays, of course, were the exception. The sabbath was devoted to the worship of the Lord, in the Presbyterian church where the elder Andrew had been eulogized and the younger Andrew baptized. Elizabeth’s devotion was such that for a time she believed her third son should be a minister. As he learned to talk and otherwise express himself, he showed every sign of being the brightest of her three and the most likely to master the literary arts required of a man of the cloth. To prepare young Andrew for his vocation, Elizabeth sent him to an academy operated by Dr. William Humphries. (Hugh and Robert made shift at the local common school.) Besides the usual letters and numbers, Andrew was introduced to Latin and Greek. He and they never became good friends, but enough of the acquaintance lasted to let him appreciate the classical tags that adorned the rhetoric and writing of the era and affix a few of his own.

Despite Andrew’s academic aptitude, it didn’t take Elizabeth long to realize that her youngest wasn’t meant for the ministry. He was a wild child, with an almost unmanageable will and a defiant temper. How much of this he inherited is impossible to know. Certainly it fit the mold of the Ulsterman. Yet the circumstances of his upbringing contributed their share to the formation of his character. He had no father, and his mother was so busy running the Crawford household that she couldn’t readily monitor his behavior. Nor did James or Jane Crawford, with so many children of their own, pay much attention to their nephews. As a result, Andrew was reared as much by the children of the neighborhood as by any adults.

In time the neighbors from his childhood would tell stories about him. Most of the stories reflected the feisty, stubborn streak of a skinny boy who felt he had to fight for anything of value. A heavier contemporary recalled that when they would wrestle, Andrew would be the one thrown to the ground three times out of four. “But he would never
stay throwed
. He was dead game, even then, and never would give up.” Another story told how some pranksters loaded a rifle with powder to the muzzle and got Andrew, unaware, to fire it. The recoil knocked him down and nearly unconscious, but he retained sufficient presence of mind to threaten the humorists: “By God, if one of you laughs, I’ll kill him.”

In adulthood, Andrew Jackson’s enemies would ridicule his inability to write a sentence without misspellings and would cite it as evidence of an incurable ignorance. Jackson indeed lacked much of what his better-schooled contemporaries took for granted, starting with a decent formal education. How long he stayed in school is uncertain, but his unfamiliarity with the conventions of orthography suggests it wasn’t long. (Conceivably he suffered from dyslexia or other learning disability, but bad spelling aside, there is nothing to indicate this.) Other famous men, including Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, have lacked much formal education but become masters of the English language. Jackson didn’t fit that pattern, although even his critics acknowledged that he spoke and wrote with power and vividness. He eventually became an enthusiastic reader, albeit of practical works, including newspapers, rather than of philosophy or literature. Yet in youth, even had he shown an interest in reading, he would have found little opportunity to indulge it in the backcountry community where he grew up. The Bible was available, of course, and from the evidence of his later life, Jackson read it from cover to cover. But beyond the good book were very few other books.

Jackson’s early biographers, who included some of his staunchest political supporters, liked to assert that what his education lacked in book learning, it made up for in experience of the world. To some degree this was true: the bright boy couldn’t help picking up life lessons wherever they arose. It would be a mistake, though, to place much weight on this essentially democratic-romantic notion. By most objective measures, Andrew Jackson’s was a deprived upbringing: deprived of educational opportunity, deprived of parental supervision, deprived of more than the most modest standard of living, deprived of much chance to develop self-esteem. His mother doubtless loved him, and he revered her memory all his life. Yet her love aside, Andrew Jackson had a bleak boyhood, better forgotten.

B
y Jackson’s tenth birthday the struggle for North America had taken a new turn. The wars for the West—first against France, then against Pontiac—had been expensive, and British taxpayers complained of the debt. As part of a general retrenchment, the British government determined to pull troops back from the frontier. But it couldn’t easily do so if the settlers persisted in getting into trouble with the Indians. Therefore, to keep the settlers and Indians apart, the government in 1763 banned new settlements beyond the mountains.