Andrew Jackson Read Online Free PDF

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