Andrew Jackson and slavery
We everywhere remarked the greatest order, and most perfect neatness; and we might have believed ourselves on the property of one of the richest and most skilfull of German farmers, if, at every step, our eyes had not been afflicted by the sad spectacle of slavery.
According to a history of agriculture in early Tennessee, "Jackson had, beginning in 1795, an overseer; and all his race horses were fed and trained and cared for by other men.
The frantic, yet always hopeful letters to his adopted son during his second term as President, though coming long past this period, demonstrate too well the problem of the absentee owner on the Cumberland, trying to keep a plantation going almost entirely on money from the crop...The letters tell a tale of mismanagement and bad judgement...Neighbors wrote Jackson of Negroes sick and several dead, one suspects from brutality and ill treatment in general from the overseer, for there was no Rachel around to oversee the overseer...There is something infinitely pathetic about Jackson, honest, patient—a strange role for Jackson—old, watching the ruin of everything he had worked for all his life.
[16] The year before the 1828 U.S. presidential election, pioneering American abolitionist Benjamin Lundy republished news items suggesting that Andrew Jackson had been a slave trader in his younger days, commenting, "I shall be slow to believe that General Jackson would at this day be guilty of carrying on the 'lawful business' of men-dealing, although it is strongly commended by high authority in Maryland.
Some years since, a gentleman, residing near the mouth of the Ohio river, informed me that a slave belonging to General Jackson having absconded, was taken up and committed to jail (if I mistake not) in Alabama.
[18] According to Anita Goodstein's study of frontier-era Nashville black history, Jackson was "furious when his wife's maid [laundered] clothes for people outside the family.
"[20] On the question of "irons" Jackson had been given a platform for sharing his perspective on the discipline and punishment of subordinates when the U.S. Army issued a statement about the prevalence of desertion and what might be done to ameliorate the problem, including improving conditions for the soldiery.
Jackson, as Major General of the Division of the South, issued a statement on July 21, 1821, saying that issue was command weakness and the solution was more whipping and less chaining, writing (spelling and orthography is as written by Jackson):[20] The government must annex an adequate & certain punishmt
Is it more dishonorable to receive twentyfive stripes and be or dered to immediate duty, than to be manacled with Chains for months & years, an object of disgust to every freeman who sees him, more properly an appendage of ancient despotism, than any thing belong ing to republican institutions?
Let the deserter in time of peace, for the first offence receive thirty nine stripes, for the second double that number, and for the third let him feel the highest penalty of the law.
I will venture to say that a few examples will put an end to that extraordinary frequency of desertion which at present prevails, and the cause of which, has been so unjustly imputed "to an undue severity, or to the absence of system in the conduct of officers towards their men["][20]The number of "39 stripes" (meaning 39 strikes with the whip or the cat o' nine tails or the paddle) comes from the Bible, Deuteronomy 25:3, "He may be flogged with forty lashes, but no more."
[27] Federal troops were used to crush Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831,[28] though Jackson ordered them withdrawn immediately afterwards despite the petition of local citizens for them to remain for protection.
