Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, was a slave owner and slave trader who demonstrated a lifelong passion for the legal ownership and exploitation of enslaved black Americans. Unlike Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, Jackson "never questioned the morality of slavery." [2]
Jackson was active in the interregional slave trade, transporting people by boat from the Cumberland River district of Tennessee to the Natchez District of Mississippi. [3] In 1811 a Choctaw Indian agent, Silas Dinsmore, theoretically tried to enforce a prohibition on trafficking slaves through Choctaw territory. According to his political opponents, Jackson declared his intention to disregard this law, ranting, "I am no kidnapper. I am no slave. I want no passport. I am a freeman, and if I cannot pass freely with my property, my rifle and my pistols wilt pass me; they have never yet failed me; and while I have strength of arm to use them, they never will?" [4]
Jackson owned three plantations in total, one of which was Hermitage labor camp, which had an enslaved population of 150 people at the time of Jackson's death. [5] When General Lafayette made his tour of the United States in 1824–25, he visited the Hermitage and his secretary recorded in his diary, "General Jackson successively showed us his garden and farm, which appeared to be well cultivated. We everywhere remarked the greatest order, and most perfect neatness; and we might have believed ourselves on the property of one of the richest and most skilfull of German farmers, if, at every step, our eyes had not been afflicted by the sad spectacle of slavery." [6]
During his presidency, the Hermitage all but fell to ruin, and Jackson's slaves suffered the consequences. According to a history of agriculture in early Tennessee, "Jackson had, beginning in 1795, an overseer; and all his race horses were fed and trained and cared for by other men. He managed very well—as long as Rachel lived to manage for him. The frantic, yet always hopeful letters to his adopted son during his second term as President, though coming long past this period, demonstrate too well the problem of the absentee owner on the Cumberland, trying to keep a plantation going almost entirely on money from the crop...The letters tell a tale of mismanagement and bad judgement...Neighbors wrote Jackson of Negroes sick and several dead, one suspects from brutality and ill treatment in general from the overseer, for there was no Rachel around to oversee the overseer...There is something infinitely pathetic about Jackson, honest, patient—a strange role for Jackson—old, watching the ruin of everything he had worked for all his life." [7] : 303–305
Jackson and his son Andrew Jackson Jr. bought a plantation in Coahoma County, Mississippi called Halcyon. Halcyon was managed by overseer J. M. Parker. [8]
Jackson also owned 640 acres of former Creek lands "south of the Tennessee on the Military road between the river and big spring." [9]
According to historian Mark Cheathem, between 1804 and 1827, "at least ten male slaves ran away from plantations owned by or under Jackson's control." [10]
A visitor to the Hermitage described the slave quarters there: "Each family had a one-story frame house that was painted either white or red, and with it about an acre of ground, all fenced in with palings or board fence and whitewashed; and around each of these houses were a lot of fruit trees and shrubbery." [11]
The Hermitage's long-lost slave cemetery was rediscovered in 2024 after decades of investigation. Ground-penetrating radar identified 29 graves (although that is not necessarily equivalent to the number of burials). [12] The cemetery is located about 1,000 feet (300 m) northwest of the mansion. [13]
Andrew Jackson is known to have placed two runaway slave ads, one for "a mulatto Man Slave" in 1804, and one for Gilbert in 1822. [14] The year before the 1828 U.S. presidential election, pioneering American abolitionist Benjamin Lundy republished news items suggesting that Andrew Jackson had been a slave trader in his younger days, commenting, "I shall be slow to believe that General Jackson would at this day be guilty of carrying on the 'lawful business' of men-dealing, although it is strongly commended by high authority in Maryland. It may be, that the following circumstance gave rise to the suspicion entertained by the Kentuckian. Some years since, a gentleman, residing near the mouth of the Ohio river, informed me that a slave belonging to General Jackson having absconded, was taken up and committed to jail (if I mistake not) in Alabama. The General got word of it, and went for him. After identifying him, he took him out of the jail, tied him to a joist, in a blacksmith-shop, and gave him a very severe flogging. He then took him home. This case has often been related in Kentucky, and possibly magnified so as to give rise to the statement relative to the General's connection with the slave trade." [15] The Jackson papers show that he expended time and effort on the problem of Tom Wid, George, and Osten, all three of whom, at one time or another made an effort to no longer be enslaved under the purview of Andrew Jackson. Historian Mark Cheathem believes George (b. c. 1770) was likely an estate slave inherited by Rachel Jackson from her father and who was once bitten by a snake; despite Andrew Jackson chasing him around for a while he ultimately made it to New Orleans from whence he disappeared. [16]
