Andrew Jackson and the slave trade in the United States

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—the preferred payment methods of the frontier south were "cash or negroes."

[26] (This left the theft of horses and mules, and the capture or protection of fugitive slaves, as the few means available for the western division of the Choctaw to disrupt colonization in and around Natchez without engaging in widespread violence and thus inviting outright war with the Americans.

"[34] It's not quite a thousand miles as the crow flies from Pittsburgh, at the head of the Ohio, to Natchez on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, and Nashville stands at just about the midpoint on the route between the states that ratified the U.S. Constitution between 1788 and 1790, and the outlet of a continent-spanning river system.

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.Jackson's attitude toward Texas fit with his foreign policy in general, which was largely a projection of his personal experience.

"[48][b] The debts accumulated because Jackson was prone to making imprudent financial investments (such as a disastrous deal with fellow speculator David Allison); status symbol purchases including "large sums for fine wines, expensive furnishings, hand-painted wallpaper, various objets d'art, and costly cut glass";[54] and, throughout his life, extravagant wagers on sporting events.

)[56] Regarding the accumulation of slaves, as Frederick M. Binder put it in his The Color Problem in Early National America (1968), "There was much about [Jackson] to remind one of the rude frontiersman, but one need only read his letters concerning family affairs and plantation management to recognize marks of the Southern aristocrat.

"[92] 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.

"[99] Historian Chase C. Mooney, in his 1957 Slavery in Tennessee, came to the conclusion that John Overton, Jackson's business associate and political patron,[100] "might be classed as a slave trader—but not of the coffle-driving type—for he both purchased and sold quite a number of Negroes.

[105] 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.

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.

[116] 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..."[118] The fullest description of life on pre-territorial Bayou Pierre comes from the autobiography of Confederate general and Reconstruction-era Mississippi governor Benjamin G. Humphreys, recapitulating the memories and legends of three generations of his family:[119] "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.

My older brothers and sisters fed the pigs, herded the cattle, gathered the eggs, and wormed the tobacco patch..."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.

"[131] An estimated 70,000 enslaved people were imported into the United States from overseas between 1791 and 1807,[135] but fortunately for Jackson, business opportunities for American slave-traders abounded in 1790s Natchez, because the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 had disrupted the once-reliable supply of slaves from the Caribbean islands, easing competition until after the Spanish left Mississippi in 1798.

John Griffing Jones, a native of Jefferson County and "pioneer Methodist historian in Mississippi,"[142] 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 of Old Greenville on the Natchez Trace, opposite his father's birthplace at what was called Belle Grove plantation.

[145] That same year, Spanish emissary Stephen 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.

[168] In 1795, to stock the store he and his brother-in-law Samuel Donelson ran at Hunter's Hill,[169] 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.

[182] On Christmas 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 and Im sir your most obt.

Per the Expositor, "When...[Jackson's] correspondence, such as is actually and unquestionably his own, comes to be inspected...All the rules of composition, of orthography, and of syntax, 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 the Secretary of War on the same subject.

"[221] 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.

[253][260] 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, and bounty hunters seeking the heads of fugitive slaves.

[274] On February 8, 1812, Jackson wrote to his sister-in-law Mary 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..."[275] He also advised her that the "convulsed state of the Earth and water from the frequent shocks" of the 1811–1812 New Madrid earthquakes had disrupted river traffic to such an extent that she would be better off buying someone already down south.

"[295] 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.

[306][105] Natchez is a land of fevers, 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 refuse grog 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 majestic magnolia tree, with its superb flower, unknown to the northern climes, and its fragrance unsurpassed, calls forth the admiration of every beholder; and the dark 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; and knives, the length of a barber's pole, usurp the place of toothpicks: where the filth of the town is carried off by buzzards, 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 of Benton'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.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.

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 the Blue 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.

The editorial page of The 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.

"[411] 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 the Old Southwest that remained in the hands of Indigenous people and the Spanish crown.

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.

