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Personal Military career 7th President of the United States
Tenure Presidential campaigns   | ||
Andrew Jackson was an American slave trader andfreebooter who became the seventh president of the United States. Jackson (lifespan, 1767–1845; U.S. presidency, 1829–1837) bought and sold slaves from 1788 until 1844, both for use as a plantation labor force and for short-term financial gain through slavearbitrage. Jackson was most active in theinterregional slave trade, which he termed "the mercantile transactions",[1] from the 1790s through the 1810s. Available evidence shows that speculator Jackson trafficked people between his hometown ofNashville, Tennessee, and the slave markets of the lowerMississippi River valley. Unlike theFounding Father presidents, Jackson inherited no slaves or lands from his parents, so he hustled for his fortune. He bought and sold groceries, dry goods, wine, whiskey, furs, pelts, stock animals, and horses; he promoted cockfights and built racetracks; he soldflatboats and ran a shipping business; he speculated in military land warrants and resold land grifted off the Indians; his slaves and overseers grew enough of the valuable cash crop cotton that it has been said that he farmed; he lawyered, he judged, he traded in negroes.
Jackson bought and sold outright, but slaves also served as barter for trade goods, currency for real estate transactions, and as the stakes in bets on horse races. "Cash or negroes" were the preferred payment methods of the frontier U.S. south. While Jackson had a number of business interests in Tennessee, many of Jackson's slave sales took place in theNatchez District in what is now the state of Mississippi, theFeliciana District in what is now the state of Louisiana, and inNew Orleans. Jackson ran a trading stand and saloon in the vicinity ofBruinsburg, Mississippi (not far fromPort Gibson), and/or atOld Greenville, two now-extinct settlements at the southern end of an ancient and rugged Indigenous trade route known to history as theNatchez Trace. Jackson's customers included his wife's sister's extended family and their neighbors, Anglo-American settlers who owned tobacco farms and cotton plantations worked by slave labor. Jackson seems to have traded in partnership with his Donelson brothers-in-law and nephews. After 1800, Jackson often tasked his nephew-by-marriageJohn Hutchings with escorting their shipments to the lower country. In 1812, while arguing over acoffle that he himself had shopped around Natchez, Andrew Jackson admitted in writing that he was an experienced slave trader, stating that his cost for "Negroes sent to markett [sic]...never averaged more from here than fifteen dollars a head."[1]
There is substantial evidence of slaving to be found in Jackson's letters; Jackson was identified as a slave trader in his own lifetime by abolitionist writers includingBenjamin F. Lundy andTheodore Dwight Weld; and there are a number of secondhand accounts attesting to Jackson's business dealings in Mississippi and Louisiana. Jackson's slave trading was a major issue during the1828 United States presidential election. Some of Jackson's accusers during the 1828 campaign had known him for decades and were themselves affiliated with the trade. His candidacy was also opposed by a number of Natchez elites who provided affidavits or copies of Jackson's slave-sale receipts to local newspapers. Jackson and his supporters denied that he was a slave trader, and the issue failed to connect with the electorate.
Little is known about the people Jackson sold south. However, because of the partisan hostility of the 1828 campaign, there are surviving records naming eight individuals carried to Mississippi: Candis, age 20, and Malinda, age 14, sold at the same time to the same buyer for $1,000 for the pair; Fanny, sold for $280; a 35-year-old woman named Betty and her 15-year-old daughter Hannah, sold together for $550; and a young mother named Kessiah, and her two children, a three-year-old named Ruben and an infant named Elsey, sold as a family for $650.
Jackson, a native of theCarolinas and pioneer settler ofTennessee in 1788, was connected to colonial-eraMississippi by the geography of commerce. Moving goods between the east coast and theCumberland River basin was challenging because of the necessary, difficult, and expensive passage through theAppalachian Mountains.[2] Moving goods north to market inKentucky or theIllinois Country was pointless because those places produced more or less the same products as Tennessee.[3] That left the western inland waterways as the road to market, and in much ofwhat became the territory of the United States inNorth America, these waters lead to the mouth of theMississippi River at theGulf of Mexico and from there to the rest of theAtlantic world.[4]
Before colonization and settlement, the land that came to be known as theNatchez District was the domain of Indigenous communities including theHoumas, theKoroas, theNatchez (Na·šceh), and theTunicas.[5] Other tribes with scattered settlements in the lower Mississippi included theAtakapa (Ishakkoy),Biloxi (Tanêksa),Caddo (Hasí꞉nay),Chitimacha,Opelousa, andQuapaw (Ogáxpa).[6] Following the bloodyNatchez revolt of 1729, counterrevolutionary violence by French colonial militias all but destroyed the region's namesake Natchez people. Most of the Natchez were killed, some were sold into slavery onSaint-Domingue, a few survivors escaped and wereassimilated into Creek (Muscogee,Mvskoke) orCherokee (Tsalagi,ᏣᎳᎩ) communities.[7] In 1765, theChoctaw (Chahta) signed the old Natchez domain over to theBritish Empire, and as part ofWest Florida theNatchez District attracted a handful of families fleeing theThirteen Colonies during theAmerican Revolutionary War.[a] In 1785, a visitor estimated the population of the Natchez District at 2,000, with approximately 900 slaves laboring for 1,100 colonists.[10] Spain took control and openedSpanish West Florida to American colonists on August 23, 1787.[11] The population of colonial-era Natchez was clustered along the waterways,[12] namely theBig Black River,Bayou Pierre,Cole's Creek,Fairchild's Creek,St. Catherine's Creek, and theHomochitto River (with itsright-banktributariesSecond Creek andSandy Creek). These streams and rivers also served as the region's commercial thoroughfares; travelers and migrant trains surely cut through the pine woods and tramped over thehummocks of the cypress swamps, but the land routes were comparatively inferior passages for traders moving goods in bulk.[13] Just about everything else between the Mississippi River andGeorgia wastitled to the Cherokee,Chickasaw (Chikashsha), Choctaw, and Creek people native to the region.[13] By the last decade of the 18th century, the Natchez region had a polyglot, pluralistic, creolized culture.[14] The region's economy was also rapidly changing, astobacco,indigo, timber, and cattle were being supplanted by industrial-scalecotton agriculture.[15] There are no known sources that historians can use to study the importation of slaves to Mississippi prior to the 1810s, but it is clear that the end of the Spanish tobaccosubsidy and the simultaneous removal of trade barriers spurred an increase in the slave trade.[16] Traders and slave owners moved an estimated 18,000 enslaved people over land, river, and sea into lower Louisiana between 1790 and 1810.[17]
The primacy of cotton meant that "slavery became very much a central institution and defining feature" of the region.[18] Around 1792, settlers were predominantly Anglo-American and two out of every three slaves in the Natchez District wereAfrican-born.[19] Some African-born slaves destined for the United States were first carried to theWest Indies, in particular to the Britishcolony of Jamaica,[20] whose planters preferred to buyIgbo people from "theGold Coast and theBight of Benin".[21] TheMississippi Territory of theUnited States was organized in 1798.[22] When the Natchez District transitioned from Spanish to Americansuzerainty and from "a frontier to a borderland, and eventually to a bordered land...slaves were the losing party in the transfer of power."[23] Although the territorial organizing act prohibited the introduction to Mississippi of slaves from outside the U.S., this "foreign trade ban seems to have been ignored."[24] The importation of these so-calledsaltwater slaves to American ports continued until 1808, when thelaw prohibitingtransatlantic slave shipments went into effect,[25] although slavers, euphemistically termedprivateers, continued to deliver to trading centers just beyond the U.S. border, includingGalveston (just down theGulf coast from the port of New Orleans), andAmelia Island (nearly the southernmost of theSea Islands, and just south of the Georgia border in what was thenSpanish East Florida).[26][27]
Available evidence shows that Jackson participated in what is called theinternal slave trade, buying and selling enslaved Americans born and raised in the first 16 U.S. states. These were termedcountry-born negroes (as opposed to enslavedLouisiana Creole people, enslavedSaint-Domingue Creoles,Guinea negroes from the so-calledSlave Coast of West Africa, orCongo-born slaves fromcentral Africa, perhaps bearing what were called "country marks" resulting fromritual scarification).[28] Jackson seemingly moved people from theeastern seaboard and theupland south to what is now called theDeep South, where more demand made for higher prices.[29] Trafficking American-born slaves across the continent to colonial Natchez and New Orleans would have been somewhat unusual and enterprising; it was not until after 1815 that American slave traders regularly shipped African-American slaves from the Atlantic states to the lower south.[30]
As of 1800, the total estimated population of the Natchez District was a little under 4,700 people, about evenly split between free and enslaved people.[32] Meanwhile, Indians in the lower Mississippi found that their alliances with Britain and Spain had collapsed as a consequence of the Revolutionary War and they could no longer effectively inhibit the growth of the plantation regime.[33] Interested governments did not attempt to enumerate Indigenous people in the vicinity of Natchez, but there were likely 30,000 to 40,000 Native Americans resident in the unceded lands between the river and the Georgia frontier.[32][34] In 1802,Thomas Jefferson wroteRobert R. Livingston that the preeminent geopolitical enemy of the United States was whichever power was the possessor of New Orleans "through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from it's fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants."[35] The following year,France sold the 828,000 sq mi (2,140,000 km2)Louisiana territory to the United States.[36] A few months later Jefferson replied to a letter from Jackson and mentioned the new territorial expansion, describing it as a "noble prospect of provision for [the] ages" that would be of "immense importance to our future tranquility", in that it would serve as a defensive buffer zone between the population centers of the American eastern seaboard and potentially hostile colonial powers, keeping them "to a distance from which they can no longer produce disturbance between the Indians & us." Jefferson also proposed the idea that would eventually come to pass as the dispossession and expulsion of the southeastern tribes to theshortgrass prairies further west, "which perhaps they will be willing to exchange with us." In Jefferson's romantic vision of the Louisiana Purchase, "the world will here see such an extent of country under a free and moderate government as it has never yet seen."[37] As Jackson himself argued a decade later, if the mouth of the Mississippi were closed to Americans "all the fruits of his industry rots upon his land—open, and he carries on a trade with all the nations of the earth. To the people of Western Country is then peculiarly committed by nature herself the defense of the lower Mississippi and the city of New Orleans."[38]Louisiana became the 18th U.S. state on April 30, 1812.[39]Mississippi was admitted to the Union as the 20th state on December 10, 1817.[40]
It is not quite 1,000 mi (1,600 km)as the crow flies fromPittsburgh, at the head of the Ohio, to Natchez on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, andNashville stands at just about themidpoint on the route between the states thatratified the U.S. Constitution, and the outlet of a continent-spanning river system.[41] Nashville was never afirst-tier slave market, but as late as 1860 the city served as a sort offulcrum for the domestic trade.[42]
Jackson spent very few of his formative years anywhere near the center of national politics, and so the ways he behaved as president only make sense in the context of what preceded...To say that he was prosecutor, state judge, congressman, and U.S. senator—all before he rose in stature as a victorious major general during the War of 1812—is to explain little or nothing about Jackson's appeal or even his ambition.
— Andrew Burstein,The Passions of Andrew Jackson (2003)[43]
The contempt for authority and law that characterized his youthful and early adult life in Tennessee is clearly discernible in his later acts. Florida boundary, War Department orders,Marshall Court decisions, Congressional resolutions, all got equally short shrift. The arrogance, the disingenuousness, the cruel disregard for the rights of Indians, the highhandedness, the egotism bordering on egomania, the intolerance, the joy in hating, the emotionalism, the pettiness, the vindictiveness, that mark his career before 1828 continued to manifest themselves afterwards.
— Edward Pessen,Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (1985, rev. ed.)[44]
Jackson's attitude towardTexas fit with his foreign policy in general, which was largely a projection of his personal experience. As a planter and land speculator, he took an interest in the expansion of cotton acreage and in securing overseas markets for agricultural staples.Indian Removal, foreign trade agreements, andTexas annexation all reflected these interests...[Late in life] Jackson had removed any cloak from his aggressive imperialism...the letters he scratched out breathed fire against old enemies, the British and the abolitionists who stood in his way.
It is almost too deep and awful to look into.
