Presidential Biographies | Jackson Administrations - Education

Education

As the youngest in the family, Andrew Jackson was better educated than his brothers, but he was certainly less learned than any of the U.S. presidents before him. (He was the first president since George Washington not to attend college.) As a boy Jackson attended several schools in the Waxhaw district, where he learned to read, write, and perform bookkeeping tasks. He also studied Greek and Latin but seemed to remember little of what he had learned. In general he was a poor student who showed little regard for the rules of the English language, and he was a famously bad speller all his life. Still, as president he could be forceful and eloquent in both writing and speech.

As a teenager Jackson decided that the way for him to make his fortune was to enter the legal profession. In 1784 he traveled to Salisbury, North Carolina, where he entered the law office of Spruce McCay to learn his new occupation. While Jackson...