The Reign of Andrew Jackson By Frederic Austin Ogg A Chronicle of the Frontier in Politics Volume 20 of the Chronicles of America Series Allen Johnson, Editor Assistant Editors Gerhard R. Lomer Charles W. Jefferys Textbook Edition Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co. New York: United States Publishers Association, Inc. Copyright, 1919 by Yale University Press Printed in the United States of America Contents The Reign of Andrew Jackson Chapter Chapter Title Page I. Jackson the Frontiersman 1 II. The Creek War and the Victory of New Orleans 23 III. The "Conquest" of Florida 45 IV. The Death of "King Caucus" 68 V. The Democratic Triumph 95 VI. The "Reign" Begins 113 VII. The Webster-Hayne Debate 137 VIII. Tariff and Nullification 158 IX. The War on the United States Bank 181 X. The Removal of the Southern Indians 201 XI. The Jacksonian Succession 217 Bibliographical Note 237 Index 241 THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON CHAPTER I JACKSON THE FRONTIERSMAN Among the thousands of stout-hearted British subjects who decided to try their fortune in the Western World after the signing of the Peace of Paris in 1763 was one Andrew Jackson, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian of the tenant class, sprung from a family long resident in or near the quaint town of Carrickfergus, on the northern coast of Ireland, close by the newer and more progressive city of Belfast. With Jackson went his wife and two infant sons, a brother-in-law, and two neighbors with their families, who thus made up a typical eighteenth-century emigrant group. Arrived at Charleston, the travelers fitted themselves out for an overland journey, awaited a stretch of favorable weather, and set off for the Waxhaw settlement, one hundred and eighty miles to the northwest, where numbers of their kinsmen and countrymen were already established. There the Jacksons were received with open arms by the family of a second brother-in-law, who had migrated a few years earlier and who now had a comfortable log house and a good-sized clearing. The settlement lay on the banks of the upper Catawba, near the junction of that stream with Waxhaw Creek; and as it occupied a fertile oasis in a vast waste of pine woods, it was for decades largely cut off from touch with the outside world. The settlement was situated, too, partly in North Carolina and partly in South Carolina, so that in the pre-Revolutionary days many of the inhabitants hardly knew, or cared to know, in which of the two provinces they dwelt.