— U.S. RepresentativeJohn Clopton, about the internal slave trade, quoted inJesse Torrey,A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery (1817)[46]
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During his first months living in theWatauga District near the present-day border between North Carolina and Tennessee, in "summer or early fall 1788",[47] Jackson organized and publicized a 0.5-mile (0.80 km) race at the semicircular Greasy Cove racetrack at what is nowErwin,Unicoi County, pitting his racehorse against one fielded byRobert Love, Jackson's acquaintance of four years past, and a veteran of battles with the British, Cherokee, andShawnee (Šaawanwaki). The planned matchup between the two horses triggered an absolute frenzy of wagering: "Guns, furs, iron, clothing, cattle, horses, negroes, crops, lands and all the money procurable were staked on the result."[48][49] Jackson personally rode in the race, and reacted to his defeat with a "Vesuvius of rage", during which display "Jackson denounced the Loves as a 'band of land pirates,' because they held the ownership of nearly all the choice lands in that section."[48][b] Shortly thereafter, on November 17, 1788, inWashington County, Jackson made his first recorded slave purchase, a woman named Nancy who was between 18 and 20 years old.[52][53] According to historian Whitney Snow, Jackson's employment income as an attorney was unpredictable, and insufficient to cover his financial losses, so he "began dabbling in mercantilism,land speculation, and theinterstate slave trade" and found that of the three, "slave trading not only relieved Jackson of debt but also allowed him to accumulate a larger-than-average work force of slave labor, a sure sign of status at the time."[54][c] The debts accumulated because Jackson was prone to making imprudent financial investments (such as a disastrous deal with fellow speculatorDavid Allison);status symbol purchases including "large sums for fine wines, expensive furnishings, hand-painted wallpaper, variousobjets d'art, and costlycut glass;"[60] and, throughout his life, extravagant wagers on sporting events.[61][62] As one example of Jackson's grandiosity in gambling, it is told that in 1815 a large friend saw fit to physically pick up Jackson and carry him away in order to prevent him from betting$10,000 (equivalent to $171,800 in 2024) that his horse Yellow Queen would win her race against Jesse Haynie's Maria.[62] Yellow Queen lost, Maria won.[62]
Regarding the accumulation of slaves, as Frederick M. Binder put it in hisThe Color Problem in Early National America (1968), "There was much about [Jackson] to remind one of the rudefrontiersman, but one need only read his letters concerning family affairs andplantation management to recognize marks of theSouthern aristocrat."[64] Yet, according to a study ofagriculture in Tennessee byHarriette Simpson Arnow, "Jackson's letters in particular are relatively untouched with remarks on the nature of thesoil about him,the weather, and the swing of the crops through the seasons...farming was for Andrew Jackson...a capitalistic enterprise in which he invested, not himself, but only money."[65] The frontier south measured wealth in slaves as much or more than in land holdings, because enslaved men, women, children, and babies were the "chief security, the most salable and the major part of all agricultural property."[66] In pursuit of income, if not fortune, merchant and slave trader Jackson used aflatboat to get fromStones River to the Cumberland River (or from theWatauga to theHolston to theTennessee) to theOhio River, to the Mississippi, and thence south to theNatchez slave market in Spanish West Florida and/or theNew Orleans slave market in colonial Louisiana. Lackingsteamboats, which had not yet been invented, Jackson and companions made the return trip on foot (if they were slaves) or horseback (if they were traders). The only route was theNatchez Trace, an ancient track through the hundreds of miles of Chickasaw and Choctaw territory between the northern fork of Bayou Pierre and the Tennessee River. Journey's end was Jackson's farm, originallyPoplar Grove, thenHunter's Hill, and after 1804,The Hermitage. There is no record of Jackson owning land or operating a plantation of his own on Bayou Pierre.[67][68][69]
HistorianJ. Winston Coleman wrote that at the turn of the 19th century, "Tennessee was as wild and rough a frontier country as the nation possessed. Life in those parts was both hard and turbulent, and a short one for many a man who tried to get on for himself in that fast-growing section of young America. Reckless gambling, hard drinking, and fighting to the death with pistol and knife were the order of the day. Men fought for their rights and for their lives...cut-throats of every description defied the laws of the back country districts, and the towns themselves were scarcely less barbarous."[70] Jackson was in business at a time and place when "Money was scarce, and the interchange of goods was difficult and hazardous.Barter was still commonly employed in conducting commercial transactions."[71] According to the editors ofThe Papers of Andrew Jackson, "Between 1795 and 1807 Jackson followed general-store merchandising at least as fully as farming, the law, or the military."[72] Goods fromPhiladelphia resold in the Cumberland were marked up triple.[73] Cotton from the Cumberland resold for double in New Orleans.[74] Products for sale include fabric, "salt, grindstones, hardware, gunpowder, cow bells, and whatever else the people of the neighborhood wanted. In payment for these commodities, they took, not money, but cotton, ginned and unginned, wheat, corn, tobacco, pork, skins, furs, and, indeed, all the produce of the country."[73] Middle Tennessee had originally produced mostly corn and stock animals, but by 1800 cotton had become so lucrative acash crop that cotton bales served as a local currency.[75] As explained by a news writer in 1882, to be a merchant in Nashville at the turn of the 19th century was "vastly different" than it would be even 50 years later because the nation was then just beginning to build the vast internal transportation and communications networks necessary for commerce, and "Merchants usually kept a miscellaneous stock of goods, which stock was annually replaced by a visit toBaltimore orBoston. For several years goods were hauled by wagon from Baltimore to Nashville."[76] Later the route swerved up to Pittsburg so shipments could be loaded onto keelboats and sent down the river.[76] A few products cameup the river, namely sugar, coffee, molasses, which were toted up on barges, a trip that took two or three months.[76] In addition to manufactured goods, stock animals, and cotton, frontier Tennessee merchants dealt in slaves. For instance, in 1805, Jackson and his nephew accepted $25 in cash and "A Negro Woman namd. Fan a bout forty five years of age" to pay off Andrew Steele's $150 past-due account at their store.[77]
Jackson's commercial hub in Tennessee was atClover Bottom, which was being developed as a plantation when "men from nearby places, Jackson included, formed ajockey club...and laid out a racecourse here."[78] In 1805 Jackson oversaw construction at Clover Bottom of a racetrack and horse stables, viewing stands, "a tavern or lodging facility", a store, and "booths for hucksters."[78][79][80] There was gambling going on in this establishment, as well as throughout the settlement.[81][82] (According to court records, popular hobbies in the Cumberland included a card game calledloo, another game calledfives, and the crime "assault and battery.")[83] Sometime between 1805 and 1810, Josephus H. Conn, a Nashville merchant,[84] brought a young boy to Clover Bottom on the occasion of a planned race between Jackson's horse Doublehead and Lazarus Cotton's horse Greyhound.[85] Many decades later, when the boy was Nashville judge and local historianOld Jo Guild ofRose Mont, he estimated that 20,000 people had been present, and he recalled that "a largepound was filled with horses and Negroes bet on the result of the race."[85] Shortly before the planned start, Jackson arrived to claim that Greyhound should be disqualified. He was "riding slowly on a gray horse, with long pistols held in each hand. I think they were as long as my arm and had a mouth that aground squirrel could enter. In his wake followed my uncle Conn,Stokely Donelson,Patton Anderson, and several others as fierce asbulldogs."[85] That Jackson was a bully by both avocation and occupation—for fun and for profit—has been the conclusion of more than one historian.[86][87]
Jackson also ran saloons in Tennessee. On August 19, 1806, Cage & Black made a rental agreement with Andrew Jackson and James S. Rawlings for a house, lot, and stables inGallatin, Tennessee.[88] Rawlings wasmarried to a niece ofRachel Jackson.[88] On September 13, 1806, Rawlings advertised that he had opened a tavern in Gallatin that offered "a well-chosen assortment of imported spirits and wines."[89] This was probably the brick-built Gallatin stable where Jackson lost $500 toEdward Ward, president of the Clover Bottom Jockey Club, in a bet on a fight betweengaffed cocks.[90] The bet was forgold, and Jackson apparently tried to avoid the payout byworking the refs.[90]
The Clover Bottom was also where Jackson's company sold and launched flatboats for other travelers going downriver. River-traffic statistics involving flatboats illustrate how early Jackson came to Mississippi, and thus how closely he must have been involved in its colonization. According to writerDavid O. Stewart, in 1792 "only a dozen flatboats made the journey downriver to New Orleans", but by 1802, it was more than 500, and by 1807, the count was closer to 2,000 a year.[91] According to another account, in 1790, 64 flatboats docked at Natchez the entire year, while on a single day in 1808 a visitor counted 150 flatboats tied up at the Natchez landing.[92] There is a surviving 1803 contract between a riverman and Jackson's partnerJohn Coffee arranging for a flatboat to depart fromHaysborough, Tennessee for New Orleans loaded with 25 bales of cotton and 77 hogs, which offers some sense of the scale of Jackson's shipments.[93] In 1803 his firm built 27 boats "for thewar department in expectation of difficulty with Spain in Louisiana."[94] One of these boats, 45 ft (14 m) long and 12 ft (3.7 m)across the beam, and apparently never used for its commissioned purpose, was sold toWilliamson County merchant John Hardeman on February 23, 1804, forUS$45 (equivalent to $944.9 in 2024).[95] In the course of the 1806–07 expedition that came to be known as theBurr conspiracy,Aaron Burr ordered five of Jackson's boats, picked up two that were ready at Clover Bottom, and set off for the south from Jackson's landing at Stones River, weeks later surrendering himself to authorities atPeter Bruin's house at Bruinsburg.[96][97] These boats were themselves valuable in the lower Mississippi, which had a shortage of planed lumber.[98][99][d] The Clover Bottom store, where Jackson built and sold flatboats, raced horses, and took people as a form of payment, was "a two-story building near today's Downeymead Drive."[103]
Jackson's mercantile enterprises and gaming operations appear to have been entangled with his slave trading, real estate speculation, and his imperial designs on Indigenous lands, which was the case throughout pioneer-era Tennessee, whose politicians, militia officers, and "land-grabbers" were men whose "classifications...greatly overlapped."[104] As a merchant, Jackson bought and sold as the market demanded, and as explained by researcher Bill Carey, "In the early 1800s, Tennessee's retail world had not advanced to the point where there were separate grocery, drug, and furniture stores. Customers bought all types of products from auctioneers, who might have furniture one week, blankets the next, and slaves the third."[105] As Nashville historian Anita S. Goodstein put it, "Land speculators, merchants, self-made lawyers—all dealt in slaves. Indeed they used slaves almost as currency."[106] It was common to treat slaves as a cash equivalent: as debtcollateral,by mortgaging them, or by staking them on the turn of afaro game. (One of Jackson's friends from North Carolina was even accused of buying his way into a judicial clerkship with "the presentdocket profits and three negroes.")[107] Slaves were "liquid assets" that served as a ready currency for land owners with unreliable income. The financial system of the frontier U.S. south was based on the inherent fundamental value of the enslaved, all while guaranteeing a lifetime of insecurity for the people used as security.[108][109][110][111] An example of the use of slaves to repay debts is Stockley Donelson's 1791 offer to pay off Jackson with "one likely Country born Negro boy or girl."[112] HistorianChase C. Mooney, in his 1957Slavery in Tennessee, came to the conclusion thatJohn Overton, Jackson's business associate and political patron,[113] "might be classed as a slave trader—but not of thecoffle-driving type—for he both purchased and sold quite a number of Negroes. Some of his purchases follow: Robin and Pol, $530; Sam, Phyllis, and Ezekiel, $1050; Mathew and wife (slaves of John Coffee, purchased through theUnited States marshal), $710; Charles, $180 in 'horse flesh, and one hundred and ten dollars in notes'; Lewis, $400; Betty, $800; Elijah, $450; Wood, $600; Bob, $500; Huldy, $375; Tom, $300; Ben, $385; Arthur, $315; Washington, $340; Adam, $500; Martin and Oliver, $365; and 'two negroes,' $700.28."[114] In 1819, Overton asked Jackson to haveJohn Brahan, ofHuntsville,Alabama Territory, repay him for a debt of approximately $800 in "one or two likely healthy boys of 12 or 13 years of age at such price as you may think they are worth in Cash, and as you would trade for yourself."[115] According to Goodstein's analysis of 452 Nashville-area transactions involving approximately 700 enslaved persons in the period from 1783 to 1804, "The overwhelming number of sales were of a single slave, man or woman or child. Of the 452 transactions only 116 involved transfers of more than one slave...Almost half of those for whom we have age data were under 16. It was not uncommon for children to be sold separately, away from parents or friends. Witness Aron, age six, sold to Andrew Jackson in 1791."[116] Jackson paid£100[e] to buy Aron from George Augustus Sugg on December 21, 1791.[117] Aron was not resold but grew up at the Hermitage where he worked as the plantationblacksmith and had a wife and three children as of 1825.[118] If the Hermitage kept to the pattern found elsewhere in the south, Aron's work tasks would have included shoeing horses, making nails, repairing metalwork, forging chains, and locking shackles and collars on other slaves, which was called "ironing negroes."[119][120]
About the year 1824, Jesse Kuykendall built asaw andgristmill on the North Fork of theObion. The following anecdote is related of him: When he first put his sawmill in motion, he looked at it with anxiety, and observing that it was complete and in good running order, exclaimed "Lands and niggers; when the saw comes down it sayslands, and when it goes up it saysniggers."
— Goodspeed'sHistory of Tennessee (1887)[121]
Now let us see what is "the farmer of Tennessee." Possessing a fine and extensive domain with a vast mansion—not a farm-house but The Hermitage—surrounded by a host of slaves—this "farmer" of Tennessee eats the bread of idleness and luxury. The whip of the overseer quickens the servile labor whereby he—one of those priviledged beings, born to consume the fruits of the earth, is sustained—and men, immortal as himself, are daily "driven a field", like oxen; and their strength taxed to the utter-most, perhaps, that he, their master, may add another race-horse to his stud, or stake an additional bet upon a favorite game cock. Of personal labor, the hands of this farmer are innocent; for, where slavery exists, labor is held to degrade the white man. Thus surrounded by beings debased, inferior, dependent upon the nod of a master almost for life—what estimate can this "farmer" make of the feelings of others? What is to teach him who hears only the voice of servile adulation, the lessons of equality? His associates are, like himself priviledged individuals—a class apart, exempt from toil, and living upon the blood and bones and sinews of their slaves.
— N.Y. American, July 1828[122]
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In 1781, at age 14, Andrew Jackson found himself unattached, his immigrant parents and two older brothers all having died of disease or misadventure over the course of his childhood.[123] As such, he was already on his own when he inherited a modest sum that he then spent down inCharleston, "leaving himself nearly destitute" although "a throw of thedice in a game calledrattle and snap" netted him some more money and "saved his horse from having a new owner."[124][125] He moved to North Carolina where he studied law, and then, in company with work friends, he moved west to examine the prospects for a frontier lawyer in the new settlement that was being hacked out of the woodlands along the Cumberland River in theMero District of North Carolina, shortly to become theTerritory South of the River Ohio.[126] In 1789, at age 22, Jackson was one of "several leaders of the Tennessee settlements" who "opened negotiations with a Spanish agent to discuss his government's intervention with the Creeks, and [who] hinted at possible secession from North Carolina."[127] The pre-1815 pioneer settlers of the greater Mississippi River valley were not necessarily bound by oath nor emotion to any given national-colonial identity, and as such, "American officials deeply distrusted the various white settler groups...a threatening amalgamation of land speculators, merchants, and slaveholders; ancient and 'new' French planters, Old Regime Conservatives, Bonapartist imperialists, Saint Domingue refugees, British Loyalists, Spanish officials, and expatriated Americans; all of whom seemed ready to raise the standard of any imperial power that promised to protect slavery."[128] (The enmity may have been symmetrical. On July 4, 1805, Jackson toasted at a Nashville banquet to "the rising greatness of the West—may it never be impeded by the jealousy of the East.")[129]
That summer, Jackson rode the waters of the Mississippi south to Bruinsburg, which was located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Bayou Pierre. The nameBayou Pierre dates to the French period, but the local pronunciation ofbayou "ignores they and rhymes the word withnow."[130] In 1789 there were no riverfront settlements betweenL'Anse à la Graisse (later known asNew Madrid, Missouri) and Bayou Pierre.[131] The settlement had no public buildings; a church would not be built for another decade.[132][133] White families resident on Bayou Pierre and the Big Black at that time lived in small nuclear-family households, and if they owned slaves the count was in the single digits.[132] The earliest surviving description of Bruinsburg dates to March 25, 1801: "pass't Judge Bruin's at the lower side of a creek called Biopere...some Houses but no improvements worth notice".[134] The fullest description of life on pre-territorial Bayou Pierre comes from the autobiography ofConfederate general andReconstruction-eraMississippi governorBenjamin G. Humphreys, recapitulating the memories and legends of three generations of his family:[135][f]
In 1793 my father and mother moved from Grind Stone Ford to a tract of land on the north side of the Big Bayou Pierre known as the 'Hermitage' held by my mother by grant from the Spanish Government. At this time, what is now known as Claiborne County was an unbroken wilderness tenanted only by about five white families, a few vagabond Spaniards, strolling Choctaw Indians, the bear, the panther, the catamount, the wolf, and the deer. A horse path leading from Natchez, through what were afterwards known asWashington,Seltsertown,Union Town, Port Gibson, Grind Stone Ford, Rocky Springs toCayuga in the Choctaw Nation was 'blazed out' by the Spanish Government. From this horse path were lateral paths blazed out by the settlers to their settlements. Corn, rice, indigo, and tobacco were the only agricultural products then introduced. Cotton gins were unknown, mills were unknown, and corn had to be converted into meal by means ofcoffee mills and themortar and pestle. Nothing could be spared from the scanty subsistence of the settler for market. The bear, the catamount, the panther, and the wolf destroyed pigs and calves, poultry, and corn fields. Sheep were unknown. In a great measure the pioneer had to rely on his trusty rifle for the 'creature comforts' of life.Peltry, tobacco monopolized by the Government, indigo, and white oakstaves transported inpiroques to Natchez and N. Orleans were the only articles of commerce and the pioneer's only dependence for a supply of sugar, coffee, medicines,powder, andlead. I heard my father say that he never saw the day his family suffered for want of food or raiment; but for the first 15 years of his married life he did not see $15 in money that he could call his own. My mother and a negro woman...did the 'chores' of the household, spun the thread and wove the cloth for the entire family, white and black. My father, two negro men and two women, cleared the field, built the cabins, cultivated the crops, and replenished thesmoke house with wild game and fish. My older brothers and sisters fed the pigs, herded the cattle, gathered the eggs, and wormed the tobacco patch...
