Andrew Jackson
The frontier general turned president who built the first mass political party, broke the national bank, and drove the southeastern Native nations off their land.
Andrew Jackson was the first American president who was not a gentleman planter of the founding generation or the son of one, and he never let anyone forget it. Orphaned in the Revolution, scarred as a boy by a British officer's sword, a duelist, a slave trader, a militia general who hanged mutineers and invaded Spanish Florida without orders, he arrived in national politics as a figure the Virginia elite regarded as barely governable. He then remade American politics in his own image, and the country has argued about him ever since.
The people's president
Fame came in a single afternoon. On January 8, 1815, outside New Orleans, Jackson's ragged force shattered a British assault, inflicting some 2,000 casualties for a few dozen of his own. The peace treaty had already been signed in Europe, which changed nothing about how Americans felt. In 1824 he won the most popular and electoral votes in a four-way race, and lost anyway when the contest went to the House and Henry Clay's support made John Quincy Adams president. Jackson called it a corrupt bargain and spent four years campaigning on it, which produced something new: a permanent national organization, run by Martin Van Buren, that turned elections into mass mobilization with rallies, newspapers, and patronage jobs for the faithful. He won in 1828 in a landslide. That machine became the Democratic Party, the oldest continuously operating political party in the world.
He also enlarged the presidency itself. Jackson used the veto more than all six of his predecessors combined and used it on grounds of policy rather than constitutionality, converting the office from an executor of Congress's will into a rival center of power that claimed to speak for the nation directly.
Removal
The signature policy of that presidency was ethnic cleansing. Jackson had made his name fighting the Creeks and believed Native nations had no future east of the Mississippi. The Indian Removal Act passed the House in May 1830 by 102 votes to 97, a margin of three, over serious opposition, and he signed it two days later. When the Cherokee took Georgia to the Supreme Court and won in Worcester v. Georgia, Jackson simply declined to enforce the ruling, and the Court discovered it had no army. Removal was carried out under his successor: roughly 16,000 Cherokee were marched west in 1838 and 1839, and about a quarter of them died on the way. Their nations were not the only ones. Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole were driven out too, and the land they left became the cotton kingdom.
Nullification and the Bank
Two other fights defined him, and they cut in opposite directions. When South Carolina declared in 1832 that it could nullify a federal tariff, Jackson, a Southerner and slaveholder, treated it as treason, got authority from Congress to use force, and privately threatened to hang the leaders. The Union survived the crisis intact, thirty years before it was tested for real. Against the Second Bank of the United States he was equally implacable and far less careful: he vetoed its recharter in 1832 as a monster serving the rich, pulled federal deposits into favored state banks, and helped set up the speculative boom and the Panic of 1837 that broke his successor's presidency.
Jackson is the permanent American argument in one man. He widened democracy for white men further than anyone before him while enslaving roughly 150 people at his Tennessee plantation and destroying the sovereignty of Native nations. In 2016 the Treasury announced he would be replaced on the twenty dollar bill by Harriet Tubman, a woman he would have considered property. The redesign was delayed, then delayed again, and in July 2026 the Treasury said it was no longer pursuing it. He is still on the money.