Andrew Jackson

by H. W. Brands

  If any one attacks you, I know how you’ll fight with that big black stick of yours. You’ll aim right for his head. Well, sir, ten chances to one he’ll ward it off; and if you do hit him, you won’t bring him down. No, sir, you take the stick so [grasping the stick to demonstrate], and punch him in the stomach, and you’ll drop him.

  I’ll tell you how I found that out. When I was a young man practicing law in Tennessee, there was a big bullying fellow that wanted to pick a quarrel with me, and so trod on my toes. Supposing it accidental, I said nothing. Soon after, he did it again, and I began to suspect his object. In a few minutes he came by a third time, pushing against me violently, and evidently meaning fight. He was a man of immense size, one of the very biggest men I ever saw. As quick as a flash, I snatched a small rail from the top of a fence, and gave him the point of it full in his stomach. Sir, it doubled him up. He fell at my feet, and I stamped on him. Soon he got up savage, and was about to fly at me like a tiger. The bystanders made as though they would interfere. Says I, “Gentlemen, stand back, give me room, that’s all I ask, and I’ll manage him.” With that I stood ready with the rail pointed. He gave me one look, and turned away a whipped man.

  Beyond the courtroom battles and the street fights, Jackson moonlighted as a merchant and speculator. The circumstances and extent of his trade are hard to discern, but fragmentary records show him trafficking in a wide variety of goods. In the summer of 1795 he and a partner paid $644.80 for “contingent expences arising on the preparation, carriage, boating &c. of a cargo of merchandize” purchased in Philadelphia and delivered to Nashville. These goods were sold at a Nashville store Jackson operated with his brother-in-law Samuel Donelson. Its inventory included butcher knives, sharpening files, stirrup irons, silk hose, ladies’ hats, pocket handkerchiefs, calico, linen, coffee, tea, sugar, raisins, and wine.

  But Jackson’s trading instincts revealed themselves most plainly in his numerous transactions involving land. During his first few years in Nashville, he seems to have made little overt effort to purchase land; most of his acquisitions were in payment for services rendered. But on May 12, 1794, he entered into a partnership with John Overton to buy and sell much larger quantities of land. According to their agreement, the partners were “to bear an equal proportion of all purchases, losses, and expenses, and to receive an equal part of all profits, advantages, and emoluments arising from the lands so purchased.” Two days later the Jackson-Overton partnership contracted to purchase 15,000 acres for 500 pounds. (To ease their chronic money shortage, westerners traded in three currencies: American dollars, British pounds, and Spanish pesos.) The day after that, Jackson and Overton acquired another 10,000 acres for 400 pounds, and in July 30,000 acres for 1,000 pounds. In May 1795 they picked up another 25,000 acres in two separate transactions that were part of a larger, more complicated scheme (as indicated by the nominal purchase price of 10 shillings).

  The complications increased. Overton and Jackson transferred land between themselves. Jackson entered into partnership with others besides Overton. But the worst complications arose from the fact that title to much of the land wasn’t at all clear. Only a minor portion of the Mero District had been legally acquired from the Indians by treaty—mainly the 1791 Treaty of Holston with the Cherokees. The rest was up for grabs (as indicated by a 1783 North Carolina law commonly called the Land Grab Act, authorizing settlers to claim western land still owned by Indians). Much of the land Jackson and Overton acquired fell outside the area of authorized settlement. In the spring of 1795 Jackson traveled to Philadelphia to purchase goods for his store and dispose of some of his and Overton’s tracts. Overton advised him to be “candid and unreserved with the purchasers with respect to the situation and quality of the lands and particularly inform them that they are situated without the Treaty of Holston.” But then Overton had second thoughts, concluding that candor might impede a profitable sale. He wrote in the margin beside his earlier advice: “This clause to your own discretion; perhaps it would be best to raise as few difficulties [as possible].”