— The Life of Benjamin Grubb Humphreys (c. 1878)
Despite Humphreys' belief that the Spanish government had "blazed out" the Natchez Trace, the entire continent had long had an "intricate network of Indian trails. Many of the first routes taken by the settlers, and subsequently made into roads, originally were Indian trails", including the road between Nashville andKnoxville, and the route through theShenandoah Valley.[74] In any case, on July 15, 1789, Jackson was in the Natchez District swearing allegiance to the king of Spain so that he could trade there without paying a tax intended for non-resident American traders.[138][139] The gist of such a pledge was that "U.S. immigrants commonly exploited Spanish regulations awarding land gratis to foreigners who appeared sincere in their pledges of loyalty and bona fide settlement...The 'general system' of colonization...was 'that of making speculative incursions, and reaping the advantages the country afforded, under the pretence of becoming, at some future day, a Settler'."[140] In August 1789 Mississippi planterThomas M. Green Jr. grantedpower of attorney to the young lawyer.[138] Jackson's brother-in-law John Donelson lived in theVilla Gayoso district near Cole's Creek in the 1790s.[141][142] Jackson could also pursue his hobbies in Natchez: there was a quarter-mile (400 m) racetrack atNatchez-Under-the-Hill as early as 1788, and the St. Catherine course, later to come to fame as thePharsalia Race Course, was likely in operation by 1790.[143] Thejockeys and grooms at these tracks were enslaved African Americans, and horses and slaves alike were used for stakes.[144][145]
Jackson might have been a transient or itinerant trader, which was common.[146] If he had a physical store it would likely have been log-built, or possibly the frame cabin of his "emigrant boat" deconstructed and rebuilt to the same purpose on land.[12][147] According to biographerRobert V. Remini, young Jackson made the acquaintance of "a great many Natchez businessmen and through them began an extensive trading operation."[148] Preserved letters from 1790 between Jackson and "Melling Woolley, a Natchez merchant" record goods being carried from Nashville to Natchez, including "cases of wine and rum; also asnuff box, dolls,muslin, salt, sugar, knives and iron pots."[149] Another letter of 1790 thanks Jackson for his help with the "Little Venture of Swann Skins", which historianHarriet Chappell Owsley asserted were feathers or down stuffing for pillows and mattresses,[150] but which other scholars believe described a shipment of slaves.[149][151] Letters show thatJames Robertson tasked Jackson with delivering a runaway slave to the Spanish colonial governor,Manuel Gayoso de Lemos.[148] An estimated 70,000 enslaved people were imported into the United States from overseas between 1791 and 1807,[152] but fortunately for Jackson, business opportunities for American slave-traders abounded in 1790s Natchez, because the beginning of theHaitian Revolution in 1791 had disrupted the once-reliable supply of slaves from theCaribbean islands, easing competition.[153] This same Saint-Domingue slave revolt killed the island's sugar trade and thus disintegrated the economic undergirding of a dual-hemisphereNapoleonic empire, opening the way for the AmericanLouisiana Purchase.[154]
The study of Jackson's earliest slave trading is closely tied to the study of theRobards–Donelson–Jackson relationship controversy. Jackson and Rachel RobardsnéeDonelson ran off together sometime between the summer of 1789 and July 1790,[155] leaving behind Rachel's allegedly abusive first husbandLewis Robards.[156] An 1890 news article purporting to tell "the true story of the great statesman's matrimonial venture" claimed that "near Natchez...there used to stand a ruined log hut, which was pointed out to strangers as the spot where they had passed their honeymoon. This was, no doubt, the spot to which he carried her when they first ran away..."[157][g] For that matter, in the first decade of the 20th century, a man named E. R. Jones repeatedly asserted that his father, Rev. John Griffing Jones, a native ofJefferson County, Mississippi, and a "pioneerMethodist historian in Mississippi",[159] had been insisting since the 1870s that Rachel Jackson Robards had had a double log house with an open hall ("two pens and a passage") on a small farm located 1.5 miles (2.4 km) southwest ofOld Greenville on the Natchez Trace, opposite his father's birthplace at what was called Belle Grove plantation.[160][161] The young couple returned to Nashville in a party of 100 or more via the Natchez Trace in July 1790, withHugh McGary attesting at Rachel'sdivorce proceedings that the couple were "bedding together" on the journey.[155] By 1792 Jackson had finances sufficient to buyPoplar Grove on Jones' Bend in Davidson County.[162] That same year, Spanish emissaryStephen Minor recorded in his journal of a diplomatic mission to the Choctaw, "Franchimastabé answered me that he had reason to believe that what I had told him was true, so he was determined to live prepared, as he was not unaware of the desire of the Americans to take the Lands of the Indians and always to impoverish them, which they were able to do."[163] In 1794, the year Jackson and Rachel Donelson were legally married in Tennessee, the Spanish reported that the Choctaw and Chickasaw were looking to them for food, and were collectively "in a wretched condition...[some] dying of hunger."[164] In 1797, Chickasaw leaderUgulayacabé told the Spanish commandant atSan Fernando de las Barrancas,Joseph Deville Degoutin Bellechasse, that in the "speeches and prodigalities" of the Americans—soon to take over many of Spain's colonial possessions east of the Mississippi—"the Chickasaws could perceive the behavior of 'therattlesnake that caresses thesquirrel in order to devour it.'"[165]
In his letters, Jackson referred to the path from Natchez to Nashville as a journey through "the wilderness."[166] Surveyor and land speculatorThomas Freeman described the Trace in early days as "an impenetrable forest condensed bycane and cemented by grape vines, so that a dozen trees must be cut before one can fall..."[167] British travelerFrancis Baily described the rustic nature of the Natchez road in his journal of a 1796–97 trip, with the one-room "tavern" at Grindstone Ford being so unpleasant that he preferred to sleep outside under a tree.[168] Baily also wrote about "encamping grounds", describing wide places in the road, especially at river fords, that were identified by the presence of felled trees, extinguished campfires, and compacted soil.[169] In times of high water, travelers would swim across the intervening rivers and streams, accompanied by cargo rafts built on the spot, so that provisions and supplies could stay dry.[170] According to an Ohioan, travelers returning northeast on the trace usually went onOpelousas horses, "a small breed of mixed Spanish and Indian...very hardy and accustomed to subsist on grass and the bark of trees. To every three or four persons there was one or more spare horses to carry the baggage."[171] Still, despite its unimproved nature, the trail was already a well-traffickedtrade route in the 1790s—a stretch of the southern section was called the Path to the Choctaw Nation, and the run fromTupelo to Nashville was called the Chickasaw Trace—and Choctaw, Spanish, and American leaders alike were preoccupied with protecting and extending their access to the road.[172][173]
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It is unclear where Jackson collected the enslaved people he carried south, and in what quantities of people he trafficked. Until Robertson's 1794Nickajack Expedition tied off the bloody conflict with the Cherokee, the Cumberland district remained "as violent a world as any American ever inhabited."[175] The Cumberland was almost an island in the land; one historian wrote that "the Cumberland Basin provides a good example of the often jagged, leapfrog pattern of settlement. The frontier was less like a tier or line than a loosely joined series ofsalients, tongues, and 'bubbles'. Davidson County was a bubble separated from the older Tennessee settlements by several hundred miles of wilderness."[176] Nashville proper remained but a small settlement in this era, with a total population in 1800 of about 350 people, approximately 150 of whom were slaves.[106] Davidson County (which in 1800 encompassed large portions of what are nowCheatham andRutherford counties)[177] was largely populated by Jackson's kin, including 39 in-laws or directdescendants of John Donelson.[178] As one history put it, "The entire neighborhood was made up largely of Donelsons and their connections, each possessing plantations of a thousand or more acres."[179] In 1790, more than half of all Black Americans lived in just two states,Virginia andMaryland (with the vast majority of the remainder dwelling inNorth Carolina andSouth Carolina, although there were at that time also substantial populations of slaves living inDelaware,Georgia,New York,New Jersey, andPennsylvania).[180] Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia were "already net exporters" of slaves in the 1790s, shortly joined by theDistrict of Columbia, and North Carolina, whereas Tennessee, admitted in 1796 as the 16th U.S. state, would not become a net exporter of slaves until the 1850s.[181][182] Historians know not to what purpose Jackson "crossed the wilderness between Knoxville and Nashville 22 times—once alone, 'when the Indians were most numerous and hostile.'"[183] The old "drovers' road" from the Carolinas went to Knoxvillethrough the Saluda Gap, and Knoxville was the Tennessee starting point for thePhiladelphia Wagon Road (Jackson's brief service in the House and the Senate certainly gave him occasion to visit the national capital then located in Philadelphia).[184][185] Philadelphia toPittsburgh, inwestern Pennsylvania, offered a connection to comparatively swift travel southwest via the Ohio River.[186] From 1798 to 1804, Jackson had the travel obligations of a state judge, an annual route through county after county where he no doubt presided in many cases from a tavern bench, since only the most rustic of courthouses had yet been assembled from chestnut, oak, spruce, and poplar logs brought out of the woods.[187] During Nashville's earliest history, "Philadelphia being the favorite market of the Nashville merchants, they would leave here on horseback, and it would take them nearly six weeks to reach thecity of 'Brotherly Love'. All purchases were then sent through by wagons."[63] Shipping betweenBaltimore and Nashville involved "six-horse teams" that cost $10 for every 100 pounds of freight.[188] The return route from Baltimore or Philadelphia to Nashville went "across theAlleghenies, throughJonesboro, Knoxville, andKingston, and then across theCumberland Mountains, viaSparta andLebanon to Nashville."[189]
In 1795, to stock the store he and his brother-in-lawSamuel Donelson ran at Hunter's Hill,[190] Jackson set off on a work trip to Philadelphia intending to buy trade goods and to sell lands that were still legally under Indian title.[191] There Jackson "traded land preemptions for flour, sugar, piece goods, and pocket knives."[103] Before Jackson departed, friend Overton cautioned him, "If you purchase Negroes in any of the northern States, be careful in so doing not to subject yourself to the penal Laws of the State."[191][h] On November 30, 1799, Judge Jackson agreed to a slave swap between himself, Judge Overton, and a man named Carter. Jackson was to take a couple owned by Carter, writing Overton, "They will [serve] my Purpose to Sell again."[194]
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In his 2013 biography,Andrew Jackson, Southerner, historianMark R. Cheathem wrote, "HistorianCharles Sellers once argued that after 1804 'never again was Jackson to engage in any considerable speculative venture.' The facts do not bear out this claim. Jackson speculated widely in land during the 1810s in an effort to benefit himself. Given his direct involvement in land seizures during the 1810s and his subsequent correspondence about prospects inAlabama,Florida, and the Mississippi Territory, it stretches credulity to imagine that he did not calculate these moves to help his land-speculating associates turn a profit as well."[195] Similarly, Jackson was still opportunistically trading slaves well into the 19th century, certainly until theBattle of New Orleans in 1815 made him a national figure. Jackson's brother-in-law John Caffery announced in autumn 1800 that he had taken up the business of freighting to New Orleans and would sell Tennessee produce there for a commission of five percent of the sale price.[196] When Jackson sold Betty and her 15-year-old daughter Hannah to Abraham Green on December 27, 1800,[197] the sale price of $550 for the pair was almost equivalent to Jackson's $600 annual salary as a Tennessee state judge.[198] According toFrederic Bancroft'sSlave-Trading in the Old South (1931), letters in the Jackson papers at theLibrary of Congress demonstrate his continuing interest in the market.[199] For instance, territorial governorWilliam C. C. Claiborne wrote to Jackson from "near Natchez" on December 9, 1801, with an update on local markets:[200]
"The Races in this District, commenced yesterday, and will hold for three days; Mr. Hutchings has attended the Race today, and will proceed from thence, to Mr. Green's, where he has left the Negroes & Horses. Mr. H. will be at my House, next Week; in the mean time, I will try to find a purchaser for your Horses, as for Negroes, they are in great demand, and will sell well. There is hardly any Corn in this District, and so soon, as the pumpkins give out, Horses will Suffer, & hence it is, they are not at present in demand; But if Mr. H. should bring his horses to Natchez, I will try to sell them, to the best advantage."[200]
A couple of weeks later, an update from Claiborne:[201]
"I had the pleasure to deliver in person your Letters to Mr. Hutchins; he is now at my House, & is in good health & Spirits. The Negro Woman he has sold for 500 dolls. in Cash, and I believe he has, or will in a few days sell the Boy, for his own price, toColo. West. The Horses are not yet disposed of, but I hope he will meet a purchaser, in a day or two. I shall on Tomorrow, set off forFort Adams, & Mr. Hutchings has promised to accompany me; previous to our return, I hope, we shall be enabled to sell the Horses. I can assure you, with great truth, that Mr. Hutchings is a prudent, amiable young man, & is very attentive to your Interest."[201]
John Hutchings was Andrew Jackson's nephew-by-marriage.[202] Rachel Donelson's older sisterCatherine married Thomas Hutchings; John Hutchings was their firstborn son.[203] According to the editors ofThe Papers of Andrew Jackson, Hutchings was "Jackson's partner in theLebanon, Gallatin, and Hunter's Hill stores."[204] Later, the Jackson–Hutchings–Coffee triumvirate also opened a store atMuscle Shoals, Alabama.[205] OnChristmas 1801 Hutchings wrote Jackson with his own update on the sale items described by Claiborne, declaring, "I shall meet with no dificulty to sell the negres...you may rest asurd that money is my hole thought."[206] On January 9, 1802, Claiborne wrote Jackson, "On our way from the Fort, Mr. Hutchins Sold two of his Horses, and a Negro Boy to advantage."[207] The tandem vending of horse flesh and human flesh was common. As Bancroft explained in 1931, in many antebellum Southern marketplaces, "the same man dealt in horses, mules and slaves."[208] Similarly,Calvin Schermerhorn, writing about the ocean-going"coastwise" slave trade, stated, "On nearly all American coastal voyages on which slaves were transported in the 1810s and early 1820s, the accent fell on shipping nonhuman cargoes", meaning that the "main" cargo was coal or rum or cowhides or cotton or porcelain, but shippers moving goods between any two points where slavery was legal were as likely as not to have a few slaves aboard as well, bound for resale wherever inventory was low and prices were high.[209]
In 1803 Jackson took custody of an enslaved Black man named Bird; Jackson had served as guarantor for a $500 credit line extended to a free White man named Mark Mitchell; when Mitchell could not pay his debt, Jacksonrepossessed Bird to resell to raise some or all of the money owed.[210] In 1804, as Jackson's Tennessee stores busily traded steel for bear skins,[211][212] he wrote a long letter arguing with a trading partner about their arrangement:[213]
"...that Mr. H would carry on negroes to exchange for groceries, and wishing you to make a sale of them before he came if you could, that a fellow answering the description you wanted was bought, but I was fearfull he would not suit you as he had once left his master and so forth but as to stating that he had sufficient funds with him to pay all our debts cannot be correct..."[213]
In 1926, historianJohn Spencer Bassett wrote inThe Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, "This letter shows Jackson's method of carrying on a controversy in his early life. It also contains the clearest available evidence that his trading firm bought and sold negroes."[214] On February 14, 1804, Jackson, Robertson, U.S. District Court JudgeJohn McNairy, and surveyorWilliam T. Lewis were "subscribers" to a contract betweenJohn Gordon (later Jackson's personal spymaster in the wars of the 1810s) andWilliam Colbert (one of the mixed-raceColbert brothers of the Chickasaw Nation), agreeing to establish and jointly operate a stand and ferry across theDuck River along the Natchez Trace.[215] A 22-year-old namedThomas Hart Benton was hired as a clerk, or "factor", to help run the Duck River place.[216] It has been said that Benton "speculated his way to a small fortune even before he reached his 21st birthday" but in what, exactly, he speculated goes unmentioned.[217] Age 21 would not have been a particularly precocious mercantile debut; Andrew Jackson was already deemed a "shrewd" trader of horses at age 15.[218]
Jackson was up to his neck in debt that year, so, Remini summarizes, "To pay what he owed, Jackson returned full time to his business interests in 1804. He resigned the judgeship, sold his plantation at Hunter's Hill (where for a time he had operated a small store and from a narrow window sold goods to the Indians), disposed of an additional 25,000 acres (10,000 ha) he held in various parts of the state (he continued his land speculation despite the Allison disaster)...Through consolidation and liquidation he managed to pay off all his debts. It meant starting all over again financially, and it meant living in alog cabin once again."[219] Presidential historian John R. Irelan told much the same tale in 1887, albeit with more color:[220]
Allison failed, and Jackson had to pay the notes which he had exchanged for goods. This piece of ill-fortune greatly embarrassed him, and was one cause of his quitting the 'Bench' in 1804, a position for which he was, in most respects, totally unfit. From this time forward he did not concern himself about learned offices. He was general of the militia, and that was enough...he did not make the remotest attempt to farm on scientific principles. He simply kept up as well as he could, with the condition of affairs as made by others...He alsoraised fine horses. During all this time he seldom took a law case, and finally ceased to do so entirely. He studied very little, and never did at any time know or care a great deal about law. Although living quietly and happily at home with a wife whom he adored, and who, to a great extent, managed the large number of negroes he collected about him, his life at this time was reckless, dissipated, and far from exemplary in most things.
