Andrew Jackson Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    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.
     
    J acksonian 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