Jackson, from a Scot-Irish frontier background, could not have been more different from the patrician Virginians and New Englanders who had preceded him. Coming from the humblest of beginnings, and orphaned during the Revolution, he became a United States senator at 30; a self-taught lawyer and state Supreme Court judge; and as a general, the conqueror of most of the southeastern United States and the winner, against the British, of the Battle of New Orleans, perhaps the most lopsided military victory in American history until the first Gulf War. "Fearless, principled [on the side of egalitarianism and against privilege], and damaged, Andrew Jackson was one of the fiercest and most controversial men ever to serve as president of the United States" (Wilentz).
"His career as frontier warrior and self-made plantation magnate exemplified aspirations that were widely shared by American men of his time. He was the first president with whom many ordinary Americans could identify and the first to have a nickname" [Old Hickory] …. Jackson’s success in life personified the wresting of the continent from alien enemies, both Native and European, white supremacy over other races, and equal opportunity for all white males, without preference for birth or education, to enjoy the spoils of conquest. A visitor to his plantation house, the Hermitage outside Nashville would find the log cabins of his youth standing alongside the stately mansion with its Greek columns and imported French wallpaper." (Daniel Walker Howe).
"As a boy soldier during the American Revolution, Jackson had been captured by British dragoons and ordered to scrape the mod off an officer’s boots. When Jackson claimed the status of a prisoner of war and refused to be shamed, the officer slashed him with a sword, nearly severing several fingers and cutting a permanent trench into the boy’s skull" (Sean Wilentz). You can’t see it beneath the shock of white hair in Asher Durand’s famous portrait of 1835, but a year before he sat for that portrait, "while the Senate was debating whether to censure him for presidential misconduct, he learned that a Whig congressman planned to introduce articles of impeachment—and to charge that the stories about the wartime slashing had been invented as a campaign ploy." (Daniel Walker Howe).