In June 1805, Jackson wrote Edward Ward, the buyer of Hunter's Hill, that he could not accept slaves as a form of payment, because of timing: "I cannot believe that you are seriously impressed with the belief, that you are now authorised to discharge a part thereof in negroes—had negroes been offerred before Mr Hutchings descended the river with negroes for sale they would have been recd."[224][194] Some traders worked all year to collect what were called "shipping lots" of slaves, but Jackson apparently rejected Ward's midsummer offering as inauspiciously timed.[225]
Also, according toGen. Jackson's Negro Speculations, Jackson bought a child from a Dr. Rollings of Gallatin in 1805 or 1806, with the intent to resell him in the "lower country", and later sued the doctor over the boy's health condition.[226] The documents timeline inThe Papers of Andrew Jackson includes three mentions of a case known asAndrew Jackson and John Hutchings v. Benjamin Rawlings. The suit seems to have been initiated in approximately September 1805, a decision was rendered in September 1808, and an appeal decision was handed down in March 1813.[227] There is an 1828 letter from Jackson "casually" explaining that possession of this "negro boy", who had been "kept at the Clover Bottom at our store", had been uncertain in part because he was abducted as the result of "a race...the stakes...which was to be in cash or negroes as I understood."[228][145][i] The "negro boy" in question was namedCharles and had been born in approximately 1793, meaning he was about 12 years old when Jackson had purchased him for purposes of resale.[229] According to Jackson, Charles eventually died, either from a sore on his leg that "broke out" or from a "disease engen[der]ed in the lower country."[228] In theCorrespondence, Bassett annotated this Jackson letter with the following note defending the president's reputation: "An article in theNashville Banner and Whig of Aug. 1, 1828, had brought up this incident in support of the charge that Jackson was a negro trader. That he took slaves in settlement of accounts and sold them for money is undoubtedly true. But he was never a negro trader in the ordinary meaning of the term."[230]
In October 1828, the final issue of theMonthly Anti-Jackson Expositor published a letter that had allegedly been written by Jackson toWilliam P. Anderson in January 1807. Anderson, aU.S. Attorney and father of future Confederate generalJ. Patton Anderson, had been one of Jackson's closest associates in the 1800s and 1810s, but by 1828 had turned into a lacerating critic. Per theExpositor, "When...[Jackson's] correspondence, such as is actually and unquestionably his own, comes to be inspected...All the rules of composition, oforthography, and ofsyntax, are disregarded, and a most reprehensible ignorance is made manifest...The occasion of writing it...was the receipt of the President's proclamation respecting Burr, and a letter from theSecretary of War on the same subject. And it is certainly remarkable for the cool indifference with which private receipts, a negro-trading bargain, contempt for the Secretary of War, and consultations for the suppression of a supposed wide-spreadingtreason are commingled together."[231] As to the bargain, Jackson had written Anderson, "...the Negro girl, iflikely, at a fair price, I will receive...if you [find it] Convenient bring the girl with you..."[231]
In March 1807, Jackson purchased 15 slaves at a sheriff's auction of the property of his neighbor and brother-in-lawRobert Hays.[232][233] (By Jackson's influence as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Hays had been appointed in 1797 to be the firstU.S. marshal of the new-formedfederal judicial district of Tennessee.)[234] Jackson then conveyed those 15 slaves back to Hays' wifeJane Donelson Hays.[235] In 1807 Hays had recently declared bankruptcy, and during the 1828 election this action was alleged to be a conspiracy intended to defraud Hays' creditors, essentiallymoney laundering enslaved assets.[236]
Jackson's trading activity had seemingly ramped up again in 1807, as in February there was also an exchange with Samuel Dorsey Jackson involving a "growing gaming debt" and a "Negro woman."[233][237][238] Samuel Jackson wrote Andrew Jackson, "I would like to keep her as long as it was in your power to do without her, as we have but little help."[239] Bassett annotated the first of two letters about this debt with the comment: "This sentence seems to mean that the negro woman was to go on the boat."[239] A month later, on March 6, 1807, 39-year-old Andrew Jackson jumped 55-year-old Samuel Jackson on the street, such that "on May 15, 1807...a Davidson Countygrand jury presented to the Mero District Superior Court anindictment against Jackson for 'assault with intent to kill' Samuel Dorsey Jackson." The reportedmotive for the attack was an unpaid debt; former state judge Jackson wasacquitted of the charge in November 1807.[240][j] In 1808, aneconomic recession hit the United States, depressing the value of both cotton and slaves until 1814.[246] By 1809 the transatlantic slave trade was officially closed and the interregional trade became the only legal way to procure slaves, but not without an incipient domestic resistance; one Baltimore slave buyer anxiously wrote his cousin in July 1809, "TheQuakers and Abolitions have been so violent on men of our business that I'm afraid to leave the place for fear they turn my negroes out ofGaol and if they should and no person to take charge of them we should lose them of course."[247]
The range of topics covered in the letter to Anderson, the always-contentious nature of his business relationships, and Jackson's metamorphosis from negro speculator to local warlord to U.S. president were not coincidental, but rather part of a consistent cycle of ambition, hubristic failure, and retrenchment. In the words of political scientistMichael Paul Rogin, "Jackson...won and lost land in horse races, mixed slave trading with land deals, and was plagued like other speculators by problems oftax liens,imperfect title, Indian claims, andbankruptcy. Other speculators lived with these problems and sought to resolve them pragmatically. They had turnedvirgin land into money; they remained in the material realm in the conflicts that resulted. Jackson, however, did not. His personality and the threat to his fortune forced him to return to the nature of things. Worldly success failed to rescue Jackson...and establish his authority in the world...Plagued by title conflicts and insecure possession, he went back to the Indians, at the beginning of it all."[248]
In 1810, Andrew Jackson,Joseph Coleman (thefirst mayor of Nashville), and a "probable" resident of Natchez named Horace Green formed a business partnership on the existing system of transporting trade goods, slaves, etc. downriver from Tennessee to the consumers of Louisiana and Mississippi.[249][250][k] Slaves owned by this firm became part of the propagandaleafleting and news coverage of Jackson's business dealings during the bitter 1828 campaign.[250] The slaves that came into the joint ownership of Jackson, Coleman, and Green were bought from aMecklenburg County, Virginia, tavern owner named Richard Epperson.[249] Per historian Snow, "In essence, the men only paid adown payment of $2,500 on a total agreed price of $10,500 in cash. The rest of theprincipal was to be paid in two six-month installments. However, when Green...subsequently abandoned the slaves in Natchez, Jackson became entirely responsible for both the debt and the costs of transporting the slaves back toDavidson County."[249] The letters collected by Andrew Erwin in 1828 and published under the titleGen. Jackson's Negro Speculations were largely concerned with this particular slave-trading contract, which one letter summarized as the "dispute between [Jackson] and Epperson, which was referred to the arbitration ofJudge Haywood and Judge Overton", and, continuing, stated that among the enslaved people assembled was "a negro fellow [Jackson] bought for the express purpose of selling toKenner and Henderson at New Orleans, expecting to obtain for him the enormous sum ofUS$2,000 (equivalent to $37,796 in 2024), provided [Jackson] could procure the certificate of D. Moore, and others, as to his being a good blacksmith."[202]
Also, on December 15, 1810, Jackson bought three slaves for$850 (equivalent to $17,089 in 2024) from fellow Tennessee lawyerJohn Williams.[253] The people exchanged in this transaction were Peter, about 30, Rachael, about 26, and "Rachael's male child about the age of one year", all of whom werewarranted by the seller to be "sound healthy and sensible."[254] On November 26, 1811, Jackson paid$450 (equivalent to $8,504 in 2024) for a 14-year-old boy named David.[255][256] The seller was 63-year-old Charles M. Hall who lived near the Clover Bottom.[257][258] The bill of sale was witnessed by John Coffee.[255][256]
According to a political opponent writing as "Philo-Tennesseean", other enslaved people that Jackson collected immediately prior to the outbreak of the War of 1812 were gleaned from a$4,000 (equivalent to $75,592 in 2024)horse-race bet lost byNewton Cannon, later agovernor of Tennessee.[259][260] Cannon paid up in cash, a horse, and 11 slaves, which collectively represented "the earnings of many years honest labor."[259] Philo-Tennessean also alleged that Jacksonfixed races and asked, "Did you not always carry about with you, to horse-races, cock-fights, &c. a set of bullies, who were ready to fight for you on the slightest occasion? and did they not, on some occasions, when there was a dispute, take the 'stakes' by force?"[259] In regard to the charge that Jackson fixed races, an 1897 history by John Allison hinted at "indiscretions" and allowed that there were perhaps a "few spots on the otherwise white flower of a blameless life" when it came to Jackson's career in "sport."[261][l] Horseracing historian James Douglas Anderson commented in 1916 that "in his racing contests Jackson seems to have been more successful in defeating his enemies than his friends."[260]
ThePort Gibson Correspondent newspaper published an "extra" edition on September 13, 1828, addressing the subject of Jackson's work as a slave trader and giving a detailed description of Jackson's 1811 slave shipment to Natchez.[265] The Port Gibson coverage was reprinted inPeter Force'sNational Journal, which was "the official organ of theJohn Quincy Adams administration."[266]
"We have, with astonishment, observed the attempt in Nashville to brow-beat and bully the most respectable gentlemen from asserting publicly what is the absolute truth: that Gen. Andrew Jackson was, in the year 1811, a dealer in Negroes: and, believing it to be our duty to expose falsehoods and to aid the truth, we do now assure all men, whether the friends or the opponents of Gen. Jackson, far and near: That in the fall of the year 1811, Gen. Jackson and John Hutchings did descend the river Mississippi and land at Bruinsburg at the mouth of the Bayou Pierre in this county, with from twenty to thirty negroes: that a number of those negroes were brought to this immediate neighborhood, and afterwards encamped for weeks at Mr. Moore's in the McCaleb settlement, ten miles from this town; that on the 27th of December, 1811, Gen. Jackson sold three negroes, "a woman namedKissiah, with her two children,Reuben, about three years old, and a female child at the breast calledElsay, in and for consideration of the sum of $650."—that on the 28th of Dec. 1811, the very day after the former sale, and while at the same encampment, he sold to Mr. James McCaleb, of this county, two other negroes, named Candis and Lucinda, for the sum of $1000:—that he sold other negroes in this county during that trip;—that he sold some at or in the neighborhood ofBayou Sarah;—that after the belief became general in this country that war would be declared against Great Britain, the planters were indisposed to buy negroes, as the market for their cotton would be closed, Gen. Jackson resolved to return to Tennessee, with the remnant of his drove; that while he had his negroes encamped near Mr. James McCaleb's, and was making his preparations to pass through the Indian nation, he was informed by one of the most respectable citizens of this county, now living in it, of the law requiring passports for slaves; of the resolute character of Mr. Dinsmore, and of his punctilious execution of the duties of his office as Indian Agent: These things we do most unequivocally and unhesitatingly charge and assert. We do so on the best of authority,—the notoriety of the facts; the declarations gentlemen of whose truth no doubt can or will be entertained; from written documents, of various kinds, in the hand writing of Gen. Jackson himself: as also from the affidavit of Mr. William Miller of this county, who came down on board the boat with Gen. Jackson and his negroes; all of which we have heard and read. These things Gen. Jackson cannot, dare not, and will not, himself deny; whatever he may suffer others to do."[265][m][n]
According to "Sidney" in the NatchezAriel, the slaves Jackson sold in late 1811 were "landed in chains at thePetit Gulf, in Claiborne county; as far as I can learn about a dozen were sold in that county...Not finding purchasers for more in Claiborne county, Gen. Jackson brought the remainder down toWashington [the territorial capital, located in Adams County] and then to Natchez, where he exhibited them for sale, and the General was notoriously considered at that day as nothing more than anegro trader. About two years after it is thought by many that he took his degrees which qualify him for the presidency—'there indeed was arise.'"[276] That Petit Gulf and Natchez were slave-trading centers is affirmed by the memoir ofWilliam Wells Brown, who wrote about visiting Natchez andRodney (renamed from Petit Gulf in 1828) when he was the teenaged servant of aMissouri-based slave trader: "We landed at Rodney and the slaves were driven to thepen in the back part of the village. Several were sold at this place, during our stay of four or five days, when we proceeded on to Natchez. There we landed at night, and the gang was put in the warehouse until morning, when they were driven to the pen. As soon as the slaves are put in the pens, swarms of planters may be seen in and about them. They knew when Walker was expected, as he always had the time advertised beforehand when he would be in Rodney, Natchez, and New Orleans."[277]
