Andrew Jackson (6 page)
Not every encounter ended so happily. Disturbed at the revival of rebel activity in the Waxhaw, the British dispatched a troop of dragoons to sweep the area. Jackson and about forty others rode out to meet them. The British gained the advantage, capturing several of the rebels and scattering the rest. Jackson and his cousin Thomas Crawford galloped away across the fields with the dragoons close behind. Crawford’s horse mired in a muddy patch, and before Jackson could turn to help him, a dragoon cut Crawford with his sword and took him prisoner. Jackson fled, eventually reaching safety in a thicket.
There he met Robert, who had survived a similar close scrape. The brothers spent the rest of that day and all the following night in the woods, hiding. Andrew was rail-thin already, and Robert wasn’t much stouter, and after thirty-six hours without food they were on the verge of fainting. They crept to the home of their captured cousin, hoping to get a meal from their aunt. But some area Tories, either guessing that the Jackson boys would visit their cousin’s house or simply spotting their horses, alerted the dragoons, who surrounded the house and captured the boys before they could put up a fight.
The British soldiers thereupon began systematically destroying the household belongings of Mrs. Crawford, before her eyes and those of her children. Furniture was broken, bedding was torn, dishes were smashed: the modest accumulation of a family’s lifetime was ruined in minutes. Jackson, helpless at sword point, must have been mortified at what he had brought upon his aunt. (“I’ll warrant Andy thought of it at New Orleans,” a cousin declared decades later.) A British officer, perhaps intending to complete the lad’s humiliation, ordered him to clean his—the officer’s—muddy boots. At this point Jackson’s mortification flashed to anger, and he indignantly refused. The officer, determined to chastise the cheeky rebel, drew his sword and aimed a blow at the boy’s head. Jackson raised his left hand and deflected the blow but received a severe gash on his hand and another on his head. With blood pouring down his face and from his hand, he defiantly stood his ground and dared the officer to strike again.
The officer must have been tempted to kill Jackson on the spot, but he decided to put him to better use. The dragoons didn’t know the country, and the officer rightly guessed that Jackson did. The officer had orders to find a particularly troublesome rebel named Thompson. He insisted that Jackson show the way to Thompson’s house and threatened to execute him if he led them awry. Jackson acceded to the demand but simultaneously frustrated it. There were two roads to Thompson’s house, one that went there directly, the other that circled within sight of the place a half mile before actually arriving. Jackson chose the latter, assuming that Thompson would be watching the road and that a half-mile head start was all he would need. Jackson’s assumption proved out, and he had the silent pleasure of watching Thompson ride away ahead of the dragoons, who were none the wiser for their failure.
Andrew, Robert, Thomas Crawford, and several other prisoners were then forcibly taken to Camden, where the British were collecting captured rebels. Jackson’s wound had stopped bleeding, but the pain was excruciating and the loss of blood produced a searing thirst. The prisoners’ guards, however, allowed them no water—or food either—on the journey, and when Jackson and the others tried to scoop water in their hands from the creeks they forded en route, their captors made them stop.
The prison camp was an abomination. More than two hundred inmates were crowded into a narrow annex to the county jail. They lacked beds, clothing, food, water, medicine—everything essential to prevent the outbreak of disease, which naturally occurred. Before long smallpox was raging through the camp, and the prisoners provided textbook illustrations of the progress of the disease, as the recently infected mingled with those farther gone, who in turn lay elbow to knee with the dying and the unburied dead. “I frequently heard them groaning in the agonies of death,” Jackson recalled years later.
For many days Jackson somehow managed to avoid infection. Prospects of rescue appeared to rise upon the approach of a rebel army under Nathanael Greene. From the distraction of the guards, the bustle about the camp, and the boasts of the British soldiers that they would do to Greene what their fellows had done to Horatio Gates—boasts that were accompanied by threats to hang all the prisoners—Jackson and the other prisoners divined the day the British were to commence the battle. To gain a view of the contest that might well decide their fate, Jackson borrowed an older prisoner’s razor and with great effort whittled a hole in one of the boards that had been nailed over the jailhouse windows.
From his peephole he reported to his fellow prisoners how the rebels, making effective use of artillery and small arms, initially forced the British to retreat. The news lifted the prisoners’ spirits. But then the British regrouped and counterattacked, and the rebel lines bent and broke. Greene was lucky to escape with his army intact.
Jackson and the other prisoners couldn’t help despairing. They saw nothing ahead but indefinite detention, broken only perhaps by death from the epidemic that continued to rage among them. The cause for which they had fought appeared equally endangered, raising the prospect that they would die in vain.
With time to reflect, Jackson must have thought of his mother, his dead brother, the father he had never known. And at the mercy of the British, he doubtless recalled a moment when he might have materially changed the course of recent events. Early in the Waxhaw fighting, not long after the massacre that made Banastre Tarleton infamous, the British colonel had ridden unknowingly past a place where Jackson had taken refuge. The boy could hear the horses snorting and almost make out what the Tory raiders were saying as they marched by. “Tarleton passed within a hundred yards,” Jackson remembered many years later. Still vexed at himself for his missed opportunity, he added, “I could have shot him.”
W
hat Andrew Jackson inherited from his father is hard to say, due to the elder man’s early death. What he inherited from his mother is easier to identify, starting with an iron determination that allowed no obstacle to stand in the way of necessary action. Elizabeth’s determination had kept her fatherless brood together till the war split them up, and now it kept her from resting till she reclaimed her surviving sons from their disease-ravaged prison. After she learned of the capture of Robert and Andrew, she traced their path the forty miles to Camden, refusing to allow Tories, Indians, or outlaws to stand between a mother and her children. In Camden she hid her rebel sentiments sufficiently to persuade the British to exchange Andrew and Robert for some British prisoners their American captors couldn’t afford to keep.
