President Andrew Jackson

Today (15 March) is celebrated at The Hermitage in Nashville as the birthday of President Andrew Jackson, whose parents were Ulster-Scots.

Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States of America, a general in the War of 1812 and the victor at the Battle of New Orleans.  His parents were Andrew Jackson    and his wife Elizabeth Hutchinson and he had two brothers who were born in Ulster.  The family emigrated from Boneybefore, near Carrickfergus, in 1765 and Andrew was  born in North Carolina on 15 March 1767, shortly after they arrived in America.  He served as a boy soldier in the Revolutionary War and fought at the Battle of Hanging Rock.  Jackson trained as a lawyer and when Tennessee was admitted to the Union in 1796 he sat in the convention that framed its first constitution.  He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1796 and the Senate in 1797 but resigned in 1798 and served as a judge of the Tennessee Superior Court until 1804.  During the War of 1812 he was a major general of the Tennessee Militia and earned for himself the nickname 'Old Hickory'.  Jackson was elected to the United States Senate in 1822 but lost the presidential election of 1824. In 1828 he was the first United States president to be elected from the area west of the Appalachians and the first to gain office by a direct appeal to the mass of voters.  In 1832 he was re-elected for a second presidential term.  after that second term he lived in retirement at The Hermitage in Nashville and he died there on 8 June 1845.