While returning to Nashville with his unsold stock, Jackson got into a dispute with aUnited States Indian agent namedSilas Dinsmoor.[o] Dismoor was determined to enforce a regulation requiring that every enslaved person crossing through the unceded Choctaw lands carry a document identifying their legal owner and the purpose of their travel. The intention was to prevent runaway slaves from using the Choctaw lands as a refuge, which in turn would hopefully reduce complaints from White American settlers about the Choctaw. Jackson disliked Dinsmoor enforcing this rule, and while traveling, had to pass theChoctaw Agency in company of a "considerable number of slaves." Dinsmoor was not at the agency when Jackson passed by, and "much to my gratification and disappointment I was very politely treated by Mr. Smith Deputy Agent."[279] Still, Jackson left a message promising a future confrontation with Dinsmoor, and later sent a letter to a U.S. Senator demanding Dismoor's removal and threatening that "the wrath and indignation of our citizens will...involve Silas Dinsmore in the flames of his agency house."[280] (In 1828, J. Q. Adams mentioned the publication of this letter in his journal, seemingly not realizing that Jackson himself was the blockaded "negro trader.")[281] In September 1812, John Gordon, ferry and stand operator, who "may have served as the agent for other persons, such as Andrew Jackson", provided an affidavit about his experience being stopped for a passport while traveling with two "servants."[282] Per Gordon's account, Dismoor "appeared astonished that I should have come through without one" and "he then took an obligation of me to give him from some proper person a certificate of the rite of property and gave me a passport to proceed."[282] This affidavit came into the possession of Jackson, which suggested to historian Douglas Edward Leach "that Gordon and Jackson may have had business relationships at this time."[282] Dismoor persisted in regulating the passage of enslaved people over the Trace, and in a display of his characteristic vindictiveness, Jackson eventually succeeded in getting Dismoor fired from his job.[283]
Jackson, affronted that the "threatening a federal agent" issue was being resurfaced in 1828, wrote, "Did I not inform you that the Sub agent Smith (Dinsmore not being there) had collected about 400 armed Indians with about sixty white men, to stop or destroy me, if I attempted to pass the agency without exhibitting a passport...that the demand was an act of usurpation...I was determined to exercise this right, and resist & put down, at the risque of my life, this petty usurper..."[284] (Curiously, in a letter that he written 16 years earlier, in 1812, Jackson did not describe 460 men lying in wait, but rather stated, "there were at least 20 men summoned, and attending, with four Choctaws.")[279] According to accounts from Jackson's political opponents, "It is notorious that he did not take a passport, but when he approached the Agency he armed his negroes with axes, hired somehalf breed Indians with their arms—marched by the Agency in military order, himself at the head, with the cap of hisholsters thrown back, and hisrifle cocked."[285] The slaves Jackson was trafficking, one of whom was named John Amp, were collectively armed with two axes and six clubs.[279][286]
Jackson's ire seemed to stand out, even on a frontier road regularly traveled by hardened boatmen, quarrelsome Kaintucks, horse-stealing Indians, gangs of homicidal highwaymen, andbounty hunters seeking the heads of fugitive slaves.[288][289][290][291][292] Historian J. M. Opal found "no evidence of any general uproar against the Indian agent. Indeed, the very existence of so many passports suggests a rough consensus between most settlers and aJeffersonian regime eager to oblige them."[293] A retired American military officer,Alexander McIlhenny ofFrederick County, Maryland, who had been stationed atWashington Cantonment in Mississippi Territory during the War of 1812, said as much in a letter to the newspaper in 1828: "...the general, having sent forward his negroes, had mounted his horse, and laying his hand upon his pistols, significantly replied, 'These are General Jackson's passports!!!' I have often thought of this anecdote of Mr. Dinsmore's whenever theConstitution,laws, or the orders of government, have thwarted the arbitrarywill of this man. Shall weapons of war be his passport to oursuffrage, and to the Chair of State?"[294]
And measured out our length, as once our height. How far
From home our luggage takes us!
But, farther, still, Our hanker; till a trail's eroded
Down how far we've come. Rock in belly, bullet in gut,
Axe in skull, quelling passion in whatever name,
Kill pain; but ache out-aches the crime,
The gun. Somewhere along the trace, our spill
Of blood will tell the others who and what we were.
— Marvin Solomon, "The Natchez Trace" (August 1962)[295]
There arethree contemporaneous letters written in 1812 by the then-44-year-old Jackson about this specificplatoon of slaves. Nearly all surviving letters written by participants in the American slave trade are marked by "insensitivity, self-congratulation, and deeplyracist complacency."[296]
Jackson wrote in 1828 of this much-disputed coffle that "it was said, [Green] was squandering it, bycard playing."[284] Jackson wrote in 1812 that there were 27 people in the group: "...25 grown negroes; with two sucking children they always count with the mother",[297] and that 13 of the group were girls or women, as they needed "habits."[298] Jackson reported no expenditure to clothe the men or boys.[298]
In the first letter, dated December 17, 1811, and addressed to his wife, Jackson wrote "on tomorrow I shall set out from here homewards, on the Biopierre I expect to be detained Some days preparing the negroes for the wilderness My trusty friend John Hutchings, on the recpt of my letter had come down to this place recd. all the negroes on hand and had carried them up to his farm—I have Just seen Mr. [Horace] Green last evening this morning he was to have Seen me, but as yet, he has not appeared as to the State of the business I can give you no account—untill I have a Settlement with him or have an account of the appropriation of the amount of sales from him I shall bring home with me from twelve to Twenty—I hope to be able to sell some of them on the way at good prices—but many of them I Shall be obliged to bring home and as most of that number will be females I leave you to point out to Mr John Fields [Hermitage overseer] where to have the house built for them."[300] Ten days later, he found a buyer for the mother and children, Kessiah, Ruben, and Elsey.[301] The day after that he sold Candis and Lucinda.[301]
On February 8, 1812, Jackson wrote to his sister-in-lawMary Donelson Caffery: "The negro fellows that I brought thro with me owing to their exposure in the wilderness have all been sick and were the well neither of them is such that I could recommend to you—nor could I think of selling such to you..."[302] He also advised her that the "convulsed state of the Earth and water from the frequent shocks" of the1811–1812 New Madrid earthquakes had disrupted river traffic to such an extent that she would be better off buying someone already down south.[302]
Then, in correspondence ofFebruary 29, 1812, he made time for a multi-page complaint about the business acumen of young Horace Green.[303] Jackson wrote that "...the highest Expence of any that did accrue during the time we were engaged in the mercantile transactions was (including provissions hands and return expence)" was $250, whereas Green had spent $318.75. Jackson continued, "I also found from examining the acpts of Negroes sent to markett that the expence never averaged more from here than fifteen dollars a head", with the solitary exception of "one wench and three children, who had been subject to the fits remained better than six months in the Natchez" having cost him $25. Jackson argued to the arbitrators to whom he was writing that Green's businessexpenses were "exorbitant" and that Green did not even provide an itemized report, but rather lumped "charges without any specification." Jackson continued that "taking no notice of the time the negroes have beenhired out, or the reduction of their expence by sales, andone having run away" there was a balance of $340 but "from every enquiry I have made on the subject, that fifteen dollars pr head is about the usual expence, and finding this to amount including the amount of the Price of the Boat, and not taking into view the children at the breast, it makes the cost on each negro $44.66,2⁄3" which per Jackson was "more than double what is usual..."[304]
Jackson proceeded to lay out a list of expected expenses for such a slaving expedition, based on "the soldiers ration", including the anticipated cost of crewing the boat (with asteersman), housing for Mr. Green "after he left his Boat", two purchases ofcornmeal (totaling 100bushels) for $62.75, two purchases of bacon for $208.121⁄2, as well as an expected clothing expense for at least the female slaves: "one habit each the fellows recd naked."[298] The standard diet for slaves on the march was pork and cornmeal, but, per Mississippi historianCharles S. Sydnor, "as there was no economy in providing new clothes for the journey through the forests, negroes generally reached the market in rags."[305]
They had hired akeelboat, and Green "had on board a number of Negroes" who could be put to work pulling the oars. An oar-propelled keelboat was better for goingupstream than a flatboat, which essentially treated the Mississippi as one longflume ride.[307] Jackson argued that if Green had sense he never would have made a sales call at Natchez, which everyone knew was "glutted" with slaves and slave traders, but instead he should have visited the prosperous old settlement of Bayou Sara (further downriver nearBaton Rouge) and then gone up into theRed River country of Louisiana and sought buyers there. This type of circuit was the life of a slave trader, most of whom "seem to have stayed only a short while in any one place."[146] Green instead landed at Natchez where he traded some of the slaves in his possession for what Jackson called "an old horse foundered."[308] If Green had been a better steward of this merchandise, wrote Jackson, the slaves in question "would have cleared their own expence, if not neated something to the owners."[308]
In the acts of 1812, theTennessee state legislature prohibited importation of slaves as merchandise; it remained legal to import slaves "acquired by descent, devise, marriage, or purchase."[309] The prohibition act authorized the seizure and sale of slaves at auction if the legal owner had not provided an inventory and oath of lawful ownership to the localjustice of the peace within 20 days of settlement.[309]
On June 7, 1814, in the midst of theCreek War, seven people were sold at auction in Nashville. All are believed to have been slaves of Creek village headman Bob Cataula, who had surrendered theMuscogee tribal town ofLittafuchee at the request of Jackson's army on October 27, 1813. There were three men in the auction lot, one of whom was named Cato. Cato was married to an enslaved woman who was at least one-quarter Choctaw by heritage and who had been purchased by Cataula for $300. Cato's wife had three children. By order of General Jackson, proceeds from the auction were supposed "to be equally divided between the heirs of those who were killed or died of their wounds and those men who became disabled" during the war. At least one Tennessean inquired publicly if it was right to sell Cato's wife and children: "I want to know by what authority a poor captive Choctaw squaw and her several children for many years confined to slavery in the Creek nation, and taken at Talleshatchee by the whites, has been sold as slaves? I know not what principles govern in these cases—but I imagine it cannot be right to make slaves of Indians. At least my feelings revolt at the idea of such a step."[310] Littafuchee had also been the home of a baby the Jacksons calledTheodore, who was separated from his biological mother and sent to live at the Hermitage as a "little Indian" for their five-year-old sonAndrew Jackson Jr.[311] Later, after the destruction of the Red Stick army atTohopeka, displaced Black refugees began to arrive atFort Jackson. In some cases their legal owners had beenkilled at Fort Mims; the buying and selling necessary to resettle these slaves continued for years, and Jackson took the opportunity to buy five people (Amey, Hannah, Jack, Sam, and Seller) from the son-in-law of a man killed at Fort Mims. Jackson sent several others to his forced-labor farm in Tennessee, "where they were put to work" until they were reclaimed in 1816 and 1818.[312][313]
If you want to know what unhappiness means, just stand on the slave block and hear the auctioneer's voice selling you away from the folks you love.
— John Rudd, interviewed inVanderburgh County, Indiana for theWPA'sSlave Narrative Project (c. 1937)[314]
What do you think they came for when they tried to get rid of us? Our community. You break that and you break the individual.
