Charley (Andrew Jackson captive)

"[5]: 91  The next day, April 8, 1814, Andrew Jackson Jr., who was about five years old, wrote the general asking about the impending arrival of Lyncoya and offering a critique of his companion: "…I like Charly but he will not mind me.

"[6]: 44 Scholars have speculated on Jackson's martial and psychological motives from bringing Indigenous children into his home, but the only testimony in his letters suggests that he identified with their orphanhood, as he had lost his entire surviving family (mother and two brothers) during the American Revolutionary War.

[3]: 80  Historian Lorman Ratner described Jackson as a boy without a father, and a man without sons, which may have motivated him to accept guardianship of at least 32 young people who lived with him at various times or who he assisted legally, financially, or socially.

The value of sending Indian children to his white male dependents lay in the assumption that both Jackson and the young white men within his household shared masculine prerogatives over people who were not unquestionably 'white'...[this] was part of a broader impulse on the part of the Southern general to inculcate in his son and his wards the sense that they had the right to consume the bodies and resources of others, in this case Indian people and their material possessions, to satisfy their own wishes.

"[4]: 161 Around the time Charley was being transported to the Hermitage, Jackson made a speech at the Horseshoe Bend battlefield expressing his feelings about the fate of the Muscogee, stating, "The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer murder our Women and Children, or disturb the quiet of our borders...They have disappeared from the face of the Earth...How lamentable it is that the path to peace should lead through blood, and over the carcasses of the slain!!