Andrew Jackson by H.W. Brands Read Free Book Online Page A

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.”

W hat 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