So Thomas Jefferson not only wrote the Declaration of Independence but he was the means of doubling the size and wealth of the country, making it extend from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
ANDREW JACKSON, AMERICA’S MOST POPULAR HERO
ABOUT ten years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, two Irish linen weavers, Andrew and Elizabeth Jackson, came across the Atlantic to a backwoods settlement in North Carolina. There the young settlers built a cabin, but before they had lived long in their rude little home, Andrew Jackson died, leaving his wife with two small sons, Hugh and Robert. The young widow went to live with a sick sister a few miles away, and when the third baby boy was born to her here, she named him Andrew for his dead father. The house in which little Andrew Jackson was born was so near the boundary line between North and South Carolina that years afterwards both states claimed him as their son.
Elizabeth Jackson had to keep house for her sister to support herself and her three little boys. Andrew was in his tenth year when the War for Independence broke out in the north. Three years later the British came to fight near the Jacksons’ home in the south. Hugh, the oldest, now a lad of seventeen, fought in the battle of Stono, and died, soon after, of heat and exhaustion.
Then the British troops came nearer, and Widow Jackson, with Robert and Andrew, was driven from her poor home. These terrible experiences developed in the tall, red-haired, freckled, thirteen-year-old Scotch-Irish lad a deep hatred of the “red-coats,” as the British soldiers were called.
As if Andrew had not already reasons enough for hating his enemies, a squad of dragoons surprised him with his brother Robert and a cousin, Lieutenant Thomas Crawford, at the home of the Crawfords, where they had brought Tom, wounded and ill, for his mother’s care. After capturing the young American “soldiers three,” the British cavalrymen broke the Crawfords’ dishes, tore their clothing, ripped open feather beds, insulted the frightened mother and abused the little children. Then, as if for a crowning insult, the British officer ordered Andy to clean his boots. The young Irish soldier drew himself up and said proudly,
“Sir, I am not a servant, but a prisoner of war, and I claim to be treated as such.”
The angry dragoon struck at the youth’s head with his saber. Andy threw up his hand and saved his own life by breaking the force of the stroke, but received deep cuts on his forehead and hand. He wore the two scars to his dying day.
Andrew’s brother Robert was commanded to perform the same low service and refused with the same proud spirit; he also received a sword-cut on his head which nearly killed him. The two Jackson youths were then taken away to a prison pen at Camden, South Carolina, where American soldiers were treated like beasts and where many were already dying of smallpox.
While the Jackson brothers were in this prison, a battle was fought near by. Young Andrew whittled a hole through a board with an old razor, so that he could watch the battle that was raging around them.