President Andrew Jackson (Essay Sample)

President Andrew Jackson Name: Institution: Congress and State rights Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, was born in the Waxhaw area in North Carolina on March 1767. The Declaration of Independence was signed when Andrew was nine years old and at thirteen he joined the Continental Army as a courier. One of Andrew’s brothers died in 1779, after a battle of Stono Ferry in South Carolina, two years later Andrew and his brother were taken into captivity. While in captivity a British officer ordered them to clean his boots, the boys refused to lead the officer to strike them with his sword and Andrews’ hand was cut to the bone. Due to the ill treatment Andrew harbored bitterness towards the British until his death. During their imprisonment both Andrew and his brother Robert contracted smallpox. In the same year, Andrew lost his mother and weeks before their release his brother also died, leaving him an orphan and the only child at only sixteen years. Andrew Jackson gained most of his votes from new frontier states in his election of 1828, and was designated to his first political office in 1829; subsequently his political rise was rapid (Brands 2006). He promised equal protection and equal benefits to everyone and during his first term in office he spread the spirit of equality throughout American politics (Borneman, 2005). He served as the mayor of Greenville and in both houses of the state legislature. Andrew Jackson stood powerfully on the subject of state rights at the time when settlers wanted the government to relocate native Americans living in the southeast to move to west of Mississippi (Borneman, 2005). The Congress responded by passing the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Andrew sent federal officials to negotiate treaties with Indians of the southeast, most of them agreed to move. The First Democratic Convention For many years, Andrew Jackson accused the Bank of the United States as being an organization of wealthy and that ordinary citizens had no control over them (Borneman, 2005). He argued that Nicholas Biddle, the bank’s head, represented all Andrew detested. Andrew and his supporters worked to make the political system democratic (Brands, 2006). They abandoned the unpopular system and replaced it with nominating conventions. Delegates from most states selected Andrew as their presidential candidate (Borneman, 2005). Andrew often thought of himself as a man of the common people. Jackson further pointed himself as an example of how a poor boy might grow into authority and fame through hard work and great desire. According to (Brands, 2006), the Andrew Jackson era was very important to the United States. During his tenure in office, the struggle for political office took toll, the women’s right movements and the black rights movement as part of the era. Andrew Jackson a democrat served as president of the...