He also took up with Rachel Donelson Robards, the vivacious daughter of the late John Donelson, one of Nashville's founders. He built a legal practice, entered into trading ventures, and began to acquire land and slaves. Arriving in 1788, Jackson thrived in the new frontier town. After admission to the bar in 1787, he accepted an offer to serve as public prosecutor in the new Mero District of North Carolina, west of the mountains, with its seat at Nashville on the Cumberland River. An orphan and a hardened veteran at the age of fifteen, Jackson drifted, taught school a little, and then read law in North Carolina. While trying to retrieve some nephews from a British prison ship, Andrew's mother also fell ill and died. In 1781, they were captured and contracted smallpox, of which Robert died shortly after their release. Too young for formal soldiering, Andrew and his brother Robert fought with American irregulars. Jackson's oldest brother Hugh enlisted in a patriot regiment and died at Stono Ferry, apparently from heatstroke. Fighting in the Carolina backcountry was especially savage, a brutish conflict of ambushes, massacres, and sharp skirmishes. The Revolutionary War ended Jackson's childhood and wiped out his remaining immediate family.
Jackson attended local schools, receiving an elementary education and perhaps a smattering of higher learning. His father died before his birth and Andrew's mother and her three small boys moved in with her Crawford relatives. Though his birthplace is in dispute, he considered himself a South Carolina native. Andrew Jackson was born on March 15, 1767, in the Waxhaw settlement, a community of Scotch-Irish immigrants along the border between North and South Carolina.