"[440] So here, behold, the gaping maw of the Slave Power, as it looked after the presidency of Andrew Jackson, mapped 1839 and printed 1845 by John La Tourette of Mobile, Alabama and engravers S. Stiles, Sherman & Smith of New York: "An accurate Map or Delineation of the State of Mississippi with a large portion of Louisiana & Alabama, showing the communication by land and water between the Cities of New Orleans and Mobile carefully reduced from the original surveys of the United States, being laid off into Congressional townships and divided into mile squares or sections, on the plan adapted by the General Government for surveying public lands, so that persons may point to the tract on which they live.

To a considerable extent, these personal and national traits were elements in the phenomenal growth of the United States during Jackson's lifetime.A Whig disparaged [the Democratic Party as that which] "plants its heel on the neck of the abject and powerless negro, and hurls its axe after the flying form of the plundered, homeless, and desolate Indian."

Woodcut etching of lanky Andrew Jackson wearing a Napoleon hat and using a stick to beat a crouching slave, half a dozen other slaves, both children and adults, are chained together behind them, and being led out of frame, a slave cabin stands beside a hill in the background
Negative campaigning in the 1828 United States presidential election : A Brief account of General Jackson's dealing in Negroes, in a series of letters and documents by his own neighbors, an appeal to the citizens of the State of New York to continue the wise administration of John Quincy Adams , containing letters by Wilkins Tannehill , Boyd McNairy , and Andrew Erwin ( Tennessee State Library and Archives )
Map showing Mississippi watershed extending like tree branches throughout much of North America
Andrew Jackson's flatboats steered from Stones River to the Cumberland River to the Ohio River to the Mississippi River , and thence to Natchez (Map: Shannon1)
Faded, damaged old map showing the Natchez District, which is shaped roughly like the left half of an isosceles triangle
The American Natchez District , as pictured in a "Sketch of the Inhabited Parts of the Missisippi Territory Adjoining to the Great River," dated November 9, 1802, included an alligator and the residences of Judge Bruin , C. West , T. Green , and Hen. Green. (NAID 191671882)
Historian's hand-drawn map showing rivers, Indian trails, forts, and modest land cessions in the far corners
Historical map of unconquered Mississippi and Alabama, 1803–1812, back when "bears, wolves, and panthers [came] within a few feet of the house" [ 29 ] (R. S. Cotterill, 1930)
View of Elk River , which runs in the Appalachian mountains near the North Carolina –Tennessee borderline (Photo: M. Berera, 2022)
Refer to caption
Map of Tennessee circa 1796 showing early counties and districts, Cherokee towns, and the northern terminus of the Natchez Trace. "Bears, deer, buffaloes , and other wild animals, now extinct in this part of the country, were plentiful, and furnished food for the settlers. Wild cats, wolves, and snakes were also numerous, and had their haunts where now stand stately mansions." [ 57 ] (TSLA 36028)
Hand-drawn map of bends in the Tennessee River and early stores, houses, and forts near Nashville
Landmarks of Davidson County, Tennessee in the 1790s and early 1800s (map created 1880)
Oil painting of the view from eye level on a boat, looking toward a half-a-dozen roughneck types seated on the deck, with a charred fire pit in the foreground and the broad expanse of the Mississippi waters in the background
Raftsmen Playing Cards [ d ] (1847) by George Caleb Bingham ( Saint Louis Art Museum 33813)
"Indian Trails of the Southeast" showing the Saluda Mountain Road section of the ancient Catawba Trail that connected the Carolinas to East Tennessee, and the Natchez Trace through Tennessee, the northwest corner of Alabama, and Mississippi (William Edward Myer, published 1928 as plate 15 in 42d Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology via Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Refer to caption
Etching from a sketch made by Victor Collot in 1795 of a flatboat, sometimes called an ark, voiture , broadhorn, Kentucky boat, New Orleans boat, or raft [ 120 ] [ 121 ] ( Voyage dans l'Amerique Septentrionale , 1826, LCCN 01021531)
Photograph of cypress knees and green foliage above dark swamp water
View from Cypress Swamp Boardwalk along the Natchez Trace Parkway near Canton, Mississippi (Photo: Arthur T. LaBar, 2022)
