Andrew Jackson and his road to the Presidency
Andrew Jackson, who was the 7th President of the United States, managed to capture the imagination of masses. He attracted the admiration of some and the hatred of others, as no other President had before. He was also the first President to be the target of an assassin, a madman- Richard Lawrence who thought he was heir to the British throne. Fortunately, Jackson got out of it with no harm, although as Ward writes : " two pistols were fired at Jackson not more than 6 feet away.(…. ) An expert on small arms calculated the odds on two successive misfires of this nature to be about 125,000 to 1." ( 1955: 114)
It is interesting to see how this simple ' frontiersman' became the President and as many say, a symbol for an age.
Andrew Jackson was born in 1767 in Carolinas in a poor Scotch-Irish family. Jackson's father died shortly before his birth, his childhood was definitely not an easy one. At the age of 13, Jackson was captured by the British, wounded and nearly killed for not polishing a British officer's boots. Soon his brother died of smallpox and then died his mother fatally stricken by cholera.
Left alone Jackson managed to finish school, although in the first years he gained a reputation for wilderness and hooliganism.…
