Lyncoya Jackson (c. 1812 – July 1, 1828), also known as Lincoyer or Lincoya, was an Indigenous American from a family that was a part of the Upper Creek tribal-geographical grouping and more than likely affiliated with Red Stick political party.

The other two, Theodore and Charley, died or disappeared shortly after their arrivals in Tennessee, but Lyncoya survived and was raised in the household of former slave trader and ex-U.S.

Jackson later included Lyncoya in the catalog of wards whom he considered to be his sons, inquiring about his health and educational progress in letters home to his wife Rachel.

[5] John Walker Jr., a U.S. Army major of Cherokee heritage who had married the granddaughter of Indian agent Return J. Meigs,[6] participated in the massacre, later "recalling that their 'situation looked dismal to see, Women & Children slaughtered with their fathers.

[7] An account published in Alabama in 1983 stated that Lyncoya means "abandoned one" in Muscogee, a claim promulgated by the 1953 Susan Hayward–Charlton Heston film The President's Lady.

[9] Historian Kathryn E. Holland Braund wrote in her examination of Muscogee womanhood at the time of the Creek War that, "In his account, Richard Keith Call noted that Jackson, 'although a man of iron nerve, he was yet a girl in the softer feelings of his nature.'

The image of Andrew Jackson and his officers nursing a baby with a sugar tit and puzzling over their young charge marks a sharp contrast to the horrific life-taking that produced the orphan.

"[10] The actual work of sustaining Lyncoya with brown sugar and scavenged biscuit crumbs was delegated to an enslaved man named Charles.

[18] He was the third of three Indigenous babies or children who was carried to Nashville at Jackson's behest, the others being Theodore, who died in the spring of 1814, and Charley, whose fate is uncertain.

His arrival signaled a growing division between the pious and local life Rachel wanted and the national stage that Jackson had begun to thrust upon her.

Their young ears had not known ____?____ Neither had their war limbs gathered strength from your tables, nor rest under your roof, yet they called thee Father - when an infant you placed me on your knee and Learned me the talk of your Andrews, and made me their companion at Home, their fellow in school, and their rival in their duty to you.

[29] Lyncoya's obituary stated that, "...he had no intercourse whatever with Indians, except on one or two occasions when a few chiefs called to visit the General; when they were observed to take but slight notice of him.

"[1] Historian Melissa Jean Gismondi argues that the letter was written under the supervision of Lyncoya's tutor William Chandler, and was intended as an exhibit to be shared with Jackson's fellow politicians, as much or more than it was meant to be a personal missive from a 10-year-old child to his father.

"[38] Black Horse Harry Lee, who lived at the Hermitage at the time and wrote for Jackson's 1828 presidential campaign, is said to have written an eloquent tribute to Lyncoya, which some describe as a lost document but is very possibly the obituary.

The column, penned by one "Logan," concluded, "On the whole, the story of Lyncoya, be it true or be it false, is but an impotent apology for the Hero's bloody life.

"[53][54] However it was styled, the pro-Jackson retelling of Lyncoya's life typically "transferred the blame for the destruction of Indigenous families from Jackson to Muscogee women.

"[45] Historian Mark R. Cheathem, in the course of reviewing recently published histories of the Jacksonian era, wrote "The example of Lyncoya is often used by scholars and non-scholars alike to soften Jackson's treatment of Native Americans, and...sentimental language, unsupported by historical evidence, only reinforces this romanticized view...Lyncoya's place in the Jackson household [should be] situated within the context of recent scholarship on Indian adoption.

"[56] The three war-orphan Indigenous children sent to the Hermitage, Lyncoya, Theodore, and Charley, are considered to be part of Jackson's domestic life, and Lyncoya in particular was featured in tours of the Hermitage beginning in the 1970s, which has resulted in conflict over how to frame the story: "Jackson and his troops had killed his entire family, which is the reason he was orphaned in the first place.

Older white visitors frequently ask about Lyncoya unprompted, generally phrasing it as some derivative of, 'Didn't he adopt an...Indian boy?'

"[57] A memorial to Lyncoya was dedicated in Calhoun County, Alabama in 2000, but according to historian F. Evan Nooe, the monument centers Jackson as savior, such that it "provides comfort for the descendants of settlers in the present, casting aside the location as a site of trauma..."[58] In 2016, former U.S.

Senator Jim Webb used Lyncoya as a defense against charges that Andrew Jackson was a génocidaire, writing that "it would be difficult to call someone genocidal when years before, after one bloody fight, he brought an orphaned Native American baby from the battlefield to his home in Tennessee and raised him as his son.