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] 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." [6] : 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. [7]
Jackson also owned 640 acres of former Creek lands "south of the Tennessee on the Military road between the river and big spring." [8]
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." [9]
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. [10] 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." [11]
According to Anita Goodstein's study of frontier-era Nashville black history, Jackson was "furious when his wife's maid 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. [12]
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." [13] 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?" [14]
During Jackson's presidency, slavery remained a minor political issue. [15] Though federal troops were used to crush Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831, [16] Jackson ordered them withdrawn immediately afterwards despite the petition of local citizens for them to remain for protection. [17] Jackson considered the issue too divisive to the nation and to the delicate alliances of the Democratic Party. [18]
Jackson's view was challenged when the American Anti-Slavery Society agitated for abolition [19] by sending anti-slavery tracts through the postal system into the South in 1835. [18] Jackson condemned these agitators as "monsters" [20] who should atone with their lives [21] because they were attempting to destroy the Union by encouraging sectionalism. [22] 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. [23] That December, Jackson called on Congress to prohibit the circulation through the South of "incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection". [24]
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. Often praised as an advocate for ordinary Americans and for his work in preserving the union of states, Jackson has also been criticized for his racial policies, particularly his treatment of 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.
Sarah Jackson was an American woman who was the White House hostess and the eighth 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.
The presidency of Andrew Jackson began on March 4, 1829, when Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as President of the United States, and ended on March 4, 1837. Jackson, the seventh United States president, took office after defeating incumbent President John Quincy Adams in the bitterly contested 1828 presidential election. During the 1828 presidential campaign, Jackson founded the political force that coalesced into the Democratic Party during Jackson's presidency. Jackson won re-election in 1832, defeating National Republican candidate Henry Clay by a wide margin. He was succeeded by his hand-picked successor, Vice President Martin Van Buren, after Van Buren won the 1836 presidential election.
Lyncoya Jackson, also known as Lincoyer or Lincoya, was an Indigenous American born into a Muscogee family that was part of the Upper Creek tribal-geographical grouping and more than likely affiliated with Red Stick political party. The family lived in the tribal town near 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 raised in the household of slave trader and former U.S. Senator Andrew Jackson. Lyncoya was the third of three Indian war orphans who were transported to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in 1813–14.
The following is a list of important scholarly resources related to Andrew Jackson.
Andrew Johnson, who became the 17th U.S. president following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, was one of the last U.S. Presidents to personally own slaves. Johnson also oversaw the first years of the Reconstruction era as the head of the executive branch of the U.S. government. This professional obligation clashed with Johnson's long-held personal resentments: "Johnson's attitudes showed much consistency. All of his life he held deep-seated Jacksonian convictions along with prejudices against blacks, sectionalists, and the wealthy." Johnson's engagement with Southern Unionism and Abraham Lincoln is summarized by his statement, "Damn the negroes; I am fighting these traitorous aristocrats, their masters!"
A coffle, sometimes called a platoon or a drove, was a group of enslaved people chained together and marched from one place to another by owners or slave traders. These troupes, sometimes called shipping lots before they were moved, ranged in size from a fewer than a dozen to 200 or more enslaved people.
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.
The history of slavery in Tennessee began when it was the old Southwest Territory and thus the law regulating slavery in Tennessee was broadly derived from North Carolina law, and was initially comparatively "liberal." However, after statehood, as the fear of slave rebellion and the threat to slavery posed by abolitionism increased, the laws became increasingly punitive: after 1831, "punishments were increased and privileges and immunities were lessened and circumvented." Tennessee was one of five states that allowed slaves the right of a jury trial, and one of three states that never passed anti-literacy laws, although the punishment for forging a slave pass was up to 39 lashes.
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."
Lewis Robards was an American Revolutionary War veteran and Kentucky pioneer who is best remembered as the first husband of Rachel Jackson, who was later married to Andrew Jackson, elected U.S. president in 1828.
This is a bibliography of works about Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–1877), an American slave trader, cotton plantation owner, Confederate cavalry leader, railroad executive, and Grand Wizard of the First Klan.
The question of whether Andrew Jackson—who lived from 1767 to 1845, and was president of the United States from 1829 to 1837—had been a "negro trader" was a campaign issue during the 1828 United States presidential election. Jackson denied the charges, and the issue failed to connect with the electorate. However, Jackson had indeed been a speculator in slaves, participating in the interregional trade between 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.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)