  Jackson encountered difficulties enough without raising any of his own. Jackson and Overton paid very little cash for the land they acquired; the great majority of their purchases were on credit, which meant that they had to sell land at a profit in order to finance further speculation. But the market for western land rose and fell on the state of relations with the Indians and with the British in Canada and the Spanish in Louisiana, on the vagaries in the money supply, and on the intangibles that affect every speculation. In the spring of 1795 supply outstripped demand, and Jackson had trouble locating a buyer in Philadelphia. “To my sad experience I found nothing doing, no purchaser but Mr. Allison,” Jackson wrote Overton on the way home. David Allison was a merchant and speculator who had lived in Nashville but now worked out of Philadelphia. More savvy than Jackson, he let the visitor stew through what Jackson called “difficulties such as I never experienced,” before Jackson gave in and accepted Allison’s price for 50,000 acres. More than that, Jackson accepted Allison’s note in payment for the land. Believing Allison’s credit good, Jackson endorsed the note and used it to pay for the trade merchandise he required for his store. This made him liable for Allison’s willingness and capacity to pay. In the meantime it cast a pall over the trip and an uncharacteristic discouragement over Jackson. “I am very much fatigued, even almost unto death,” he told Overton.

  His troubles didn’t end on his reaching home. Samuel Donelson, who traveled to Louisville to check on the goods Jackson had shipped from Philadelphia, wrote to say there had been a delay. The wagons from Philadelphia to Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) were slow arriving, and the first boat heading down the Ohio to the Cumberland was full. So Jackson’s goods were placed on another boat, manned by an associate of the shippers. The transfer produced further delays. “They have not the smallest expectation that his boat will arrive here before theirs starts for the mouth of the Cumberland,” Donelson said. He added that he had been haranguing the shippers to get things moving and would continue to do so. “I shall use all industry I possibly can to forward the boat on.” But Jackson had better consider alternative plans.

  Worse news arrived from Jackson’s suppliers in Philadelphia. “We are sorry so soon after your departure to follow you with the advice that any notes or acceptances of David Allison’s now falling due are not generally or regularly paid, and that there is little reason to expect he will be more punctual hereafter.” They added, “We shall have to get our money from you.” But Jackson didn’t have the money, and he wouldn’t get it till he sold his goods.

  The dunning continued. Jackson received a notice from another Philadelphia firm to which he had signed over an Allison note. Allison’s liquidity had not revived. “His note therefore that we received from you for goods which is due on the 13th of next month in all probability will not be paid by him. We therefore request you will make provision for the same.”

  Jackson was stuck. He couldn’t pay his suppliers till his customers paid him, and he wouldn’t have enough customers to do so till the rest of his goods arrived. In Jackson’s day debt was a serious matter. People went to prison for debt. Jackson couldn’t know that Allison would be imprisoned for the debts that now entangled Jackson or that Allison would die in prison after a degrading year there. But he knew others who ended up behind bars when the money ran short, and he took the intended lesson from their experience.

  The result was that he abandoned his mercantile business. He sold the store—literally lock, stock, and barrel—to Elijah Robertson, the brother of Nashville cofounder James Robertson. With the proceeds he paid his Philadelphia creditors, and he walked away congratulating himself that the fiasco hadn’t been worse.

  A small but not insignificant aspect of Jackson’s business during this early period was commerce in slaves. The great debate over slavery, which would grow in strength and virulence during the rest of Jackson’s life, was just beginning. The republican premise of the America
n Revolution, and in particular the ringing egalitarianism of the Declaration of Independence, with its unqualified assertion that “all men are created equal,” prodded consciences in several northern states to abolish slavery. Vermont and Massachusetts did so at once; Pennsylvania and some other states mandated gradual abolition. Yet these were relatively painless gestures, as slavery had never figured centrally in the northern economies. The decision by Congress in 1787 to bar slavery from the Northwest Territory fell into the same pro forma category—symbolically important but practically of little immediate effect.

  In the southern states and the Southwest Territory, slavery played a much larger role than in the North. Slaves formed the backbone of plantation labor in the Carolinas and Georgia and a lesser though still substantial portion of the workforce elsewhere. Whether southern consciences were more calloused than their northern counterparts during this period is open to question; certainly the cost of abolition would have been higher to the South than it was to the North. In any event, the South held on to its slaves.

