Epigraph
By Reau E. Folk
Andrew Jackson, seventh President of the United States, gave the name “Hermitage” to his home. In his inspiring memory it is preserved.
Youth
Andrew Jackson was of Scotch-Irish lineage. His parents were of the rugged pioneer type that throughout America helped to lay the foundation of a great republic. He was born on March 15, 1767, in what was known as the Waxhaws Settlement, near the line between North and South Carolina. There has been some dispute as to which of the two States could claim him. Some authorities appear to have definitely settled that at the time of his nativity the Waxhaws Settlement constituted a part of South Carolina, but that now Jackson’s birth site is comprehended in Union County, North Carolina. Jackson always gave South Carolina as his birth state.
Andrew Jackson’s father, for whom he was named, died several days before he was born. His mother, Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, to whom tribute should be paid as a truly remarkable woman, heroically met the hard situation of rearing and educating her three small sons. Young Andrew was nourished in the Revolutionary sentiment, which was rife in the late sixties and early seventies, bursting into flame in 1775. He and his mother and brothers were patriots from the inception of the Revolutionary movement. These fires of patriotism in the Waxhaws were fanned by the fact that there was much Tory sentiment. When in August, 1776, a newspaper reached the Waxhaws carrying the Declaration of Independence young Andrew Jackson, then in his tenth year, was called upon to read it to an assemblage. In 1781, at the age of fourteen, he enlisted with the South Carolina forces and was later made prisoner and struck down by a sword in the hands of a British officer whose boots he refused to black. His two brothers also enlisted in the war and gave up their lives. His mother, as a result of a mission service to Charleston to nurse prisoners from the Waxhaws there on shipboard, contracted yellow fever and died. At the successful end of the struggle of the Colonies young Andrew Jackson, in his fifteenth year, emaciated from desperate prison illness, found himself alone in the world, an orphan of the Revolution.