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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