  If Jackson ever reflected on the underlying moral issues involved in slavery, he kept such thoughts to himself. Did he think slavery was a good thing? No, or at least he never said he did—unlike numerous apologists for the peculiar institution, especially toward the end of Jackson’s life. But many things on earth weren’t good, including war, famine, and disease. Jackson didn’t second-guess the Creator regarding those existential evils, and he didn’t second-guess the Creator—who, on Jackson’s reading of the Bible, allowed bound labor—regarding slavery.

  Jackson’s involvement with slavery began almost inadvertently. He acquired what appears to have been his first slave—a young woman named Nancy, in 1788—not by purchase but in exchange for legal services rendered to a client who ran short of cash. Two years later he and Rachel received two more slaves, named George and Molly, as part of the settlement of John Donelson’s estate.

  Gradually Jackson began buying and selling slaves outright. In July 1791 he purchased a slave named Tom, “about seven and twenty years old,” according to the bill of sale, for 60 pounds. In December of that year, he bought six-year-old Aaron for 100 pounds. He acquired Peg, “about twenty-six years old,” in January 1793 for services rendered, and Roele in November for 150 dollars. In 1794 he purchased Hannah and her child Bet for 80 pounds, another Betty and her children Hannah and Tom for 125 pounds, and Mary for 233 dollars. In 1795 he bought an unnamed (in the surviving record) slave for 175 dollars. In 1796 he bought two slave boys, named Sawney and Charles, for an unspecified sum. In 1797 he sold and then bought back a teenage slave named Suck, in each transaction for 290 dollars.

  These almost certainly were not the sum of Jackson’s dealings in slaves, but their relatively modest number indicates that he was a slaveholder rather than a slave trader. The lands he acquired included farms that had to be plowed and sown and weeded and harvested. His slaves worked those properties. In 1796 he purchased—for seven hundred dollars—a square mile of land he called Hunter’s Hill. There, on the south bank of the Cumberland above Nashville, he built a home for Rachel and himself. (Ironically or otherwise, the original white claimant to the property was Lewis Robards.) Several of Jackson’s slaves lived and worked at Hunter’s Hill, in the fields and around the house.

  By the mid-1790s, despite his failure as a merchant, Jackson had established the basis for his future material success. He was wealthy in land, which wasn’t worth much in anything else yet but someday would be. The formula for western wealth was simple (and was the same as it had been for generations and would be for generations more): get there early, acquire land cheap, wait for more settlers to arrive, and sell at a profit. It was how a man grew up with the country, and it was what Jackson intended to do.

  In the summer of 1789, while Jackson was settling into Nashville, while George Washington and the federal Congress settled into New York, and while the state of Franklin settled into the sea of history and myth, a very unsettling series of events began unfolding in Europe. The people of Paris revolted against King Louis XVI with a force that surprised even them and astonished most onlookers. Americans initially embraced the French assertion of popular rights, as an extension of the cause they had set in motion more than a decade earlier. “The convulsions in France are attended with some disagreeable circumstances,” Benjamin Franklin observed, “but if by the struggle she obtains and secures for the nation its future liberty and a good constitution, a few years’ enjoyment of those blessings will amply repair all the damages their acquisition may have occasioned. God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say, ‘This is my country.’”

  Such was easier for Franklin to say than for some of his compatriots, in that Franklin died before the French Revolution was a year old, before the disagreeable circumstances to which he referred turned really bloody. The revolution became a civil war as the aristocracy struggled desperately to preserve their privileges and then their lives, and ultimately an international war as Britain and France’s other neighbors tried to prevent the spread of the revolutionary infection. At this point Americans began to take sides—not officially, as President Washington responded to the outbreak of war in Europe by declaring American neutrality, but emotionally, as Americans reacted to the events in strikingly divergent ways. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and at this point Washington’s secretary of state, cheered for France. The “liberty of the whole earth,” Jefferson said, depended on the ability of republican France to fend off the attacks by its reactionary rivals. Appealing to the alliance with France by which the United States had won its independence, Jefferson argued that American honor and necessity required a tilt toward Paris. Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s secretary of the Treasury and closest confidant, took the opposite view. Whatever the initial merits of the French Revolution, Hamilton judged, they had been washed away in the blood of the Terror. Real liberty required restraining France and restoring order in Europe. Britain was trying to do just that and therefore deserved American support.

