by H. W. Brands
During the early nineteenth century, American practices and attitudes involving slavery continued to change. Additional northern states mandated an end to the institution, although most allowed owners to keep current slaves for years or decades. Congress outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808, a move that assuaged American consciences but posed little hardship on slaveholders, as American slaves reproduced fast enough to meet the needs of the domestic market. (In the West Indies and Brazil, by contrast, the far higher death rate necessitated regular replenishment of slave ranks to sustain the institution.) In fact the ban actually made slave owners wealthier, at least on paper, by restricting supply and driving up the prices of the slaves they owned. And the domestic trade—the buying and selling of slaves within and between states—continued.
Yet even this was acquiring an odor. Slave owners liked to portray their labor system as merely a variant of labor practices elsewhere. Slaves were called “servants,” “hands,” “boys,” “girls,” “my men.” Masters thought of themselves as heads of large families that included slaves, albeit in a different category than the masters’ own flesh and blood. (The categories overlapped when, as happened with unacknowledged frequency, slaves were the flesh and blood of the masters.) The slave trade, even the domestic version, intruded on this peaceful picture. It tore mothers and fathers from children, husbands from wives, and generally ripped the mask from the idyllic model. Though necessary to support the business of slavery, it was often relegated to agents from whom the genteel classes tried to distance themselves.
Andrew Jackson wasn’t what most of his neighbors would have called genteel, but by the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century his rough edges were beginning to rub smooth. He was one of the best-known men in Tennessee, an important figure in state politics. He didn’t lack rivals or critics, but even they had to respect his ability and concede that he had come a long way from inauspicious beginnings.
His home was the Hermitage, a property he acquired in 1804. Jackson bought the property from Nathaniel Hays, a neighbor next door to Jackson and Rachel at Hunter’s Hill. Hays had staked his claim to the square mile in 1780, at the beginning of white settlement of the Cumberland, but like many others he had been forced to retreat in the face of Indian resistance. Eventually he returned, bringing his wife, three children, and a couple of slaves. He and the slaves built a house of logs—more than a cabin but no mansion—near a gravel-bottomed spring on the tract. He and they cut the mature hardwood trees that covered most of the property, and planted cotton in the black soil deposited during the previous several millennia—and renewed each spring—by the Cumberland and Stones rivers. Hays traded his cotton for merchandise at a store Jackson owned on the Hunter’s Hill property. On those visits and others, he and Jackson talked politics and militia affairs. Rachel got to know Elizabeth Hays and her daughters. As nearest neighbors they became friends.
Thus it was with some regret that the Jacksons learned in 1804 that the Hayses would be moving. Nathaniel was as restless as many other westerners, and he decided the future looked brighter in Bedford County, south of Nashville. When he told Jackson he intended to sell, Jackson did some quick calculating. His business activities had left him holding thousands of dollars of debt he couldn’t collect. He needed to raise cash lest he lose even more money and perhaps lose the Hunter’s Hill farm. As that farm was worth much more than the Hays property, if he purchased the Hays place and sold Hunter’s Hill he could pay his debts and still live in the neighborhood, which suited him and Rachel quite well.
Negotiating the switch required some ingenuity, but during the summer of 1804 Jackson accomplished it. He sold Hunter’s Hill for $10,000 in July and purchased Hays’s farm for $3,400 in August. The swap eased his debt burden substantially, although it damaged his cash flow, as the new place, which he and Rachel soon began calling the Hermitage, produced crops of considerably less value than Hunter’s Hill’s. The log house, moreover, was rustic compared with the home he and Rachel had been living in. But he hired a carpenter and paperhanger to spruce up the interior and added a new kitchen outbuilding a short while later. Meanwhile he set crews to work felling trees, cutting brush, erecting fences, repairing barns, and doing the hundred other chores required to make the Hermitage a profitable farm.
The heavy work on the Hermitage was done by slaves. Jackson owned fewer than a dozen field hands during the early years at the new place, but as the operations expanded he purchased more. By 1820 he held four dozen slaves, including his cook and house servants. During the next several years he continued to purchase slaves, so that by 1829 he held perhaps a hundred. This left him well short of the largest slaveholders in America—the big planters of the Carolinas and the Gulf coast, who owned several hundred slaves—but it made him one of the larger slave owners in Tennessee.
Jackson treated slavery as a business matter but one not devoid of humanity. He bought and sold slaves as his business required. He bargained for the highest prices when he was selling and the lowest when he was buying. He tried to avoid selling young children away from their mothers, in part because it was bad for business—being hard on the mothers and children—but also because it offended his sympathies. Jackson could see both the logic and the feeling in a comment by a business associate regarding a decision to rescind the sale of a young boy apart from his mother: “They are family Negroes. . . . The sale I had made and the distance would create great affliction among their relations.”