— Hokti (Lily Gladstone) in "Dig" (episode 3.10),Reservation Dogs, written by Chad Charlie andSterlin Harjo (2023)[315]
| Name | Age | Est. birth year | Sale date | Price and present-day value (group) | Price and present-day value (individual) | Location | Buyer | Witness(es) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Betty[197][301] | 35 | c. 1765 | December 27, 1800 | $550 (equivalent to $10,190 in 2024) | $225 (equivalent to $4,169 in 2024) | County of Pickering | Abraham Green | Jn. Hutchings, S. Lewis | Betty and Hannah were mother and daughter. |
| Hannah[197][301] | 15 | c. 1785 | December 27, 1800 | $550 (equivalent to $10,190 in 2024) | $225 (equivalent to $4,169 in 2024) | County of Pickering | Abraham Green | Jn. Hutchings, S. Lewis | |
| Fanny (or Faney)[316][301] | Age unknown | n/a | Date unknown | US$280 | US$280 | Mississippi Territory (unconfirmed) | Abraham Green (unconfirmed) | Unknown | Abraham Green in acpt. with Andrew Jackson, Dr. To one Negro Wench namedFaney, $290 To 2Negroe weamen Betty &Hanah 550 To Merchandize from John Anderson 15 18 To cash Pd Taylor for making coat 3 ___ $848.18 |
| "Negro woman"[201] | Age unknown | n/a | December 23, 1801 | $500 (equivalent to $9,449 in 2024) | Near Natchez, Mississippi Territory | Unknown | Unknown | Claiborne also predicted that Hutchings would successfully sell "the boy" to Cato West | |
| "Wench...prone to fits"[317] | Age unknown | n/a | December 19, 1809 | $325 (equivalent to $6,534 in 2024) | $162.50 (equivalent to $3,267 in 2024) | Natchez, Mississippi Territory | "Free French woman of color" | Sold by Washington Jackson as agent of A. Jackson | She did laundry work for W. Jackson while he was in possession of her in Natchez, which W. Jackson wrote "about amounts to what Cloathing I furnished her with"; both Jacksons mentioned that she and her children had not sold quickly; A. Jackson wrote in 1812 that she had "remained better than six months in the Natchez" |
| Child, name unknown[317] | Age unknown | n/a | December 19, 1809 | $325 (equivalent to $6,534 in 2024) | $162.50 (equivalent to $3,267 in 2024) | Natchez, Mississippi Territory | "Free French woman of color" | Sold by Washington Jackson as agent of A. Jackson | "Child being sickly"; Jackson later claimed that a woman believed to be this same mother had three children, not just the one mentioned in the 1809 letter of W. Jackson |
| Kessiah (or Kissiah)[255][318][301] | Age unknown | n/a | December 26, 1811 | $650 (equivalent to $12,284 in 2024) | $216.67 (equivalent to $4,095 in 2024) | Claibo Urne, Missesseppi Territory | Abraham Green | J. Hutchings | Ruben and Elsey were Kessiah's children.Test.-Note the words "named Kissiah" in the 5th line from the Top, interlined before signed. Test. J. Hutchings." January 17, 1801. |
| Ruben (or Reuben)[255][301][318] | 3 | c. 1808 | December 26, 1811 | $650 (equivalent to $12,284 in 2024) | $216.67 (equivalent to $4,095 in 2024) | Claibo Urne, Missesseppi Territory | Abraham Green | J. Hutchings | |
| Elsey (or Elsy)[255][318][301] | 0–2 | c. 1810 | December 26, 1811 | $650 (equivalent to $12,284 in 2024) | $216.67 (equivalent to $4,095 in 2024) | Claibo Urne, Missesseppi Territory | Abraham Green | J. Hutchings | Described as a "female child at the breast" |
| Candis[255][319] | 14 | c. 1797 | December 27, 1811 | $1,000 (equivalent to $18,898 in 2024) | $500 (equivalent to $9,449 in 2024) | Claibourne, Mississippe Territory | James McCaleb | John Hutchings, William Robinson | Described as "about fourteen years old of a yellow complecton"Payment was due March 1, 1812; endorsed on back "Rec'd N. Orls. Apl. 12th 1812 One thousand Dollars by the hands of J Smith Esq in full of the within note. $1000 WASHN. JACKSON & Co. |
| Lucinda[255][319] | 20 | c. 1791 | December 27, 1811 | $1,000 (equivalent to $18,898 in 2024) | $500 (equivalent to $9,449 in 2024) | Claibourne, Mississippe Territory | James McCaleb | John Hutchings, William Robinson | Described as "about twenty years old of a black complecton formerly the property of Mary Coffery" |
Several of Jackson's bills of sale are dated to late December, at the end of the Mississippi cotton season—"a few days' rest usually coincided with Christmas."[320] Winter and spring were the traditional slave-trading seasons, after the harvest was in, and before the summer heat and mosquitoes and fleas arrived in force.[186][321][322][p] The river was also higher in winter and spring, and the current stronger, making for a faster trip downstream in the days beforesteam power.[323]
According to Jackson's enemies in Kentucky (in the personage of the editor of theKentucky Reporter), the bills of sale had "been examined by persons acquainted with the Hero's hand writing and certified to be true copies. Their bad grammar and bad orthography shew their family likeness to all the productions of his pen which have not been corrected by some friendly hand. For example—Ruben for Reuben—tittle for title—negroe for negro—weamen for women—warrent for warrant—admistrators for administrators, and several other like blunders, besides grammatical absurdities. Nobody disputes the General's right to engage in the negro trade, and to pursue it from the year 1800 to the year 1811, or as long as he pleased. It is a lawful traffic, and far more respectable persons have been employed in it. But General Jackson has no right to deny the truth; nor have his friends any such right."[324] The receipts for several slave sales made by Jackson resurfaced in part because buyer Abraham Green had died October 6, 1826,[325] and his estate was still being settled in 1828.[326] One of theexecutors of Abraham Green's estate, Benjamin Hughes, had the bill of sale for Kessiah and her childrennotarized before sharing the documents with theAriel.[318] As it happens, Hughes was probably kin to Eden Brashears, an assistant agent at the Choctaw Agency.[327] The S. Lewis who witnessed the sale of Betty and Hannah is very possibly theSeth Lewis whomJohn Adams had appointed in May 1800 to serve as chief justice of the Mississippi Territory,[328] and about whom, it was said, in "the year 1790...being in Nashville, he contracted a friendship with Andrew Jackson and Col.Josiah Love, who persuaded him to study law."[329]The Port Gibson Correspondent stated that the sale record for Malinda and Candis to James McCaleb was entirely in Jackson's handwriting (except for the signatures of the witnesses) and "could be viewed at the office of the Democratic Press at any time between the hours 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. daily."[319] According to May Wilson McBee's extracts of Natchez District court records, in 1804 James McCaleb had filed a claim for about 500 acres on the "Boggy Branch" of the North Fork of Bayou Pierre, east of Grindstone Ford, and adjacent to land owned byAbner Green.[330] According to a newspaper ad placed byP. A. Van Dorn (who married a Donelson–Caffrey daughter, and who was the father of future Confederate generalEarl Van Dorn), McCaleb also operated acotton gin near Bayou Pierre in 1814.[331]
The Washington Jackson & Co. that accepted the $1,000 for Candis and Lucinda from James McCaleb on behalf of Andrew Jackson was acotton factor, or cotton brokerage firm, with branches in New Orleans, Philadelphia, andLiverpool, England.[332] Cotton factors were "the most important middlemen" between Southern crops and Northern and European markets.[333] Factors often held crops onconsignment and acted as not just business managers for plantation owners but as banks, taking a stake in the consignee's business and perhaps advancing them money against future profits.[334] According to historianHarold D. Woodman [Wikidata], "By 'endorsing' a planter's note, the factor guaranteed that it would be paid when due. The planter would receive credit, but the factor would not be called upon to make any cash outlay unless the planter defaulted."[335] There were three Jackson brothers, John, James, and Washington, who were "Irish immigrants but with no verifiable relationship to Andrew."[336] Originally merchants of Nashville, by 1809 Washington Jackson had a "cheap cash store" in Natchez, where he offered an extensive inventory, including a "first rate new keel boat, 25tons burden, with poles and oars" advertised for sale in September,[337] and where, in December 1809, he sold a slave woman prone to "fits" to a "free French" woman of color on behalf of Andrew Jackson.[338] According toThe Papers of Andrew Jackson (1984),James Jackson served as a "private banker for Andrew, extending large sums of money onpromissory notes. They were later partners in numerous land ventures, including theChickasaw Purchase speculation."[336] Another instance of Jackson treating the Jacksons as slave brokers appears in a letter of September 18, 1816, written to Rachel: "Mr James Jackson on your application will take order on Sampson if necessary, that family will sell any where, better below than in Nashville, but I suppose in Nashville for $14. or 1500." The Sampson in question was apparently "Big Sampson with wife Pleasant and son George", who had been purchased as a family inMobile in 1814, shortly after the city was captured from the Spanish in April 1813.[339][118]
Natchez is a land offevers,alligators, niggers, and cotton bales: where the sun shines with force sufficient to melt the diamond, and the word ice is expunged from the dictionary, for its definition cannot be comprehended by the natives: where to refusegrog before breakfast would degrade you below the brute creation; and where a good dinner is looked upon as an angel's visit, and voted a miracle: where the evergreen and majesticmagnolia tree, with its superb flower, unknown to the northern climes, and its fragrance unsurpassed, calls forth the admiration of every beholder; and thedark moss hangs in festoons from the forest trees like the drapery of a funeral pall: where bears, the size of young jackasses, are fondled in lieu of pet dogs; andknives, the length of a barber's pole, usurp the place of toothpicks: where the filth of the town is carried off bybuzzards, and the inhabitants are carried off by fevers: where nigger women are knocked down by the auctioneer, and knocked up by the purchaser: where the poorest slave has plenty of yellow boys, but not ofBenton's mintage; and indeed the shades of colour are so varied and mixed, that a nigger is frequently seen black and blue at the same time. And such is Natchez.
— Richard Penn Smith,On to the Alamo: Col. Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas, a piece ofWhig Party-aligned fiction about theTexas Revolution (1839)[340]
According to the county historian forWarren County, Ohio, a localplow manufacturer called John E. Dey travelled widely in the early 19th century via the Mississippi and Ohio River, seeking customers for the company's products. Dey spent his winters at Bruinsburg, and "Andrew Jackson, years before when he was just a Colonel, lived at this place. Colonel Jackson quite often frequented the plantation, and Mr. Dey became well acquainted with him. He remembered that he was a tall, slim man, with a nervous manner. He used to carry a pocket full of shelled corn and play with the grains at the dining table...He says that Colonel Jackson, soon after he came to Mississippi, went back into the woods about four miles from the river to a noted hunting place of the hunting gentlemen of the country. Here he started a saloon which he continued for many years. He never appeared behind the bar, but the establishment was his and he was responsible for it."[341] According to the editors of thePapers of Andrew Jackson, as a state judge he was exempt fromstate militia service, but correspondents began referring to Jackson as colonel in 1797.[342] In 1802, despite having no known military qualifications, Jackson won the elected office of major-general of the Tennessee state militia.[343]
In 1922, Jackson biographer and former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee,S. G. Heiskell described Jackson's Mississippi business as "slaves and whiskey."[158] Jackson must well have known that in its first decades "the United States was an alcoholic republic."[344] Corn was the primarystaple grain of both Tennessee and Mississippi, which was both fed to stock as fodder and fermented and processed into a distilledalcoholic beverage. Letters and tax records show Jackson sold whiskey from astill running at his Hunter's Hill plantation in Tennessee in the 1790s.[345]Whiskey wasthe beverage of early Mississippi, while gambling could have been considered the "unofficial state sport."[346] The earliest-dated document in the collected papers of Andrew Jackson (albeit not written in his handwriting) was created March 29, 1779, two weeks after Jackson's 12th birthday. It is a training diet for a fighting cock. The directions are to give the battle rooster smoke-driedIndian corn, finely chopped "Pickle Beaf" three times a day, "lightewheat Bread Soked insweet Milk", and "feed him as Much as he Can Eat for Eaight Days."[347]
The first account of "Jackson as slave trader" that was published after his death comes from an author writing as Idler, datelined Rodney, Mississippi, 1854: "...here [at Bruinsburg], nearly fifty years ago, Gen. Jackson—he was not 'Old Hickory' then—landed his flatboat, laden with Western produce, negroes, etc., which he had piloted from Nashville. I have understood that the original intention of Jackson was to settle in Mississippi, but he subsequently returned through the wilderness to Tennessee..." Idler continued, explaining that "the removal of negroes through the Indian nation into one of the States of the Union was strictly prohibited", and there was a plan made by the Choctaw and their allies "to arrest him by force should he persist in his unlawful attempt" but Jackson "armed his negroes and a few of his friends and boldly marched unmolested through the Indian territory."[348][q][r]
"Idler" described Jackson participating in foot races and wrestling matches at Bruinsburg, naming "Bruin, Price, Crane, Freeland, Harmon and others" as Jackson's companions in sport.[348] Jackson's most astute 19th-century biographer reported that as a youth, "He was passionately fond of those sports which are mimic battles; above all, wrestling...He was exceedingly fond of running foot-races, of leaping the bar, and jumping; and in such sports he was excelled by no one of his years."[352] Among those taking anoath of allegiance to the United States, on October 30, 1798, wereWaterman Crane, Llewellyn Price, and James and Hezekiah Harmon.[353] These men swore their oath before Samuel Gibson, a resident since 1788 and the founder of Port Gibson, the principal village of upper Bayou Pierre.[354]
A surviving letter written to Jackson on October 21, 1791, by George Cochran, mentions "many agreeable hours" spent at Jackson's "friendly retreat at Bayou Pierre."[148][355] In 1801, Cochran bought land on Bayou Pierre from Crane, property that was adjacent to land owned by territorial judge Bruin, and George Humphreys, father of future Confederate general Humphreys.[356] One of the Humphreys' properties was called the Hermitage,[135] a name that supposedly inspired the name of the Tennessee plantation Andrew Jackson established in 1804.[357] When the Confederate general's grandfather died, back in the day, he owed money to "many creditors, including Jackson."[358] In 1802 Cochran was involved in the operation of Bruin's saw mill, "now cuttingcypress planks", located on James' Run stream near Bruinsburg and Bayou Pierre.[359] The same year, Bruin advertised that he was laying out an 11-street town at Bruinsburg and was seeking investors: "SUBSCRIPTIONS will be received at Natchez, by Robert and George Cochran, Ebenezer Rees, Bryan Bruin and at the Office of theHerald; at Cole's Creek by Thomas Calvit and John Giraults; at Bayou Pierre, by James Harmon, George W. Humphreys, Arthur Carney and William Scott; at Big Black, Tobias Brashears; at Fort Adams, by Capt.James Sterret."[360] Anticipating the White essentialism ofJacksonian democracy and the principle that "superintending inequality at home" allowed a cohort ofpatriarchs from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds to engage as equals in the marketplace and in the electoral arena,[361] Jackson's fellow traders were a showcase of White men's diversity,[362] perfectly willing to marry across cultural or religious lines for economic benefit,[363] all while busily importing and exploiting an increasingly heterogeneous slave population.[364]
According to theslave narrative ofJames Robinson, published in 1858, when Andrew Jackson needed more men in the lead-up to what became the Battle of New Orleans, he visited the plantation ofCalvin Smith on Second Creek near Natchez in approximately December 1814.[368] (During the first week of December 1814 Jackson asked theLouisiana state legislature to "urge planters to lend their slaves to help raise earthworks to defend the river."Louisiana governor W. C. C. Claiborne backed Jackson, and the legislature approved the resolution.)[369] Smith gave Jackson permission to take a large number of his slaves, and suggested more slaves could be gotten fromSpringfield, the plantation of Thomas Green.[368]Thomas Hinds, one of the American military heroes of theWar of 1812 in the southwesterntheater, was also helpfully married to a daughter of Springfield.[370] Jackson had kinship ties to the Green family connected him to what was called theNatchez Junto, the Green–Hinds–Hutchins–West political alliance in Mississippi Territory.[371] (Thomas Green Jr.'s brother Abraham Green's mother-in-law and Andrew Jackson's wife were sisters.)[372] Judge Bruin of Bruinsburg had worked with Calvin Smith's brotherPhilander Smith on territorial administrative and judicial issues, including thegrand jury investigation of Aaron Burr's treason charges.[373][374]
Jackson told the slaves on Smith's plantation that they would be given freedom in exchange for their work.[368] According to Robinson, Smith was willing to part with his slaves because he could always buy new ones whereas if British forces captured theMississippi River Delta his own children might be killed in the fighting.[368] (There was, however, also a profit motive, as the masters were to be paid for the labor of the slaves that they lent to the war effort.)[375] Jackson returned to New Orleans with the needed labor force. During the first week of January, as work strengthening earth-and-timber defensive lines continued near John Coffee's position, "some soldiers threatened mutiny over toiling on the entrenchments beside several hundred slaves, [although] Jackson managed to impress their officers with the value of the work, and no revolt took place."[376] Historian Adam Rothman observed that the American capacity to "mobilize slave labor in defense of New Orleans counteracted to some degree the military disadvantages of plantation society."[377] After the battle was won Jackson reneged, and Robinson concluded his narrative with a warning to other American slaves: "Do not forget the promise Jackson made us in the New Orleans war—'If the battle is fought and victory gained on Israel's side, you shall all be free,' when at the same time he had made a bargain with our masters to return home again all that were not killed. Never will a better promise be made to our race on a similar occasion...Avoid being duped by the white man—he wants nothing to do with our race further than to subserve his own interest, in any thing under the sun."[378]
If I had known that Jackson would drive us from our homes, I would have killed him that dayat the Horseshoe.