Colored pencil sketch of a slave coffle being marched through a pass of the Appalachian Mountains
Two slave traders on horseback escort a group of slaves on foot; originally from Virginia, the slaves were to be offered for sale first in Tennessee (Unidentified artist, 1850, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum )
The U.S. government survey of the Trace was a geopolitical use case for the Pythagorean theorem ; for the 30 years after the Louisiana Purchase , American politics were largely consumed with acquiring the remainder of the land between the Atlantic and the Mississippi River ("United States main post roads c. 1804 ," mapped by Charles O. Paullin, 1932)
Photograph made using black-and-white film of an oblique view of two log cabins
"The Log Hermitage" of 1805: Per the Ladies' Hermitage Association , "the building in the foreground was once a two-story blockhouse ." [ 197 ] Dendrochronology studies found that this building, now called West Cabin, was built 1798–1800 from tulip poplar . [ 72 ] The building in the background, East Cabin, was built around 1805–1806 and was used as the kitchen during the Log Hermitage days. [ 198 ] These buildings were later repurposed as slave quarters . [ 199 ] ( HABS TN-52-A-7)
Refer to caption
Woodcut engraving from the Coffin Handbills distributed the 1828 U.S. presidential campaign , depicting Andrew Jackson stabbing Samuel Jackson with a cane-sword in 1807, an action said to have been in self-defense, because S. Jackson had thrown a rock at A. Jackson's head; this was one of a number of documented physical fights involving Jackson
Map showing the homelands of Native American tribes in North America prior to colonization
"Aboriginal America east of the Mississippi" by Moses & Tuttle, 1840, showing homelands of the Natchez, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Cherokee, and Seminole peoples ( New York Public Library b20643866)
Black and white photograph of a bronze statue of a Black mother and child; the mother is crossing her arms over her chest, the boy, about seven years old, stands in front of her but reaches behind himself to hold onto her, and both are barefoot
Negro Mother and Child by Maurice Glickman ( Public Works of Art Project , 1934)
Map showing the current borders of Mississippi but with the northern three-fourths of the land undivided, with one or two roads and the rivers as the only landmarks
The Choctaw Agency near Brashears' Landing at the intersection of the Trace and General Carroll's Road is where Jackson was irate at the prospect of having his passport(s) checked while he transporting a group of slaves back to the Hermitage (John Melish, 1819, NAID 78116869)
Image of a man's head and shoulders
Silas Dinsmoor was a slave owner. He is also remembered as a man of courage and character, especially in his dealings with the Choctaw. [ 261 ] (Photo: Dinsmore Homestead )
Woodcut showing a White man wearing a hat and sitting under a canopy, in front of him are bales of cotton and several Black men pulling oars
In 1829, the Huntsville Democrat used this icon for "cotton boats" and "cotton freighting" advertisements placed by Tennessee River shipping companies; in an 1804 letter about his firm's shipping, Jackson wrote, "My chairs and settee I wish brought up they can be lashed on top the goods, a cord for this purpose you will find in the boat..." [ 272 ]
Photograph of a narrow, leaf-covered trail surrounded by a low rise of land on both sides, with a fallen tree blocking the path on the middle distance
Enslaved people accompanying Jackson or partners back to Nashville from Natchez would have been walked through the Sunken Trace near Port Gibson, in chained packs called coffles . Male slaves were usually chained together, women with babies and young children might be transported on ox-drawn wagons. [ 279 ] [ 278 ] (Photo: Indies1, 2014)
Oil painting of businessmen in suits scattered throughout a tidy, sunlit 19th-century office, variously conversing, reading documents, or inspecting commodity cotton
A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873) was painted by French Impressionist Edgar Degas while visiting relatives in the city who worked as cotton factors (Musée des beaux-arts de Pau 878.1.2)
White scratch-through lines on black background of two fighting roosters with their bodies in roughly a figure-8 composition
"Fighting Cocks" engraving made c. 1962 by unidentified artist (Harmon Foundation collection of artworks by African artists, 1947–1967, NAID 558913)
Cartoonish illustration of an angry-looking Jackson in a Napoleon hat yelling at people
