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

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.
     
    O rphans 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 outrages 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.”
     
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