— Cherokee leaderTsunu′lahuñ′skĭ, quoted byJames Mooney in19th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1900)[379]
...after he had fallen out with his chief, Andrew Jackson, he never afterward spoke of him without a sneer...To [Davy Crockett] President Jackson was all that was selfish and tricky.
— Hamlin Garland, introduction to a reprint ofA Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1923)[380]
...the world is not to be trusted...many you will find under false pretentions of friendship would involve you, if they can, strip you of your last shilling, and afterwards laugh at your folly, and distress.
— Andrew Jackson letter to Andrew Jackson Jr. (1833)[381]
The memoirs ofWilliam Henry Sparks, published in 1870, described his knowledge of Jackson's slave-trading business: "Many will remember the charge brought against him pending his candidacy for the Presidency, of having been, in early life, a negro-trader, or dealer in slaves. This charge was strictly true, though abundantly disproved by the oaths of some, and even by the certificate of his principal partner."[382] Sparks said that Jackson had a "small store, or trading establishment...which stood immediately upon the bank of the Mississippi" at Bruinsburg, and there was an accompanying race track and acockfighting pit, and people told stories for years after about Jackson's "skill" at these sports. Per Sparks, Jackson sold slaves in the vicinity of Claiborne County, including to Sparks' father-in-law Abner Green and his wife's uncle Thomas M. Green Jr. Sparks claimed to have "bills of sale for negroes sold to Abner Green, in the handwriting of Jackson, bearing his signature..."[382]
"Sometimes, when the price was better, or the sales were quicker, he carried them to Louisiana. This, however, he soon declined; because, under the [redhibition] laws of Louisiana, he was obliged to guarantee the health and character of the slaves he sold. On one occasion he sold an unsound negro to a planter in theparish of West Feliciana, and, upon his guarantee, was sued and held to bail to answer. In this case he was compelled to refund the purchase-money, with damages. He went back upon his partner, and compelled him to share the loss. This caused a breach between them, which was never healed. This is the only instance which ever came to my knowledge of strife with a partner. He was close to his interest, and spared no means to protect it."
Writing in 1912,Thomas E. Watson commented, "The biographers of Andrew Jackson strain and strive mightily to ignore the fact that their hero was a negro trader in his early days, but it is a fact nevertheless...Ordinarily, theMemories of Fifty Years is to be rejected as an authority: the book was written in the extreme old age of the author and is full of fable. But William H. Sparks himself married into the Green family,[s] lived in the Bruinsburgh neighborhood, and must be presumed to have known what the Greens had to say concerning their great friend and his beloved wife."[384]
Sparks also recalled that when he and his wife visited theWhite House in 1835, 67-year-old widower Jackson asked them,"'Is old papa Jack and Bellile living?'...These were two old Africans, faithful servants of her father; and then there was an anecdote of each of them—their remarks or their conduct upon some hunting or fishing excursion, in which he had participated 40 years before."[385]
It is very easy for those who have their fortunes secured in bank stock...or money at interest [to] deliberatelyproclaim a jubilee on our slaves, in which they have neither interest to lose nor danger to fear.
— William Smith, U.S. Senator and lifelong friend of Jackson, 1816[386]
During a ride of 450 miles from Nashville, I had seen nothing in circulation butTennessee bank notes (mixed occasionally with an Alabama note), down to the denomination of six and a quarter cents; andshin-plasters of all sorts and of all sizes, from a dollar downwards, and manufactured by all sorts of persons, from the wealthy merchant, to the market butcher and the petty shopkeeper. This latter generation sprang into being immediately on thestoppage of specie payments by the banks.
— Rev. Henry Ruffner, "Notes of a Tour from Virginia to Tennessee in the Months of July and August 1838"[387]
[Jackson] was a bank hater from an early day.Paper money was an abomination to him, because he regarded it in the light of a promise to pay that was almost certain, sooner or later, to be broken.
— Felix Robertson, physician and son of Tennesseeexplorer James Robertson, quoted by Parton (1861)[388]
Dr. James F. McCaleb, writing about the Natchez Trace in theNatchez News-Democrat in 1915,[t] described Jackson as a sportsman and gambler, stated that he had stores at both Bruinsburg and Old Greenville, and that: "Grindstone Ford lane, one mile in length, on the Natchez Trace was the great rendezvous for horse racing, theIndian ball game, andlacrosse. Travelers from Kentucky and Tennessee stopped at the station of Mrs. Worldridge and the tavern of George Lemon near the Grindstone Ford on Bayou Pierre to enjoy the regular Sunday festivals...Among the horsemen from theBlue Grass State was A. S. Colthrap, who ran his horse against General Jackson's betting four slaves to determine the winner as well as some money. Colthrap lost his horse, his money, and his slaves to General Jackson, returning home a poorer and a wiser man."[391][392] Per historian and Jackson biographer Bassett, "Race paths were laid out in the earliest [Southern] settlements and succeeded by circular tracks, as the settlements developed."[393] In a study of antebellum horse racing, theJournal of Mississippi History recounted the Jackson–Colthrap incident and stated that thisstraightaway was the first racecourse in Claiborne County and was located near the "Red House" tavern atRocky Springs.[394] Also, according to the memoir of aPresbyterian minister, Sunday was indeed race day in the vicinity of Old Greenville, an attraction that drew many young men away from church attendance.[395] Neither report addressed whether Jackson kept his winnings for personal use or resold them for short-term gain. There is an E. S. Coltharp (1784–1859) buried at the old Rocky Springs Methodist Church cemetery on the historic road from Natchez to Nashville.[396] This Dr. James H. McCaleb who wrote an article about the Natchez Trace for theNatchez News-Democrat in 1915 was a great-grandnephew of the James McCaleb (1772–1822) who purchased Malinda and Candis from Andrew Jackson in 1811.[391][397]
American abolitionistBenjamin Lundy covered reports of Jackson's slave trading in his newspaper,The Genius of Universal Emancipation, or American Anti-Slavery Journal and Register of News. In 1827, when the first allegation appeared in Kentucky, Lundy recounted a separate story about Jackson having whipped a recaptured runaway slave he had tied to thejoist of a blacksmith shop. Lundy could not confirm the secondhand report, and expressed hope that the reports of slave trading were exaggerating this tale.[401] As the election approached in 1828, Lundy wrote that he felt that Jackson's own account of the deal was effectively a full confession: "This, we repeat, is Gen. Jackson's own story. It amounts to this. A speculation was to be made incotton, tobacco and negroes: Coleman was to do the business and Jackson to furnish the means; the negroes were bought up, taken to market, followed by Jackson, part of them sold by himself at Natchez, and the rest carried back by him to Tennessee in the year 1812."[402]
The charges were "sensational and damaging", and Jackson's campaign organization, theNashville Central Committee (known to his enemies as "the whitewashing committee"), scrambled for a response, initially lying that Jackson had merely been a silent partner, then falling back on a round ofwhataboutism.[403] The close examination in 1828 of Jackson's enslavement of people likeGilbert, and his history of slave trading, was promulgated in large part by a man namedAndrew Erwin, who, according to historian Cheathem, was "determined to undermine Jackson's campaign" for both spite and politics.[404] Erwin andHenry Clay shared a set of grandchildren.[405][406][407]Boyd McNairy, whose bank had held accounts for Coleman, Green & Jackson, and who published abroadside headlined "Jackson a negro trader", was a brother of Judge McNairy, andNathaniel A. McNairy, who dueled John Coffee in 1806 and advertised slaves for sale in Natchez in 1807–08.[408][409][410] B. McNairy later wrote in a public letter to Jackson, "You have been charged...with having been engaged, in one or more instances, in NEGRO TRADING—with having employed your capital and credit in the purchase and sale of slaves, for the sake of pecuniary profit. Is this charge true, or is it not? If it be true, why do you not magnanimously and heroically admit it, and defend yourself upon the ground that the habits prevalent in the country and the peculiar state of our society, in a community where slavery unfortunately exists, justified such speculations?"[411]
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Even though "the slaves he bought and sold as a young man as part of the burgeoning interstate trade in enslaved people helped make him rich", during the1828 United States presidential election, Jackson repudiated the claim that he was a slave trader.[412] Jackson's dishonesty was not his alone. Allies were recruited to swear, falsely, that it was not true. The editorial page ofThe Ariel of Natchez wrote that it was "a matter of astonishment that the friends of Gen. Jackson have the hardihood to deny that in the year 1811, their idol was not actually and personally engaged in the sale of Negroes as an object of speculation, because like almost every other charge brought against him, the more they endeavor to 'hide the crimes they see' and to screen him from odium, the deeper they impress on the minds of the investigating the strength of the evidence which support them."[318] As retold by Mississippi historianEron Rowland in 1910, "It may cause some of the warm friends of Old Hickory to scoff to recall the accredited fact that he, in those early days, for a time followed the business of a negro-trader at this place [Old Greenville, Mississippi]. A proof that this fact was not taken with the best grace at that day is that in several political campaigns, his followers were compelled to swear by the eternal that he did not."[413]
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AbolitionistsTheodore Dwight Weld,Angelina Grimké, andSarah Moore Grimké, under the banner of theAmerican Anti-Slavery Society, wrote inAmerican Slavery As It Is (1839) that "It is well known that President Jackson was a soul driver..."[417]Lewis Tappan wrotein the margins of his copy, now held in theAmistad Research Center atTulane University in New Orleans, that Weld said the statement about Jackson was the only thing anyone had ever denied or claimed was incorrect in the book, and further noted, "Mr. Weld informs me (Nov 23|49) that the above was stated to him byJ. G. Birney who received it fromMr. Kingsbury, missionary among the Choctaws."[418][u]
The denial was carried forward—for years, decades, daresay, centuries—by those whom Southern chroniclerHarnett T. Kane described as "fist-pounding partisans."[428] In his Jackson bio published 1861 (the first year of theAmerican Civil War), Parton wrote:[429]
"There is an odium attached to this business in theslave States, as is well known; and consequently, the alleged negro trading of General Jackson has excited a great deal of angry controversy. I was myself informed, in a mysterious whisper, by a southern gentleman in high office, that this was the only 'blot' on the character of the General. It is not necessary to investigate a subject of this nature."[429]
Regarding the repeated appearance of the wordodium in contemporary accounts of Jackson's trading, historian Sydnor wrote in his 1933Slavery in Mississippi, "To the present day a certain odium clings to the term slave-trader. It may seem illogical that owners of slaves, who from time to time purchased from traders, would have scorned men in this business, but this seems to have been the case. It is debatable whether the disapproval of the trader in negroes was honest, or whether it was a convenient sentiment which made the slave-trader ascapegoat for much of the evil ofslavery."[430] Parton, apparently unbothered by the "blot" or the odium, wrote, "The simple truth respecting it, I presume, is, that having correspondents in Natchez, and being in the habit of sending down boat-loads of produce, the firm of which he was a member occasionally took charge of negroes destined for the lower country, and, it may be, sold them on commission, or otherwise."[429] Nearly 120 years later, in volume one of his three-volume Jackson biography, Remini recapitulated Parton's conclusion almost in its entirety, further downplaying to posterity the importance of slavery in Jackson's life and work:[431] "...because he had agents in Natchez and regularly sent down boatloads of produce, Jackson occasionally engaged in slave trading as a service for a friend or a client."[432] Historian Cheathem argued in 2011 that due to an over-reliance on Parton, Remini, and theCorrespondence, at the expense of archival investigation, Jacksonian scholarship has long minimized his slaving, and while "recent research by historians" has resurfaced the political significance of Jackson's slaveholding "...more work remains to be done on his own slave communities in Tennessee and Mississippi and the ramifications for his public actions."[433]
The extended Jackson–Donelson clan is one of a number ofAmerican families that have scrubbed the occupational histories of American slave traders fromobituaries andgenealogies, effacing American history and obscuring the origins of their generational wealth.[434] Jackson's great-grandson, Andrew Jackson IV, who worked in Los Angeles as a schoolteacher and occasionalmovie extra, wrote in the early 20th century, "As a lawyer for the ten years after his admission to the bar Jackson saw to it that he was well paid for this dangerous frontier law work. For an ordinary law suit he got one square mile of land for his fee. By 1796 he had been paid 50,000 square miles in fees."[435] A distant cousin, Charles S. Caffery, wrote in the early 1950s of his direct ancestor, Jackson's brother-in-law John Caffery, "[Jackson's] defamers said that he dealt in negroes but this was never proven. He did buy goods by the boat load and resold at retail through agents. John Caffery went early to Natchez, Mississippi, as Jackson's agent."[436][v] According to Liverpool-based scholarMichael Tadman, "Slave trading and the forcible separation of slave families were pervasive...in the South generally and...traders tended to be men of considerable wealth and status. The trade, however, was awkward to fit with southern white claims of benevolence and tended therefore to be hidden."[440]
Several of Jackson's personal and political conflicts involved the trade. In an early letter about the 1806duel in which he killedCharles Dickinson, Jackson wrote, "for the present it will only be observed that the deceased, could not be called a Citizen of this state—that he was engaged in the humane persuit of purchasing Negroes inMaryland and carrying them to Natchez & Louisa and thus making a fortune of speculating on human flesh".[441] Dickinson was indeed a slave trader too: In 1882, theDenton Journal described a derelictoutbuilding on what had once been Dickinson's property nearPreston, Maryland, where "staples andringbolts" for chaining slaves were still embedded in the "massive timbers" of the old barn, originally constructed as a trader'sslave pen.[442] Dickinson's father-in-lawJoseph Erwin was also a slave trader.[443] In 1810 Jackson and his slave-trading partner Joseph Coleman both testified about the good character of victim Patton Anderson at the Nashville murder trial of the Magnesses.[444] Anderson was the brother of Jackson's aide-de-camp W. P. Anderson, and had worked locally as a trader in land warrants, horses, and slaves.[444] According toAmerican Slavery As It Is, Andrew Erwin's son James Erwin and son-in-lawHenry Hitchcock were slave traders: "It is known in Alabama, that Mr. Erwin, son-in-law of the Hon. Henry Clay, and brother ofJ. P. Erwin, formerly postmaster, and late mayor of the city of Nashville, laid the foundation of a princely fortune in the slave-trade, carried on from the Northern Slave States to the Planting South."[417][445]
