by H. W. Brands
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.
Whether 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.
Perhaps 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.
By 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.
The ban annoyed the settlers, who had hoped for just the opposite result upon the end of the French and Indian War. The expulsion of the French opened the way to additional settlements—or should have, if the British government had had the interests of Americans in mind. The ban suggested it did not.
So did measures that followed shortly. The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed the Americans as they had never been taxed before. Strong American opposition—amounting to riots in several colonies—forced the repeal of the act, but the Townshend duties of 1767 imposed new taxes in other forms. Americans again resisted, with boycotts of British products. The boycotts didn’t produce repeal but they did foster fellow thinking among the Americans, who increasingly viewed the British—or at least the British government—as hostile. When British troops fired on a crowd in Boston in 1770, the incident was quickly dubbed a “massacre.” When another Boston crowd in 1773 protested a London-imposed monopoly on tea by dumping a cargo of leaves into the harbor, and the British government responded by closing the harbor and passing other punitive measures, the Americans convened a “continental congress” to coordinate the defense of American rights against British encroachment. When fighting between British regulars and American militiamen broke out at Lexington and Concord in 1775, the Continental Congress raised an army, and in 1776 it declared the American colonies to be free and independent states.
Jacksonian mythology later asserted that young Andrew was chosen to read the Declaration of Independence when a copy of that document first reached the Waxhaw in the summer of 1776. Perhaps he was, but it seems odd that such an important task should be assigned to a boy not yet ten. On the other hand, considering the division of opinion in the Carolinas regarding independence, Jackson’s seniors may have been happy to let him do the honors. If the independence project turned out badly, the British would be less likely to punish a child.
For years after the fighting began, a bad outcome appeared entirely possible. The problem wasn’t simply the inexperience and poor provisioning of the Continental Army, although that didn’t help matters. The deeper problem was that for all the brave words and unanimous declarations of the Continental Congress, the Americans were far from united in their desire to separate from Britain. Wherever British troops landed, they were greeted by grateful Tories, or Loyalists. When they occupied New York, they found many Tories eager to supply them. After they drove to Philadelphia and settled into what had been the American capital till their approach scattered the Continental Congress, they spent a pleasant winter among friends (while General George Washington and the Continental Army shivered and starved at Valley Forge). Before 1780 the rebels won only a single major battle—at Saratoga in the autumn of 1777—and though this earned them an alliance with France, it hardly guaranteed them victory.
Yet Washington enjoyed the advantage of time. He didn’t so much have to win the war as avoid losing. For the rebels, the struggle against Britain was an essential affair, a battle for their homeland. For the British government, it was a discretionary matter. America was but a part of the British empire, and if that part became too expensive to maintain and defend, the imperial government could cut its losses and withdraw.
British commanders understood the situation and in 1780 determined to bring the war to a swift conclusion. Their strategy was to exploit the divisions among the Americans: to make the revolutionary war a civil war. Against a united America the British knew they stood no chance. Their troops were too far from home, too far from safe harbor and reprovision. But against a divided America their prospects were good. A divided America might be worn down, won over, and wooed back village by village, county by county, province by province. The ringleaders of the rebellion would flee or be captured, and the populace would accept what everyone in England accepted: that the Crown and Parliament were supreme. No doubt political adjustments would be made: the Americans could be granted seats in Parliament, dulling their complaint about being taxed without being represented. But the empire would stand secure.
The strategy would begin in the South. Tory sentiments were strongest there, especially among the planters of the tidewater districts, whose ties of family, finance, and sentiment to the mother country were broad and deep. The royal navy would deliver an army to the Carolinas, where Lord Cornwallis, the army’s commander, would launch a dual offensive: with regular British troops against fixed positions and with American Tory regiments against the rebels in the field.
Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton cut a figure that made men envious and women swoon. “A picture of a man he was!” remarked one (male) admirer among many. “Rather below the middle height, and with a face almost femininely beautiful, Tarleton possessed a form that was a perfect model of manly strength and vigor. Without a particle of superfluous flesh, his rounded limbs and full broad chest seemed molded from iron, yet, at the same time, displaying all the elasticity which usually accompanies elegance of proportion.” Tarleton appreciated his physical gifts and took pains to show them off. His cavalry jacket was tailored smartly and his white riding breeches clutched his thighs. He wore the plumed helmet of the king’s dragoons, and his saber danced jauntily as he rode.
His temperament matched his appearance and military calli
ng. He was dashingly brave; a fellow officer described him as “full of enterprise and spirit, and anxious of every opportunity of distinguishing himself.” And he was still very young: twenty-three when he received command of the British Legion, a regiment of Tories known for their green jackets (which distinguished them from the red-coated regulars and helped them blend into the forest), their familiarity with the local terrain and folkways, and their fierce opposition to the rebels, who threatened the way of life they had learned to cherish.
But none of the legionnaires was as fierce as their commander. Tarleton’s very name became a curse among the rebels, and a caution even among the Tories, on account of his utter ruthlessness in prosecuting the war. In theory, the rebels were all traitors to the Crown and liable to summary execution. In practice, most British commanders treated men under American arms as soldiers subject to the practices of civilized warfare. Tarleton preferred theory to practice. To some degree his ruthlessness reflected arrogance. With other British officers, he considered the Americans—even his own—beneath him. They were crude, unlettered, and indifferent to most of what made life fine for a man of the imperial metropolis. But to a greater degree his ruthlessness was calculated. He and his Tories would sow terror among the rebels and thereby compel them to abandon their cause. In the war behind the war—in the struggle for the allegiance of the American people—terror was Tarleton’s weapon of choice.
In the spring of 1780, while British regulars under General Henry Clinton besieged Charleston, Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton launched a series of raids inland. Moving stealthily, marching all night, the green-clad Legion surprised a rebel force at Monck’s Corner and won a stunning victory. In their defeat the rebels discovered what kind of man they were dealing with. Several members of the British Legion assaulted a group of American women who had taken shelter in a nearby plantation house. Whether the assailants understood that the women were in fact Tories—that is, on their own side—is unclear; what registered on all who heard of the incident was that Tarleton’s men were brutes with no sense of decency, shame, or even simple humanity. Nor did the green-jackets recognize any rules on the field of combat itself. Attacking with swords and bayonets, they continued hacking and thrusting even after the rebels indicated a will to surrender. A Frenchman fighting on the rebel side saw he was surrounded and asked quarter. Tarleton’s men kept hacking until the French officer was “mangled in the most shocking manner,” in the words of an eyewitness. He lingered in agony for several hours before dying. Until the end the Legionnaires taunted him and laughed at his pain.
