by H. W. Brands
In May Clinton captured Charleston, and Tarleton drove deeper inland. Chasing a rebel force that was retreating toward North Carolina, Tarleton caught the rebels on the border between North and South Carolina, in the Waxhaw district. Tarleton was badly outnumbered, and his men were staggering from having marched a hundred miles without pause, but he prepared to attack at once. He offered the rebels the chance to surrender and warned of the consequences if they didn’t. “If any persons attempt to fly after this flag is received,” he said, “rest assured that their rank shall not protect them, if taken, from rigorous treatment.”
The rebel commander, Abraham Buford, refused to surrender to the much smaller force, and Tarleton ordered a charge. He threw one column of his dragoons against the rebel left and another against their center, while he personally led a third column against the right. Buford, apparently unable to believe that Tarleton could move so decisively, ordered his men to hold their fire till the Tories were almost upon the rebel lines. Such patience might have worked against infantry or even cavalry showing the ordinary effects of fifty hours on the march, but it failed against Tarleton’s dragoons, who easily absorbed the shock of the single volley the rebels were able to get off before being overwhelmed by the charging horses and their saber-swinging riders.
The confusion among the rebels turned to rout. Some tried to surrender, others to flee; a few fought desperately on. Tarleton’s dragoons treated all alike: with unbridled ferocity. Their sabers and bayonets slashed and stabbed long after the outcome of the battle had been decided. Tarleton, who personally cut down the rebel standard bearer even as his own horse was being shot from under him, allowed the killing to continue unabated. A rebel surgeon, after treating the victims of the massacre, remarked, “Not a man was spared; and it was the concurrent testimony of all the survivors that for fifteen minutes after every man was prostrate they”—Tarleton’s dragoons—“went over the ground plunging their bayonets into everyone that exhibited any signs of life, and in some instances, where several had fallen over the other, these monsters were seen to throw off on the point of the bayonet the uppermost, to come at those beneath.” Tarleton himself, reporting the victory to his British superiors, declared laconically, “I have cut 170 officers and men to pieces.”
Andrew Jackson was thirteen years old that brutal summer, at home in the Waxhaw district with his widowed mother and his two older brothers. Elizabeth was an ardent rebel, and Hugh rode with the rebel militia. Robert and Andrew were too young for military service, but they weren’t too young to look after Elizabeth as Tarleton’s dragoons approached the Waxhaw. The Tories slowed to burn barns and crops and houses throughout the predominantly rebel district, allowing the Jacksons to escape. After the raiders moved on, Elizabeth and the boys returned to their ravaged neighborhood—only to have to flee once more when the Tories came back. For several months the Waxhaw was in constant turmoil.
Several months is a long time in the life of a thirteen-year-old, and when those months include the stern lessons of war, a boy grows up quickly. Andrew ached to join the rebel militia and avenge the losses his family suffered. When word arrived that Hugh had died on campaign, not even Elizabeth’s fears for her youngest could keep him out of the contest. The militia leaders judged him still too young to fight, but they let him serve as scout and courier, galloping the back roads of the Waxhaw with dispatches and the latest news of armed action. He observed a rebel assault on British forces at Hanging Rock, an attack that started promisingly and might have finished so but for the heat of the day and the attackers’ thirst, which they assuaged with captured rum. As their thirst diminished, so did their interest in fighting, and what might have been a decisive victory turned out to be merely a morale booster.
The following fortnight brought word of a calamitous rebel defeat at Camden, south of the Waxhaw, where Cornwallis routed Horatio Gates, the rebel hero of Saratoga. Gates’s defeat left the backcountry helpless, and as Cornwallis and his redcoats pushed north, the Waxhaw once more emptied. Elizabeth had kin near Charlotte, some forty miles over the border in North Carolina. To Charlotte she and Robert and Andrew fled. Through the end of 1780 they remained in the north, while Cornwallis and the British had their way in the Waxhaw, destroying what little remained of the property of the rebels, seizing what cattle and horses hadn’t already been eaten or driven off, and installing Tories in positions of prominence and power.
The Tory presence didn’t prevent the return of most of the refugees, including Elizabeth Jackson and her surviving sons. But it did prevent the return of peace, and for several months the ugliest kind of partisan warfare raged throughout the Waxhaw. Neighbor hunted neighbor; friends by day became foes by night. Beyond the patent horrors of the fratricidal campaign, the guerrilla character of the fighting strained the nerves of all and broke the spirit of some. One man, without warning, began striking murderously at those around him, killing everyone within reach until the madness passed and he discovered, to his own shock as much as anyone else’s, some twenty corpses in various states of dismemberment. Others, more courageous than crazy, yet still self-destructive, burned their homesteads rather than let them fall into the hands of the enemy.
