Andrew Jackson was an American politician and lawyer who served as the seventh president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. Before his presidency, he rose to fame as a general in the U.S. Army and served in both houses of the U.S. Congress. Jackson's legacy is controversial. He has been praised as an advocate for working Americans and preserving the union of states, and criticized for his racist policies, particularly towards Native Americans. His political philosophy became the basis for the Democratic Party.
Presidential elections were held in the United States from October 31 to December 2, 1828. Just as in the 1824 election, President John Quincy Adams of the National Republican Party faced Andrew Jackson of the Democratic Party, making the election the second rematch in presidential history. Both parties were new organizations, and this was the first presidential election their nominees contested.
The Hermitage is a National Historic Landmark and museum located in Davidson County, Tennessee, United States, 10 miles (16 km) east of downtown Nashville in the neighborhood of Hermitage. The 1,000-acre (400 ha)+ site was owned by President Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, from 1804 until his death there in 1845. It also serves as his final resting place. Jackson lived at the property intermittently until he retired from public life in 1837.
Sarah Jackson was an American woman who was the White House hostess and acting first lady of the United States from November 26, 1834, to March 4, 1837. She served in this role as the daughter-in-law of U.S. president Andrew Jackson after marrying his adopted son, Andrew Jackson Jr. She had initially been named as mistress of the Jackson residence in Tennessee, the Hermitage, but she moved to the White House and became co-hostess with Emily Donelson after the Hermitage was damaged in a fire. When Donelson fell ill, Jackson took on the position of White House hostess in its entirety for the remainder of the term. After leaving the White House, she returned to the repaired Hermitage, living there for the remainder of her life.
Charles Dickinson was an American attorney and slave trader who was killed by Andrew Jackson in a duel. An expert marksman, Dickinson was shot in the chest by the future president due to a protracted disagreement which originated in an incident involving a horse which Jackson owned. Jackson himself was also wounded in the duel, but was able to recover.
Lyncoya Jackson, also known as Lincoyer or Lincoya, was an Indigenous American from a family that was a part of the Upper Creek tribal-geographical grouping and more than likely affiliated with Red Stick political party. The family lived in the Muscogee tribal town at Tallasseehatchee Creek in present-day eastern Alabama. Lyncoya's parents were killed on November 3, 1813, by troops led by John Coffee at the Battle of Tallusahatchee, an engagement of the Creek War and the larger War of 1812. Lyncoya survived the massacre and the burning of the settlement and was found lying on the ground next to the body of his dead mother. He was one of two Creek children from the village who were taken in by militiamen from Nashville, Tennessee. Lyncoya was the third of three Native American war orphans who were transported to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in 1813–14. The other two, Theodore and Charley, died or disappeared shortly after their arrivals in Tennessee, but Lyncoya survived and was raised in the household of former slave trader and ex-U.S. Senator Andrew Jackson.
The following is a list of important scholarly resources related to Andrew Jackson.
Andrew Jackson, I am given to understand, was a patriot and a traitor. He was one of the greatest of generals, and wholly ignorant of the art of war. A writer brilliant, elegant, eloquent, without being able to compose a correct sentence, or spell words of four syllables. The first of statesmen, he never devised, he never framed a measure. He was the most candid of men, and was capable of the profoundest dissimulation. A most law-defying, law-obeying citizen. A stickler for discipline, he never hesitated to disobey a superior. A democratic autocrat. An urbane savage. An atrocious saint.
Hannah Jackson was an African American woman who worked as a house slave for the seventh U.S. president Andrew Jackson and his wife Rachel. She was present at both their deaths. She was interviewed twice late in her life for her stories about Jackson and is thought to be the source of some of the stories told about his life.
Andrew Jackson bought and sold slaves from 1788 until 1844, both for use as a plantation labor force and for short-term financial gain through slave arbitrage. Jackson was most active in the interregional slave trade, which he euphemistically termed "the mercantile transactions," from the 1790s through the 1810s. Available evidence shows that speculator Jackson trafficked people between his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, and the slave markets of the lower Mississippi River valley.