Jackson used soldiers, civilians, and hundreds of slaves to construct what became known as Line Jackson at New Orleans. Many, if not most, illustrations of the battle inaccurately depict defensive breastworks made out of squared cotton bales, an image that has taken "inordinate proportion in the folklore surrounding the Battle of New Orleans," [ 332 ] "perhaps because of the appeal of its uniquely Southern quality." [ 333 ] There were some rounded cotton bales used, mostly as "embrasure cheeks of the batteries," but the flammability of cotton made it a poor material for defensive use in a firefight, and the defensive lines were predominantly constructed from earth and timber. [ 334 ] ( William Croome , "Fortifying of New Orleans," illustration for Pictorial Life of Andrew Jackson , published 1848, TSLA 28062)
Family tree chart
Andrew Jackson family ties to the Donelsons, showing relationship to his business partners John Hutchings and John Coffee , and relationship to the slave-buying Green family of Mississippi, and their kin, including Thomas Marston Green Jr. , Abner Green , Thomas Hinds , and Cato West . Clear as mud? Great. (All-caps names have their own Wikipedia articles. Purple underline indicates trade relationship with Jackson. John Donelson and Thos. Green Sr. each fathered 10 or more children, not all are listed here.)
Refer to caption
In this 1828 caricature of Jackson by David Claypoole Johnston , entitled Richard III , the epaulette fringe is made from the bodies of people Jackson had hanged (for instance, Arbuthnot and Ambrister , and Francis the Prophet ), [ 360 ] and the details of his face are constructed from the naked bodies of dead Indians. [ 361 ] The caption is a quotation from Shakespeare's text : " Me thought the souls of all that I had murder'd came to my tent. " [ 361 ] (Charles E. Goodspeed Collection, Worcester Art Museum 1910.48.1589)
Painting of a burial mound cutaway showing skeletons and pottery inside as White men confer over paperwork and Black men wield shovels
One vignette from Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley , painted by John J. Egan c. 1850 , showing slaves hired to excavate the works of the Mound Builders ( St. Louis Art Museum 34–1953)
Lithograph of two small songbirds exploring the raceme of a scarlet firecracker plant
John James Audubon lived in Mississippi from 1820 until 1823. [ 375 ] He heard Carolina wrens "singing from the roof of an abandoned flat-boat, fastened to the shore, a small distance below the city of New Orleans" and found them nesting on his friend's plantation at Bayou Sara . [ 376 ] ( The Birds of America , 1827–1838)
Map of the United States east of the Mississippi
This 1806 map of the U.S. ignores the recent acquisition of Louisiana and the eight-year-old Mississippi Territory, deeming everything south of the Tennessee line as a vast unsubdivided "Georgia," and shows the Chicasaw domain in western Tennessee, the hunting grounds of the eastern and western division of the Chactaw in what is now Mississippi, the lands of the Upper and Lower Creeks in present-day Alabama, the Cherokee settlements in northern Georgia, and the land of "Talassee," near what is now called the Okefenokee Swamp along the Florida border
Engraving showing sunset over the Mississippi, half a dozen larger sailed ships in the distances, canoes in the foreground
"Andrew Jackson's flotilla descending the Mississippi," an engraving from Amos Kendall 's Life of Andrew Jackson (1844), depicting the Natchez expedition of January 1813
Refet to caption
Hand-colored etching based on a daguerreotype made in New York in 1852 of Seminole leaders Billy Bowlegs , Thlocklo Tustenuggee , Abram , John Jumper , Fasatchee Emanthla, and Sarparkee Yohola. [ 412 ] During the Second Seminole War and removal period, Abraham, who had been born enslaved, served as an interpreter and lieutenant for " Micanopy , the hereditary leader of the Alachua Seminoles." [ 413 ] (Florida State Library MC12-13)
Refer to caption
In 1831, the first title-band art for the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator depicted a slave auction under a horse market sign, a whipping post set up in front of the U.S. Capitol , and an Indian treaty discarded in the mud and forgotten. [ 419 ]
Map showing the borders of the Confederacy contracting between 1861 and 1864, with two discontiguous regions separated the Union-controlled Mississippi
"Map of the rebellion as it was in 1861 and as it is now," depicting the consequences for the Confederacy of the seizure of Memphis in 1862 and the fall of Vicksburg in 1863 ( Harper's Weekly , March 19, 1864)