  The argument over the French Revolution was about more than the affairs of Europe. It ran to the heart of the arguers’ views of government and the people. In holding for France, Jefferson and his followers—many of whom had opposed ratification of the Constitution—signaled their continuing confidence in the people as against government, their preference for the principles of 1776 over those of 1787. They believed the people were naturally good and required only opportunity and encouragement to manifest their goodness. Less government was better than more, and the state governments were better than the central government. By contrast, Hamilton and his followers distrusted human nature and relied on government to keep it in check. They had supported the Constitution of 1787, which they conceived as a corrective to the libertarian excesses of 1776. They continued to try to strengthen government against the people, and the federal government against the states.

  The split between Jefferson’s crowd, who called themselves Republicans, and Hamilton’s, the Federalists, acquired economic and regional overtones. The Federalists were strong among the merchant and monied classes, especially in the Northeast. The Republicans looked to the landed folk, particularly the planters and farmers of the South and West. Each difference tended to reinforce the others, so that by the mid-1790s Republicans and Federalists glared at each other across a widening gulf of ideology, economics, and section.

  The glaring got ugly during Washington’s last years as president. Washington professed to be above partisan politics, but his administration drifted toward Hamilton’s conservative, pro-British Federalism, causing Jefferson to quit in disgust. This freed Washington to drift further toward the Federalists. In 1795 he sent John Jay, Hamilton’s coauthor (along with James Madison) on the Federalist Papers and currently chief justice of the Supreme Court, to London to
negotiate a treaty of friendship and commerce with Britain. American merchants sought an end to British seizures of American ships—the result of Britain’s blockade of France—and greater access to British markets. They and their sailors additionally wanted the British to stop kidnapping—“impressing”—American seamen alleged to have deserted from the British navy. Finally, Washington hoped to persuade the British to complete their evacuation of the Ohio Valley. Jay succeeded in opening the British East Indies to American commerce, and he obtained a paper promise that the British would evacuate forts in the Northwest. But the other issue—in particular, the seizure of American ships and sailors—went unresolved.

  Hamilton and the Federalists, and Washington, were willing to accept this half loaf, and the president laid Jay’s treaty before the Senate for ratification. But Jefferson and the Republicans condemned it as a sellout of everything the United States ought to stand for. They were especially incensed by the secrecy surrounding the negotiation of the treaty, as it smacked of the aristocracy they thought they had overthrown. Jay was hanged in effigy by angry Republicans, who also hurled rocks at the head of the real Hamilton. The treaty cleared the Senate but by the slimmest of margins. The Republicans tried to block the treaty in the House of Representatives, stalling an essential appropriations bill. Yet this failed, too, leaving the Republicans to gnash their teeth in frustration.

  Jackson encountered the partisan warfare on his visit to Philadelphia, again the nation’s capital. “What an alarming situation,” he wrote in October 1795 to Nathaniel Macon, a congressman from North Carolina. “Will it end in a civil war, or will our country be relieved from its present ignominy by the firmness of our representatives in Congress?” Jackson wasn’t a party man, but all his instincts were with the Republicans. He despised Britain as much as ever, and he distrusted those who favored the wealthy and wanted to transfer power from the states to the central government. He joined the Republicans in decrying the Jay treaty. He urged Macon to oppose the treaty and thereby “have the insulting, cringing, and ignominious child of aristocratic secrecy removed, erased, and obliterated from the archives of the grand republic of the United States.” Jackson followed certain Republicans in declaring the treaty unconstitutional. “I say unconstitutional because the Constitution says that the president by and with the advice and consent of the Senate is authorized to make treaties; but in the present treaty the advice of the Senate was not required by the president prior to the formation of the treaty, nor the outlines of said treaty made known to the Senate until after made.” Jackson cited Emmerich von Vattel, the distinguished scholar of the law of nations, to the effect that sovereigns are merely agents of the nations they represent and ought not to go beyond what they have reason to believe the people of their nations desire. “The president (from the remonstrance from all parts of the Union) had reason to presume that the nation of America would not have ratified the treaty, notwithstanding the 20 aristocratic nabobs of the Senate had consented to it.”