According to Anita Goodstein's study of frontier-era Nashville black history, Jackson was "furious when his wife's maid [laundered] clothes for people outside the family. He ordered that she be taken to the public whipping post and given fifty lashes should she try to do it again." Jackson was apparently strongly opposed to the possibility that his slaves might hire themselves out and earn money independent of his control. [17]
Dinwiddie (also known as Dunwoody), born c. 1773, purchased 1806, worked as a trainer in Jackson's stables until Jackson's death. [18] Dinwiddie and a famous horse named Truxton were both available for lease from the Jacksons. [19]
According to James Robinson, after Jackson used slaves to fight and win the Battle of New Orleans, he made a speech recanting promises to free the slaves who fought in his command and added, "Before a slave of mine should go free, I would put him in a barn and burn him alive." [20] Some 50 years later, amid the public debate about the formation of African-American military units during the American Civil War, an Ohio newspaper editorialized, "Out, we say, upon that squeamish Democracy that would shield the negro from the privations and dangers of the war! Gen. Jackson, whose Democracy no Democrat, at least, will question, had no scruples about negroes going into the army. They fought like veterans at the battle of New Orleans--(an event that Democrats even now delight to commemorate)--and publicly commended them for their bravery. If it was right that negroes should fight then, what makes it wrong now?" [21]
During Jackson's presidency, slavery remained a minor political issue. [22] Though federal troops were used to crush Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831, [23] Jackson ordered them withdrawn immediately afterwards despite the petition of local citizens for them to remain for protection. [24] Jackson considered the issue too divisive to the nation and to the delicate alliances of the Democratic Party. [25]
Jackson's view was challenged when the American Anti-Slavery Society agitated for abolition [26] by sending anti-slavery tracts through the postal system into the South in 1835. [25] Jackson condemned these agitators as "monsters" [27] who should atone with their lives [28] because they were attempting to destroy the Union by encouraging sectionalism. [29] The act provoked riots in Charleston, and pro-slavery Southerners demanded that the postal service ban distribution of the materials. To address the issue, Jackson authorized that the tracts could be sent only to subscribers, whose names could be made publicly accountable. [30] That December, Jackson called on Congress to prohibit the circulation through the South of "incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection". [31]
Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States, serving from 1829 to 1837. Before his presidency, he gained fame as a general in the U.S. Army and served in both houses of the U.S. Congress. Sometimes praised as an advocate for working Americans and for preserving the union of states, Jackson is also criticized for his racist policies, particularly regarding Native Americans.
The Hermitage is a historical 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 at the Hermitage in 1845. It also serves as his final resting place. Jackson lived at the property intermittently until he retired from public life in 1837.
Andrew Jackson Donelson was an American diplomat and politician. He served in various positions as a Democrat and was the Know Nothing nominee for US vice president in 1856.
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.
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.
Fugitive slave advertisements in the United States or runaway slave ads, were paid classified advertisements describing a missing person and usually offering a monetary reward for the recovery of the valuable chattel. Fugitive slave ads were a unique vernacular genre of non-fiction specific to the antebellum United States. These ads often include detailed biographical information about individual enslaved Americans including "physical and distinctive features, literacy level, specialized skills," and "if they might have been headed for another plantation where they had family, or if they took their children with them when they ran."
Andrew Jackson bought and sold slaves from 1788 until 1844, both for use on his plantations and for short-term gain through slave arbitrage. He was most active in the interregional slave trade, which he 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.
Joseph Erwin was an American racehorse owner, owner of cotton and sugar plantations, and a slave trader. He is best known for the enmity between him and future U.S. president Andrew Jackson. Their conflict over their competing thoroughbred racehorses, Erwin's Ploughboy and Jackson's Truxton, led to the fatal 1806 duel between Jackson and Erwin's son-in-law Charles Dickinson. Erwin moved to Louisiana where he owned as many as seven plantations and hundreds of slaves. He ended up heavily in debt. Erwin died by suicide in 1829.
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 nearly three dozen wards that they considered to be their own child. 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.
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