Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis

Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times vividly portrays the hero of the War of 1812 and the seventh president of the United States.

The man who becomes the mythic hero of the War of 1812 and the seventh president of the United States is born in the mountains of South Carolina on Mar. 15, 1767. Jackson is loved by his widowed mother, but materially and intellectually disadvantaged. The Revolutionary War falls during his formative years, imbuing him with a sense of patriotism and hatred of all things British that burns for a lifetime. Orphaned by age 14, Jackson apprentices as a lawyer, passes the bar, and in 1788 becomes an itinerant solicitor (prosecutor), working out of Nashville, the primitive capital of the Mero district of the Southwest Territory. Jackson has nothing to show for himself but intelligence and ambition, when he meets the married Rachel Robards. They...