What was Andrew Jacksons childhood like?

Answer 1

Jackson was born on the western frontier of the Carolinas, an area that was in dispute between North Carolina and South Carolina, and both states have claimed him as a native son. Jackson maintained that he was born in South Carolina, and the weight of evidence supports his assertion. The area offered little opportunity for formal education, and what schooling he received was interrupted by the British invasion of the western Carolinas in 1780-81. In the latter year he was captured by the British. Shortly after being imprisoned, he refused to shine the boots of a British officer and was struck across the face with a sabre. His mother and two brothers died during the closing years of the war, direct or indirect casualties of the invasion of the Carolinas. This sequence of tragic experiences fixed in Jackson's mind a lifelong hostility toward Great Britain. After the end of the American Revolution, he studied law in an office in Salisbury, North Carolina, and was admitted to the bar of that state in 1787. In 1788 he went to the Cumberland region as prosecuting attorney of the western district of North Carolina-the region west of the Appalachians, soon to become the state of Tennessee.