Andrew Jackson rode with the rebels, now as an irregular soldier. One night he and Robert, who had also enlisted, were assigned with several others to guard the house of a well-known rebel, which came under attack from a large group of Tories. The attackers fired into the house, and fourteen-year-old Andrew and the other defenders returned the fire. One young man, Andrew’s cousin, was killed at his side. The position of the defenders grew increasingly grim, until a bugle calling the cavalry charge pierced the darkness. The Tory attackers, assuming the gunfire had attracted rebel reinforcements, abandoned the assault and fled into the night. Shortly after they left, a lone, unmounted rebel, with bugle in hand, appeared from the trees, chuckling to himself at the gullibility of the Tories.
Not every encounter ended so happily. Disturbed at the revival of rebel activity in the Waxhaw, the British dispatched a troop of dragoons to sweep the area. Jackson and about forty others rode out to meet them. The British gained the advantage, capturing several of the rebels and scattering the rest. Jackson and his cousin Thomas Crawford galloped away across the fields with the dragoons close behind. Crawford’s horse mired in a muddy patch, and before Jackson could turn to help him, a dragoon cut Crawford with his sword and took him prisoner. Jackson fled, eventually reaching safety in a thicket.
There he met Robert, who had survived a similar close scrape. The brothers spent the rest of that day and all the following night in the woods, hiding. Andrew was rail-thin already, and Robert wasn’t much stouter, and after thirty-six hours without food they were on the verge of fainting. They crept to the home of their captured cousin, hoping to get a meal from their aunt. But some area Tories, either guessing that the Jackson boys would visit their cousin’s house or simply spotting their horses, alerted the dragoons, who surrounded the house and captured the boys before they could put up a fight.
The British soldiers thereupon began systematically destroying the household belongings of Mrs. Crawford, before her eyes and those of her children. Furniture was broken, bedding was torn, dishes were smashed: the modest accumulation of a family’s lifetime was ruined in minutes. Jackson, helpless at sword point, must have been mortified at what he had brought upon his aunt. (“I’ll warrant Andy thought of it at New Orleans,” a cousin declared decades later.) A British officer, perhaps intending to complete the lad’s humiliation, ordered him to clean his—the officer’s—muddy boots. At this point Jackson’s mortification flashed to anger, and he indignantly refused. The officer, determined to chastise the cheeky rebel, drew his sword and aimed a blow at the boy’s head. Jackson raised his left hand and deflected the blow but received a severe gash on his hand and another on his head. With blood pouring down his face and from his hand, he defiantly stood his ground and dared the officer to strike again.
The office
r must have been tempted to kill Jackson on the spot, but he decided to put him to better use. The dragoons didn’t know the country, and the officer rightly guessed that Jackson did. The officer had orders to find a particularly troublesome rebel named Thompson. He insisted that Jackson show the way to Thompson’s house and threatened to execute him if he led them awry. Jackson acceded to the demand but simultaneously frustrated it. There were two roads to Thompson’s house, one that went there directly, the other that circled within sight of the place a half mile before actually arriving. Jackson chose the latter, assuming that Thompson would be watching the road and that a half-mile head start was all he would need. Jackson’s assumption proved out, and he had the silent pleasure of watching Thompson ride away ahead of the dragoons, who were none the wiser for their failure.
Andrew, Robert, Thomas Crawford, and several other prisoners were then forcibly taken to Camden, where the British were collecting captured rebels. Jackson’s wound had stopped bleeding, but the pain was excruciating and the loss of blood produced a searing thirst. The prisoners’ guards, however, allowed them no water—or food either—on the journey, and when Jackson and the others tried to scoop water in their hands from the creeks they forded en route, their captors made them stop.
The prison camp was an abomination. More than two hundred inmates were crowded into a narrow annex to the county jail. They lacked beds, clothing, food, water, medicine—everything essential to prevent the outbreak of disease, which naturally occurred. Before long smallpox was raging through the camp, and the prisoners provided textbook illustrations of the progress of the disease, as the recently infected mingled with those farther gone, who in turn lay elbow to knee with the dying and the unburied dead. “I frequently heard them groaning in the agonies of death,” Jackson recalled years later.
For many days Jackson somehow managed to avoid infection. Prospects of rescue appeared to rise upon the approach of a rebel army under Nathanael Greene. From the distraction of the guards, the bustle about the camp, and the boasts of the British soldiers that they would do to Greene what their fellows had done to Horatio Gates—boasts that were accompanied by threats to hang all the prisoners—Jackson and the other prisoners divined the day the British were to commence the battle. To gain a view of the contest that might well decide their fate, Jackson borrowed an older prisoner’s razor and with great effort whittled a hole in one of the boards that had been nailed over the jailhouse windows.
From his peephole he reported to his fellow prisoners how the rebels, making effective use of artillery and small arms, initially forced the British to retreat. The news lifted the prisoners’ spirits. But then the British regrouped and counterattacked, and the rebel lines bent and broke. Greene was lucky to escape with his army intact.
Jackson and the other prisoners couldn’t help despairing. They saw nothing ahead but indefinite detention, broken only perhaps by death from the epidemic that continued to rage among them. The cause for which they had fought appeared equally endangered, raising the prospect that they would die in vain.
