Jackson’s parents emigrated from Ireland

On March 15, 1767, Andrew Jackson was born close to Lancaster, South Carolina. Two years prior, his parents Andrew and Elizabeth, as well as his two older brothers Hugh and Robert, left Ireland.

Shortly before he was born, Jackson's father, for whom he was named, passed away. Jackson grew up with a big extended family who were also Scots-Irish immigrant farmers at the Waxhaws settlement on the North Carolina and South Carolina border, where he was raised by his widowed mother. With his tendency for tricks, swearing, and fighting, young Jackson rapidly destroyed his mother's dreams of him becoming a Presbyterian minister.

Due to a lack of information regarding his mother's actions immediately after her husband's death, Jackson's precise birthplace is unknown. The border between North and South Carolina had not been formally surveyed since the region was so remote. Andrew Jackson claimed in a letter he had written in 1824 that he had been born in Lancaster County, South Carolina, on his uncle James Crawford's estate. Jackson might have asserted his South Carolinian citizenship because he opposed the state's plans to annul the Tariff of 1824, which was being considered by South Carolina. He might have been born at the residence of a different uncle in North Carolina, according to second-hand information from the mid-1850s.