The journey north to home was as arduous as the march south had been. Robert was gravely ill and in considerable pain. Elizabeth was exhausted from her efforts to find the boys and effect their release. Andrew was in the best condition of the three, and because they had only two horses among them, he walked while they rode. Yet even he was sorely fatigued and badly malnourished. It didn’t help his condition that the British had confiscated his shoes and jacket, compelling him to walk barefoot, cold, and wet through the upcountry spring.
Robert survived the journey only to expire on his second day home. Andrew was ill by then himself, having, as now became apparent, contracted smallpox in prison and incubated the disease on the way back. He grew feverish and delirious, and soon the characteristic pustules were slowly exploding across his skin. Elizabeth could do nothing but mop his brow with a cool cloth, keep him covered against the recurrent chills, and pray that he was one of those fortunates for whom the disease proved less than fatal.
In fact it did, as Andrew demonstrated a constitutional toughness that would characterize all his days. But his illness was a serious one and his recovery slow. Not for months was he fully himself again. As it happened, those months marked a lull in the fighting in the Waxhaw, and he was granted the rest he needed.
But there was no rest for Elizabeth. With Andrew safe—and Hugh and Robert dead—her thoughts turned to her nephews, whom she had raised almost as sons. William and James Crawford were prisoners at Charleston, where conditions were said to be as bad as those at Camden. She made the difficult journey there—160 miles, over country ravaged by the war—in hopes of bringing William and James home. But though her courage and determination remained as great as ever, her body now failed her. The months of flight, deprivation, and worry had reduced her resistance, and she contracted cholera. Within days she was dead.
Andrew got the sad news in the form of a bundle of her clothes. He had lost his father to overwork, and now his two brothers and his mother to war. At fourteen he faced the world alone.
O
rphans were less rare in the eighteenth century than they would be later. Maternal death in childbirth left many infants without mothers. Accident and disease claimed numerous fathers, as well as some of those mothers who survived their children’s delivery. For young children, the loss of both parents was as difficult then as it would ever be, depriving them of both economic and emotional sustenance. For a child of Andrew Jackson’s age, the economic shock of orphanhood was mitigated by the fact that he was nearly an adult by contemporary standards.
Yet the emotional shock was still severe. In later years he liked to talk about the parting advice his mother gave him. As she left for Charleston to tend the prisoners there, she said:
Andrew, if I should not see you again I wish you to remember and treasure up some things I have already said to you: In this world you will have to make your own way. To do that you must have friends. You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you. To forget an obligation or be ungrateful for a kindness is a base crime—not merely a fault or a sin, but an actual crime. Men guilty of it sooner or later must suffer the penalty. In personal conduct be polite, but never obsequious. No one will respect you more than you esteem yourself. Avoid quarrels as long as you can without yielding to imposition. But sustain your manhood always. Never bring a suit at law for assault and battery or for defamation. The law affords no remedy for such outrages that can satisfy the feelings of a true man. Never wound the feelings of others. Never brook wanton outrage upon your own feelings. If you ever have to vindicate your feelings or defend your honor, do it calmly. If angry at first, wait till your wrath cools before you proceed.
Thus Jackson remembered his mother. Perhaps she really said everything he ascribed to her. Perhaps he conflated what she did say with what he thought or wished she had said. The important thing is that his memory of his mother—whether accurate or embellished—became his guiding star. “Gentlemen,” he explained to the group hearing this recollection, “her last words have been the law of my life.” And they were almost his only inheritance. “I might about as well have been penniless, as I already was homeless and friendless. The memory of my mother and her teachings were after all the only capital I had to start in life, and on that capital I have made my way.”
I
t took Jackson time to discover the wisdom in his mother’s advice about avoiding quarrels. While still recuperating from smallpox, he lived with his uncle Thomas Crawford, who also hosted a Captain Galbraith of the American army commissary. The captain possessed, by Jackson’s later account, “a very proud and haughty disposition,” which didn’t sit well with the boy. “He had a habit of telling anecdotes in which he always figured as the hero. He had a way of telling them that was ludicrous, and I could mimic him so closely that anyone in the next room would think Galbraith himself was talking. He was a Highland Scotchman, one of the few Whig”—that is, rebel—“Highlanders, and he had a broad Caithness brogue, which I could imitate perfectly. Finally, one day he happened to overhear me at this amusement, and took me to task for, as he put it, insulting a man so much older and so much superior; a man—or ‘mon,’ as he called it—who had so often risked his life for the country. Upon this I remarked that commissaries were not famous for risking their lives, and probably all the killing he had ever done was beef-critters and sheep to feed the real fighting men of the army.”
This enraged Galbraith, who threatened to horsewhip the boy. Jackson had defended his honor against a British combat officer—and bore the scars to prove it—and he refused to be chastised by an American mess master. “I immediately answered that I had arrived at the age to know my rights, and although weak and feeble from disease, I had courage to defend them, and if he attempted anything of that kind I would most assuredly send him to the other world.”
In later years, when Jackson acquired a reputation for dueling, his enemies exaggerated this affair into an attempted assassination, of an American army officer no less. Jackson dismissed such tales as ludicrous. “It was too foolish to talk about, merely a difficulty between a pompous man and a sassy boy.” Yet Jackson’s Uncle Thomas didn’t want any fights among the houseguests, and he made Jackson apologize for poking fun at the elder man. Jackson grudgingly complied. “But I never liked him and avoided him after that.”