1767–1845 · 7th President of the United States, 1829–1837
Andrew Jackson was born in the Waxhaw settlement on the Carolina border on 15 March 1767, rose to fame as a general, served in both houses of Congress, and was president from 1829 to 1837; he died at the Hermitage near Nashville on 8 June 1845. He was relentlessly lampooned by his opponents as an unlettered frontiersman, and, as Ralph Keyes notes in The Quote Verifier, “particularly ridiculed for being a poor speller” — which is precisely why a ready-made joke about creative spelling drifted onto him decades after he was gone. The same reputation attracted other inventions, including the mangled order “Elevate them guns a little lower.”