Folk-Hero President

Today is the birthday of the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson, (books by this author) born in on the western border of South Carolina (1767). He was first president of the United States who could honestly claim to have pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. Before him, all the presidents had come from distinguished or aristocratic families along the East Coast. Jackson was born in poverty in the backwoods frontier, west of the Appalachians, and he received almost no formal education.


The Battle of New Orleans turned him into a national hero, and when he ran for president in 1828, he portrayed himself as a champion of the common man and appealed to working-class voters, especially frontiersmen who were settling in the West. The election drew more than three times as many voters to the polls as the previous election, and Jackson won in a landslide.


And that is the rest of the story.


Credit: Garrison Keillor