Gilbert was an American man enslaved by Andrew Jackson, the 7th President of the United States. One of the affiants in the case of his death described him as a man of "strong sense and determined character." The man who killed him described him as "a very strong, stout man, possessed of a most violent and ungovernable temper and disposition, among many other faults."
The circumstances of the end of Rachel Donelson's relationship with Lewis Robards and transition to Andrew Jackson resurfaced as a campaign issue in the 1828 U.S. presidential election. As Frances Clifton put it in her study of Jackson's long friendship with John Overton, "Jackson's irregular marriage proved good propaganda for the friends of Adams and Clay. The political enemies of Jackson 'saw in his wife a weak spot in his armor through which his vitals might be reached; and they did not hesitate to make the most of it.'"
Harriet Chappell Owsley was a historian and archivist who studied the U.S. South region. She was curator of manuscripts at the Tennessee State Library and Archives and was co-editor of the first volume of The Papers of Andrew Jackson.
John Hutchings was a nephew by marriage of American slave trader, militia leader, and U.S. president Andrew Jackson. He was Jackson's partner in his general stores, and his slave-trading operation.
Andrew Erwin was an American innkeeper, merchant, North Carolina state legislator, freelance imperialist, and a business and political antagonist of seventh U.S. president Andrew Jackson.
Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, and his wife Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson had no biological children together but served as guardians to a large number of children, several of whom lived at the Hermitage at one time or another. Many of these children were members of the extended Donelson family, others were the children of Jackson's friends. Andrew Jackson also sent home three male Native American babies or children, who were called Charley, Theodore, and Lyncoya, who were collected before and during the Creek War, a subconflict of the War of 1812 and the first of Jackson's decades-long military and political campaigns to ethnically cleanse the south for white settlers so that their black slaves could plant cotton, a highly profitable cash crop. Lyncoya has been described as having been "adopted" by the Jacksons but there are no known documents attesting to any form of legal adoption. This was also the case for "the only ward that he and Rachel considered to be a child of theirs," Andrew Jackson Jr. There are no judicial or legislative records any of these "adoptions", and statutory family law was essentially non-existent in early 1800s Tennessee.
This is a list of people for whom Andrew Jackson, seventh U.S. president, acted as pater familias or served as a guardian, legal or otherwise. As Tennessee history writer Stanley Horn put it in 1938, "Jackson's friends had a habit of dying, and leaving their orphans to his care." As Jackson biographer Robert V. Remini wrote in 1977, "The list of Jackson's wards is almost endless...new names turn up with fresh examination." There was no comprehensive index of the wards until Rachel Meredith's 2013 master's thesis. Some of Jackson's wards would have lived at Hunter's Hill, and others would have grown up at what is now called the "Log Hermitage," which was originally a two-story blockhouse and was later converted for use as a slave cabin.
Andrew Jackson Jr. was the son of seventh U.S. president Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson Jr., a biological child of Rachel Jackson's brother Severn Donelson and Elizabeth Rucker, was the one child among their more than three dozen wards that they considered to be their own child. As presented in an 1878 newspaper feature on the surviving Jackson descendants still resident at the Hermitage, "In after years Gen. Jackson had other nephews, to whom he gave a hearty welcome into his home, but to none other did he ever give his name or make heir to his fortune. One of these nephews was the distinguished Andrew Jackson Donelson, who ran for Vice President on the Fillmore ticket, and who was always associated with the General, but who was not the bona fide adopted son, as many suppose." According to historian Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson Jr. was "irresponsible and ambitionless, a considerable disappointment to his father." When former president Jackson died, Junior inherited real and enslaved human property valued at roughly $150,000; within a decade he had turned his fortune into roughly $100,000 in debt.
Andrew Jackson, who served as the seventh U.S. president from 1829 to 1837, was involved with horse trading, and the racehorse business, for much of his life. He worked as a horse trader from a very early age, such that by age 15 in 1782 he was already considered "shrewd." When he worked as a merchant and slave trader in the 1790s and 1800s, he or his assistant John Hutchings often shipped both horses and people to "the lower country" for resale. Beginning in 1805 he was part owner of Clover Bottom Racetrack, an important racing venue in Davidson County, Tennessee.