With time to reflect, Jackson must have thought of his mother, his dead brother, the father he had never known. And at the mercy of the British, he doubtless recalled a moment when he might have materially changed the course of recent events. Early in the Waxhaw fighting, not long after the massacre that made Banastre Tarleton infamous, the British colonel had ridden unknowingly past a place where Jackson had taken refuge. The boy could hear the horses snorting and almost make out what the Tory raiders were saying as they marched by. “Tarleton passed within a hundred yards,” Jackson remembered many years later. Still vexed at himself for his missed opportunity, he added, “I could have shot him.”
What Andrew Jackson inherited from his father is hard to say, due to the elder man’s early death. What he inherited from his mother is easier to identify, starting with an iron determination that allowed no obstacle to stand in the way of necessary action. Elizabeth’s determination had kept her fatherless brood together till the war split them up, and now it kept her from resting till she reclaimed her surviving sons from their disease-ravaged prison. After she learned of the capture of Robert and Andrew, she traced their path the forty miles to Camden, refusing to allow Tories, Indians, or outlaws to stand between a mother and her children. In Camden she hid her rebel sentiments sufficiently to persuade the British to exchange Andrew and Robert for some British prisoners their American captors couldn’t afford to keep.
The journey north to home was as arduous as the march south had been. Robert was gravely ill and in considerable pain. Elizabeth was exhausted from her efforts to find the boys and effect their release. Andrew was in the best condition of the three, and because they had only two horses among them, he walked while they rode. Yet even he was sorely fatigued and badly malnourished. It didn’t help his condition that the British had confiscated his shoes and jacket, compelling him to walk barefoot, cold, and wet through the upcountry spring.
Robert survived the journey only to expire on his second day home. Andrew was ill by then himself, having, as now became apparent, contracted smallpox in prison and incubated the disease on the way back. He grew feverish and delirious, and soon the characteristic pustules were slowly exploding across his skin. Elizabeth could do nothing but mop his brow with a cool cloth, keep him covered against the recurrent chills, and pray that he was one of those fortunates for whom the disease proved less than fatal.
In fact it did, as Andrew demonstrated a constitutional toughness that would characterize all his days. But his illness was a serious one and his recovery slow. Not for months was he fully himself again. As it happened, those months marked a lull in the fighting in the Waxhaw, and he was granted the rest he needed.
But there was no rest for Elizabeth. With Andrew safe—and Hugh and Robert dead—her thoughts turned to her nephews, whom she had raised almost as sons. William and James Crawford were prisoners at Charleston, where conditions were said to be as bad as those at Camden. She made the difficult journey there—160 miles, over country ravaged by the war—in hopes of bringing William and James home. But though her courage and determination remained as great as ever, her body now failed her. The months of flight, deprivation, and worry had reduced her resistance, and she contracted cholera. Within days she was dead.
Andrew got the sad news in the form of a bundle of her clothes. He had lost his father to overwork, and now his two brothers and his mother to war. At fourteen he faced the world alone.
Orphans were less rare in the eighteenth century than they would be later. Maternal death in childbirth left many infants without mothers. Accident and disease claimed numerous fathers, as well as some of those mothers who survived their children’s delivery. For young children, the loss of both parents was as difficult then as it would ever be, depriving them of both economic and emotional sustenance. For a child of Andrew Jackson’s age, the economic shock of orphanhood was mitigated by the fact that he was nearly an adult by contemporary standards.
Yet the emotional shock was still severe. In later years he liked to talk about the parting advice his mother gave him. As she left for Charleston to tend the prisoners there, she said:
Andrew, if I should not see you again I wish you to remember and treasure up some things I have already said to you: In this world you will have to make your own way. To do that you must have friends. You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you. To forget an obligation or be ungrateful for a kindness is a base crime—not merely a fault or a sin, but an actual crime. Men guilty of it sooner or later must suffer the penalty. In personal conduct be polite, but never obsequious. No one will respect you more than you esteem yourself. Avoid quarrels as long as you can without yielding to imposition. But sustain your manhood always. Never bring a suit at law for assault and battery or for defamation. The law affords no remedy for such out
rages that can satisfy the feelings of a true man. Never wound the feelings of others. Never brook wanton outrage upon your own feelings. If you ever have to vindicate your feelings or defend your honor, do it calmly. If angry at first, wait till your wrath cools before you proceed.
Thus Jackson remembered his mother. Perhaps she really said everything he ascribed to her. Perhaps he conflated what she did say with what he thought or wished she had said. The important thing is that his memory of his mother—whether accurate or embellished—became his guiding star. “Gentlemen,” he explained to the group hearing this recollection, “her last words have been the law of my life.” And they were almost his only inheritance. “I might about as well have been penniless, as I already was homeless and friendless. The memory of my mother and her teachings were after all the only capital I had to start in life, and on that capital I have made my way.”