Jackson could be a hard man, as the many who ran afoul of him during his life discovered. Yet toward Rachel he was tender to a fault, as he was toward children and horses. His feelings toward slaves fell between his feelings for children and for horses. The slaves were under his authority and therefore must obey him. When they didn’t, he could be brutally severe. “Fifty Dollars Reward,” he advertised after one slave ran away. “All reasonable expenses paid—and ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred.” But if the slaves did obey him, he treated them as humanely as his need to profit by their labor allowed. He housed them decently, by the standards of the time, and he fed them fairly well. He purchased medicine for them when they became ill. His account books list “1 bottle castor oil . . . for negro woman” and “2 ozs. unguent basilic for negro man’s leg” among the prescriptions for his family and his horses.
As the operations at the Hermitage expanded, and especially as he spent more time away from home, he came to rely on overseers to manage the slaves. The overseers were a source of chronic concern to Jackson, as they frequently failed to strike what he considered the appropriate balance between authority and kindness. Cruelty was as out of place as excessive lenience. Both were bad for the slaves and bad for business. They were also bad for the reputation of a public man.
It was Jackson’s concern for his reputation that prompted his withdrawal from the traffic in slaves. The exit wasn’t easy or uncomplicated. In 1810 he formed a partnership with Joseph Coleman and Horace Green, the former of Nashville and the latter of Natchez. Like most of Jackson’s many partnerships, this one served multiple purposes and traded in various commodities, including cotton, tobacco, and slaves. In 1811 Green led some two dozen slaves, recently purchased from Richard Apperson, from Nashville to Natchez, where he hoped to sell them for a higher price than they could fetch on the Cumberland. But the market for slaves on the Mississippi was saturated that season, and Green found no satisfactory buyer. Apparently his tolerance for disappointment was low, for he quit the partnership suddenly, leaving the slaves with John Hutchings, an erstwhile Jackson partner.
Jackson learned of the situation several weeks later, and he traveled to the Mississippi to reclaim his property. The market for slaves hadn’t improved by the time he got there, so he brought them back to Nashville. The route crossed the lands of the Choctaws, whose agent insisted that Jackson show a passport. Jackson had no passport and moreover was already annoyed at having to travel a tho
usand miles to remedy another business venture gone bad. He defied the agent and pressed past him to Nashville. Upon his arrival he made a point of denouncing the man to Governor Blount and in doing so didn’t disguise the reason for his journey. Nor had he disguised it to anyone along the way. “It was well known that my business to that country was to bring away a number of negroes which had been sent to that country for sale, and from the fall of the market and scarcity of cash remained unsold,” he told Blount.
Yet seventeen years later, when Jackson was running for president, he attempted to hide his slave-trading past. His rivals had heard of the Natchez trip and now publicized it to show that Jackson dealt in human flesh. A friendly newspaper responded by publishing a document dated May 18, 1811—about the time Horace Green acquired the slaves he took to Natchez—asserting that “the said Andrew Jackson has no interest in the purchase . . . of the negroes. . . . He only holds a lien on them for the payment of the purchase money.” The wording of the affidavit is unusual. Business documents generally state matters positively rather than negatively. Equally curious, and perhaps more significant, is that the original document, if any, has disappeared.
Other documents from the period strongly suggest that Jackson did have an interest in the slaves. An entry in his account book for the Bank of Nashville reads: “A. Jackson amount of proportion of cash for negroes bought of Richard Epperson: $929.” Jackson’s ownership is also indicated by promissory notes from Jackson to Apperson and by an affidavit submitted by Jackson to an arbitrator sorting out the tangled affairs of the failed partnership.
Almost certainly Jackson was part owner of the slaves in question. Even more certain is that by the 1820s a personal history of slave trading had become a political liability for a national candidate. Jackson’s supporters, with or without his knowledge, likely planted the dubious disclaimer. If Jackson was aware of the cover-up, he probably excused it on grounds that it treated a minor matter from long ago. No one ever asserted that slave trading was a major part of his business or denied that it declined for him with passing years. Perhaps the trouble the Apperson slaves caused him made him swear off the practice forever. The one thing that can be said with complete confidence is that times and attitudes were changing. Slaveholding wasn’t a disqualification for national office, but slave trading might be. And Jackson knew it.
At the end of 1808 Rachel and Andrew Jackson became parents. By then they had been married nearly fifteen years (by the state of Tennessee’s reckoning; more by their own). No offspring had blessed their union, for reasons unclear. Almost certainly they wanted children. In those days before state-sponsored pensions nearly every parent did, if only for assistance in old age. Jackson’s bout with smallpox during the Revolutionary War may have rendered him sterile. Or the infertility may have originated with Rachel, who had lived with Lewis Robards long enough to have borne children had she been able. (Robards went on to father several children by a second wife.)
