Andrew Jackson was born when our country was being settled. There was trouble about the boundary lines between the colony of North Carolina and the colony of South Carolina. The children were ardent "South Men" and "North Men" too. Until this border dispute was ended, they came home from school with bloody faces and torn clothes...

It is with such glimpses of pre-Revolutionary War days that Augusta Stevenson gets clearly to child minds the background of our famous countryman's boyhood. As a child Andy was a courageous fighter and also a wonderful horseman. He loved the out-of-doors and was friendly with the Indians. He knew so much about horses that his two uncles, both plantation owners, asked his advice when they were having trouble with their stock. Once Andy trapped a bad man who was abusing his uncle's animals.

When the Revolutionary War came Andy was only thirteen years old. But the Major of the militia company knew how strong he was, how well he rode and how much he knew about the roads and bypasses of the countryside. So he made Andy a mounted orderly. Andy served through the war just as the grown men did. He fought bravely, he was captured by the British, he was wounded by a British Officer, he was imprisoned. So many things happened to him it is a wonder he lived through them all. He lived to fight years later in Florida, to defeat the British at New Orleans, to be elected twice to the Presidency of the United States....Andy Jackson, the Boy Soldier never stopped fighting all his hard, brave, gallant life.

Augusta Stevenson was born in the little town of Patriot, Indiana, on the Ohio River. Though she moved away from there to live in a large city, the place of her birth left its mark on her. She has been a patriot all her life and there is nothing she likes better than to write books about patriotic Americans for American children.

Miss Stevenson knows boys. When she tells about boys who grew to be great Americans, she makes these boys real. Thousands of children who have read her books, Abe Lincoln: Frontier Boy, and Ben Franklin; Printer's Boy, think of these two famous men as friends, once boys like themselves. And when these children start reading American history in school and meet Lincoln and Franklin, they do not see them as formidable old men who died years and years ago. They recognize them as real human beings, well loved and remembered because Augusta Stevenson made them come alive in the books she wrote about their boyhood.

She is at her best in this book, for the character and the adventures of the tempestuous young Andrew give her talent full sway. The incidents she selects are just the ones to delight an alert child. Everything she tells makes a story. In the boy hero she reveres the qualities of the chieftain who all his life long fought for freedom, the brave, beloved unconquerable "Old Hickory." She makes the youngster thrill to admiration and imitation in these days when our freedom is again at stake.

From the dust jacket