As he had done following Dickinson's death, Jackson pointed the finger again in 1819, when he was called to account for what he called "this savage and negro war", an 1818 self-authorizedpunitive expedition against theRed Sticks faction of the Muscogee Confederation and other communities of color in Florida (such as the people of theNegro Fort). These groups had been allied with the British during the War of 1812,[448] and they had long frustrated both Jackson and theGeorgia Patriots.[449] Treasury SecretaryWilliam H. Crawford was "a severe critic of his Florida adventure. Jackson had information that linked Crawford with the allegedslave-smuggling activities of Georgia's former governor,David B. Mitchell. On September 28, 1819, Jackson, the former slave trader, wrote a 'Private' letter toPresident Monroe proposing an investigation of Crawford's activities..."[450][w] This, argued Binder, writing in 1968, was a part of a lifelong pattern in Jackson's dealings with slaves and slavery, in which he remained "emotionally uninvolved" while alternately using appeals for and against various moral and social positions in pursuit of his own ends: "He viewed slavery as a convenient weapon of political warfare for obtaining objectives often quite remote from the Negro...His attitude toward the Negro appears to have been governed at all times by immediate and practical expediency. Whether in the fields of commerce, plantation management, military tactics or politics...He thought of the Negro in the present tense and appreciated him primarily as a tool in hand."[451] Jackson repeatedly used hypocritical arguments in service of selfish ends: For instance, he called his electoral and legislative nemesis Clay a "roaming, lyingdemagogue"[452] and a "typical western gambler", while somehow "forgetting that he too fit the description."[453][x] In the 1920s,Thomas P. Abernethy had come to roughly the same conclusion as Binder (that Jackson was an unprincipled and manipulative pragmatist): "No historian has ever accused Jackson, the great Democrat, of having had apolitical philosophy. It is hard to see that he even had any political principles. He was a man of action, and the man of action is likely to be an opportunist."[456]Edward Pessen has argued that this tendency toward the transactional and interpersonally exploitative was the key to Jackson's presidency, stating that "the flip-flop" was a pervasive theme—he could be both pro-and anti-tariff and either pro- or anti-internal improvements, depending on the phase of the moon and the alignment of the audience, such that Jackson's only foundational and immutable values were the "sanctity of financial obligations", that wealth signified virtue, that slavery was good, and that Indians had no rights.[457] As roaming lying demagogues both, neither Jackson nor Clay ever "bothered themselves about the matter of consistency."[458] Cherokee chiefJohn Ridge once called Jackson"'a Chicken Snake' who hid in 'the luxuriant grass of his nefarious hypocracy.'"[459] More recently, political historian Joshua Lynn has argued that theDemocratic Party of theSecond andThird political-party systems was simply an extended projection of the preferences of the founder: "Following Jackson's lead, broad-minded Democrats tolerated much that other Americans considered social, political, or moral evils, including white men's ethnic and religious diversity, tippling in addition toteetotaling, enslavement alongside freedom."[460]
Perhaps most importantly, Andrew Jackson's early arrival in the Deep South as a businessman led to his role in the Battle of New Orleans, extinguishing British hopes of regaining control of the lower Mississippi, and to his military conquest of the lands of theOld Southwest that remained in the hands of Indigenous people and the Spanish crown. Jackson's actions in the Creek War and the War of 1812 "greatly accelerated the transformation of ethnic relations already underway in the Mississippi Territory",[463] such that "the final shot in the Battle of New Orleans signaled the beginning of a race into theOld Southwest...with the acquisition of West Florida from thePearl River to thePerdido, numerous waterways had become available for unrestricted shipment of cotton, timber, and naval stores to the seacoast."[464] Jackson's campaigns against theSeminole (Semvnole) in the 1810s begat theSecond Seminole War during his presidency, which was triggered in part because "a unified band of defiant Native Americans and African Americans was a dangerous symbol when located so closely to a burgeoning plantation society built on the backs of enslaved people."[465] Former slaves found some degree of safety and prosperity in the sovereign Seminole lands.[466] The fact that Seminole leaders simply refused to allow these people to be turned back into products was intolerable to the Jackson administration.[465][467]
Appointed asUnited States Indian commissioners for a series of treaty negotiations in the 1810s and 1820s, Andrew Jackson, and his old business partner John Coffee (a "simple" man who was "absolutely devoted" to Jackson),[469] and Thomas Hinds, who had married into the Green family that was so closely aligned with Jackson's early years in Mississippi, andJohn Eaton, the husband of one ofJackson's wards and his futureSecretary of War, acquired land from the tribes of the southeast as "a matter of economic urgency."[470] A steady stream of White immigrants doubled the region's population between 1810 and 1820. These settlers dragged slaves along with them, to break the land, and they funded rudimentary local governments with their land-use taxes.[470] Jackson and his Donelson kinsmen, and their sergeants, foot soldiers, goons, cronies, vassals, franchisees, and friends, engaged in what has been described asvertically integrated family-business imperialism: "They fought the native peoples, negotiated the treaties to end the fighting and demanded native lands as the price of war, surveyed the newly available lands, bought those lands, litigated over disputed boundaries, adjudicated the cases, and made and kept laws within the region that had been carved out of Indian lands."[471] That surveying was just another name for colonization was well understood by America's aboriginal people. In the winter of 1786Hanging Maw, head chief of theOverhill Cherokee, scattered a band of Whites atDefeated Creek and captured their horses, provisions, and surveying equipment. He later taunted the original owners that he had smashed theirland stealer, acompass, against a tree.[472]
In 1834, with Jacksonian federalIndian Removal well underway,The Liberator abolitionist newspaper published Nashville ministerMarius R. Robinson's report on the internal slave trade:[473]
In Mississippi and Louisiana the slave market is literally crowded. There are three principal reasons for the large demand.—1st. The high price of cotton last fall, induced many planters to go more largely into the cultivation of it, which increased the demand for laborers. 2nd.The cholera has swept off thousands of negroes during the last two years, and the planters are now filling up the ranks made thin by this scourge. 3rd. The country wrested from the Choctaw Indians has recently been brought into market. Of course the lands must now be cultivated by slaves.
Jackson's use of the apparatus of the government during his career as a U.S. Army general, U.S. Indian agent, and U.S. president carried forward the core values of the slave speculator. As told by historianWilliam W. Freehling in 2008:[474]
...on Jackson's southwestern frontier, his heroes included the sturdy yeomen, who raised crops to sustain white men's independence; and the resourceful capitalists, who massed the slaves to produce the profits that enabled paternalists and wards to forge smiling social orders. His villains included the Indians, who allegedly savaged the peace; the abolitionists, who supposedly fed happy darkies murderous ideas; and the paper money bankers, who purportedly stole white yeomen's and patriarchs' well-earned fortunes. To sustain the heroes and annihilate the villains was the essential purpose of the good state.
Jackson would be an epochal president, lending his name to theJacksonian era of American history. He "took white men's egalitarian government to its (racial) limits and far beyond the (class) limits of theFounding Fathers' aristocratic republicanism."[475] Unlike theRevolutionary generation of slave owners who wrote and ratified the founding documents of the United States (in the time afforded them by their generational wealth), sturdy Andrew Jackson created a fortune for himself out of subjugation and despotism without inheriting a single slave.[475]
Andrew Jackson's business model and actions met the definition of "slave trader" as understood by 19th-century abolitionists and 21st-century scholars.[151] Still, as an 1828 campaign issue, "Andrew Jackson as human trafficker" got little traction. According to historianRobert Gudmestad, information about "Gen. Jackson's negro trading" failed to swing voters in part because:[479]
Southerners wanted to believe that there was a small group of itinerant traders who created most of the difficulties. It was this type of speculator, most thought, who destroyed slave families, escorted coffles, sold diseased slaves, and concealed the flaws of bondservants. They were the 'slave-dealers.' All others who bought or sold slaves, even if they did so on a full-time basis, were innocent.
In an 1841 column about local politics, theMississippi Free Trader of Natchez defended the slave trade as the profession of a number of esteemed Southern gentlemen, listing as icons of genteel American prosperityJohn Armfield,Rice Ballard,Isaac Franklin,John L. Harris, Eli Odom,Thomas Rowan, andSowell Woolfolk—"A desperate set of ruffians these, with old Andrew Jackson at their head!"[480] This privileged denial of the reality of the American interregional slave trade continued well into the 20th century. In 1915, writing at the halfway point between Parton and Remini, a plantation heir named James T. Flint recycled the slave-trading-as-a-favor-to-neighborsshibboleth: "Andrew Jackson, who owned a few slaves in Tennessee, brought them down, with others belonging to friends, over the old Natchez trace to sell to well-to-do neighbors of his wife's former home near Greenville and Natchez, Miss., and for this reason he was accused by his political enemies in after years of being a 'nigger trader'."[481] A few lines later Flint recorded that while visiting in the vicinity of Old Greenville, his forebears "talked with one of the negroes brought from Tennessee and one from Kentucky" who had been sold in Mississippi by Andrew Jackson.[481][y]
Further to the point, some Jacksonian scholars have argued that it was Jackson's status as a wealthy slave owner and slave trader that made him politically attractive to the electorate.[482][z] In Pessen's telling, Jackson voters in 1828 were "convinced he was sound on the issue of slaveowners' rights."[485] According to biographer Remini, Jackson, his allies, and his successors believed "slaveholding was as American ascapitalism,nationalism, ordemocracy...the white southern celebration of liberty always included the freedom to preserve black slavery. That states Jackson's own position precisely."[486] Jackson's purported Unionist heroics in thenullification crisis were borne of his devotion to "unimpeded racist capitalism" and his derivative certainty "that the Union provided every protection that a slaveholder would ever need."[487] The Jacksonian Democrats who came later followed the "reactionary, anti-intellectual, agrarian ideal" modeled by the Old Hero.[488]
HistorianWalter Johnson has described the lower Mississippi River valley of the antebellum United States as ananthropophagus landscape that fed on bodies and souls and turned them intoAmerican dollars: "The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit."[489] Underlining the fact that theethnic cleansing of Indigenous American people resident in the Old Southwest was prefatory to the establishment of a new economy and ecology predicated on theforced labor of African-American slaves,[490] "when the surveyors hired by theGeneral Land Office began their work in Mississippi in 1831, they used the 'Old Choctaw Line' as the 'base meridian' of their efforts to transform the landscape from a landscape of imperial violence to a field of national development."[491] Theplanter class of what had once been a vast undifferentiated "Georgia" and a nigh impassable, impossibly remote "Louisiana" had used "human fuel to fire a tremendous engine of wealth creation."[492] American hegemony on the Mississippi and along the Gulf of Mexico is largely a product of Jackson's marauding.[493] His ceaseless assault on the Indigenous people of the southeastern U.S. and his pioneering work in the for-profit forcible relocation of enslaved African-Americans yielded "the beginnings of rapid American economic development. The cotton kingdom...financed the American economic expansion of the succeeding decades."[494] As his character was summarized in the 19th-century textbookScribner's Popular History of the United States, the epochal Andrew Jackson was "neither a wise nor a good man, and in many respects he was both a foolish and a bad one. He was not only illiterate—which may be a misfortune without being a fault—but ignorant; he was easily provoked to anger, and his rage was not only cruel but uncontrollable; in temper he was as despotic as he was fearless, and he was as free from scruples as he was without fear."[495] Jackson's destiny was to expand and empower the young United States, but only "by violating many of its formal founding principles. If he had not done so, the United States would have different borders and fewer historical burdens today."[496]
...his heritage, the land which old Carothers McCaslin his grandfather had bought with white man's money from the wild men whose grandfathers without guns hunted it, and tamed and ordered or believed he had tamed and ordered it for the reason that the human beings he held in bondage and in the power of life and death had removed the forest from it and in their sweat scratched the surface of it to a depth of perhaps fourteen inches in order to grow something out of it which had not been there before and which could be translated back into the money he who believed he had bought it had had to pay to get it and hold it and a reasonable profit too: and for which reason old Carothers McCaslin, knowing better, could raise his children, his descendants and heirs, to believe the land was his to hold and bequeath since the strong and ruthless man has a cynical foreknowledge of his own vanity and pride and strength and a contempt for all his get...
it was the new country, his heritage too as it was the heritage of all, out of the earth, beyond the earth yet of the earth because his too was of the earth's long chronicle, his too because each must share with another in order to come into it and in the sharing they become one...
— William Faulkner,Go Down, Moses (1942)[497]
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On Wednesday evening, April 29, 1863, a little over 25 years after the end of Jackson's presidency, a recently emancipated slave entered anArmy of the Tennessee encampment on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River and met withMajor-General Ulysses S. Grant (lifespan, 1822–1885; U.S. presidency, 1869–1877). The free man informed Grant of an excellent boat landing at Bruinsburg—entirely undefended, and much closer than the one Grant had planned to use. The next day, at the site of Andrew Jackson's old slave-trading stand, the U.S. Army made what stood until 1942 as the largestamphibious landing in American military history.[500]
General Grant's men went on from Bruinsburg tocapture Vicksburg, breaking the spine of the Confederacyat the Mississippi River.[500]
I've traveled the Mississippi a hundred times before the war, and held a hand in many a game where niggers right on board were the stakes; andMarshall, T. A. Jr. (December 16, 1886)."Vicksburg: Its Past, Present, and Future".The Vicksburg Post. Vol. IV, no. 301. Vicksburg, Mississippi. p. 6.ISSN 0884-8912.LCCN sn84025709.OCLC 10307676.
It is said thatPrentiss lost $80,000 at poker in one night inVicksburg. In those days planters were known to stakedeeds to theirplantations on the turn of a single hand, and he was considered a timid player who would not bet a grown nigger ontwo pairs. Those were the so-called flush times in Mississippi.
Compiled and submitted by Joyce Shannon Bridges. Based on the 1967 Lum canvass, which was rechecked in about 1991. Differences noted. This cemetery contains many unmarked graves.
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{{cite interview}}: CS1 maint: location (link) inWPA Federal Writers' Project (Indiana) (1941) [1936–1938].Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. Vol. V. Indiana Narratives.Federal Writers' Project,United States Work Projects Administration. Washington, D.C.: Assembled by the WPA Library of Congress Project – viaSlave Narrative Collection, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division. – Alsodigitized by Project Gutenberg. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain.
