Andrew Jackson by Paul Raymond Audibert, Paris.

Additional information on Audibert pending.

Andrew Jackson, Seventh President of the United States, (1829-1837) Born Waxhaw Settlement, N.C., March 15, 1767; died near Nashville, Tenn., June 8, 1845. The following is excerpted from the coverleaf of the engraving:

"General Jackson had been bred by the rough processes of the frontier; he had been his own schoolmaster and tutor; he had made himself a lawyer by putting his untaught sagacity and sense of right to the test in the actual conduct of suits in courts, as he had made himself a soldier by taking the field in command of frontier soldiers as unschooled as himself in discipline and tactics. There was a certain natural grace and sweetness in the man when he was at ease, and an impressive dignity always.***But his nature was compact of passion. His prejudices once fixed, were ineradicable. He believed with all the terrible force that was in him, when once engaged in any public matter, that those who were with him were his friends and the country's, those who were against him enemies of the country as well as of himself. Knowing his own convictions to be honest and formed without selfishness, he took their wisdom and their reasonableness for granted, and believed everyone who held opinions opposed to them to be moved by some sort of public or private malice. He had declined at first to let his name be used in connection with the presidency, deeming himself too old at 54.*** But, candiacy once undertaken, his passion played along every line of emotion and conviction opened by the novel business, as if he were again in the field with troops, and his friends were themselves at a loss how to govern him.*** General Jackson professed to be of the school of Mr. Jefferson himself; and what he professed he believed. There was no touch of the charlatan or demagogue about him. The action of his mind was as direct as sincere, as unsophisticated as the action of the mind of an ingenious child, though it exhibited also the sustained intensity and the range of a mature man. The difference between Mr. Jefferson and General Jackson was not a difference of moral quality, so much as a difference in social stock and breeding. Mrt. Jefferson, an aristocrat and yet a philosophical radical, deliberately practiced the arts of the politician and exhibited oftentimes the sort of insincerity which subtle natures yield to without loss of essential integrity. General Jackson was incapable of arts or deceptions of any kind. He was in fact what his partisans loved to call him, "a man of the people, the common people". Step by step, one stage following another, the old restrictions upon the suffrage*** had been removed, until in almost every part of the Union the men of the masses had become the stuff of politics. These men Jackson really represented, albeit with a touch of the honor and the chivalrous man of honor about him, which common people do not have; and the people new it; felt that an aristocratic order was upset, and they themselves had at last come into their own."--WOODROW WILSON, in A History of the American People, Harper and Bros. Effective published copyright, ©Mickey Cox 2002, All rights reserved.