Rachel probably felt the lack of children more severely than Jackson did. Especially in those days, when fewer outlets existed for the creative energies of women, the average wife placed great store in having children. One imagines Rachel wondering, as the years passed, whether she would ever have a child to hold, to put to bed at night, to nurse when sick, to admire growing up. She doubtless shared her sorrows and frustrations with Jackson, although perhaps not all of them, for fear of seeming weak.
In December 1808, Elizabeth Donelson, the wife of Rachel’s brother Severn, bore twin boys. Someone suggested that Rachel and Jackson rear one of the boys as their own. Twins always place an extra strain on families of newborns. Perhaps Elizabeth didn’t feel strong enough to care for two babies. Perhaps two new mouths to feed were one more than Severn thought he could handle. Rachel may have asked, or Elizabeth may have offered, but somehow the women decided that Rachel would take one of the babies for her own. The men were consulted, of course, but almost certainly the initiative came from the women.
Jackson later contended that he and Rachel formally adopted Andrew Jackson Jr. a few weeks after his birth. Corroborating evidence is scanty. In that era Tennessee had no regular procedure for adoptions, relying rather on extended families to take care of their children without state intervention. Jackson said he petitioned the legislature for a special bill. But no bill, or even any petition, appears in the state records.
Jackson may have misremembered things. More likely he misrepresented them—from the best of intentions. Given the cloud surrounding the start of his and Rachel’s marriage, he didn’t want Andrew Jr. living under a similar shadow. It was Tennessee’s fault, not the boy’s, that the state made adoption difficult.
Whether formally adopted or not, Andrew Jr. received all the love any child could ask for. By the standards of the time, he was a child of his parents’ old age. Jackson and Rachel were forty-one, and many of their contemporaries were grandparents. Doubtless partly for this reason they spoiled Andrew, as grandparents—or merely late parents—often do. He wanted for nothing money could buy, servants deliver, or parental attention bestow. Though named for his father, he couldn’t have spent a childhood more different from Jackson’s straitened youth, and this was just as Jackson wanted it.
A visitor to the Hermitage caught its master in a domestic pose. “I arrived at his house one wet chilly evening, in February, and came upon him in the twilight, sitting alone before the fire, a lamb and a child between his knees. He started a little, called a servant to remove the two innocents to another room, and explained to me how it was. The child had cried because the lamb was out in the cold, and begged him to bring it in.” The visitor knew Jackson as a man of ferocious reputation. Seeing him with young Andrew and the lamb made him think the reputation wrong, or at least incomplete. “The ferocious man does not do that.”
Andrew’s arrival helped distract his father from business troubles. Besides the chronic shortage of money, entrepreneurs in the West faced the intractable problem of distance. The principal market for Nashville’s produce was Natchez, five hundred miles away, leaving Nashville’s merchants at the mercy of agents on long and tenuous tethers. Horace Green was only one of several unreliable characters whom Jackson was compelled to work with and who cost him thousands of dollars over the years. Distance created other difficulties. A dispute arose between Jackson and an ironmonger at Abingdon. “I cannot make out a statement . . . ,” Jackson explained, “for want of the original contract, it being locked up and Mr. John Hutchings now at Natchez having the key.” Perhaps Jackson was simply putting off his creditor. Jackson owed money but lacked cash. He offered a horse—“a good draft horse and gentle in gear, and not a bad riding horse,” he said—as payment for the debt. He added, “Send me a pair of boots of the manufactory of Abingdon . . . and close the accounts.” Whether Jackson got the boots is unclear, but whatever he got didn’t repay him for his headaches. “I always have the blue devils about me when old accounts are mentioned.”
At times he thought of starting anew. Several friends had heard promising things about Madison County, to the west of Nashville. They were moving there and wanted Jackson to join them. They said he might be appointed judge of the county. Jackson was tempted. His business interests in Nashville weren’t thriving and his enemies were, and the combination kept his blue devils alive. “I find it impossible to divest myself of those habits of gloomy and peevish reflection that the wanton and flagatious conduct and unmerited reflections of base calumny heaped upon me has given rise to,” he told a friend and possible sponsor for the judgeship. He said he was willing “to try the experiment how far new scenes might relieve me from this unpleasant tone of thought.” But an acceptable offer never came through, leaving him stuck where he was.
Still he dreamed of other places and new opportunities. His nephew Donelson Caffery traveled south to Spanish Florida and reported handsome prospects. “There is no business in this country like farming. An industrious man with a few negroes may soon make a fortune.”
The land was Spanish merely in name. “The Spanish authority here is suspended by a feeble thread. There is only a mere shadow of a government. The commandant of this place may be bribed to any thing. He will grant a decree for the recovery of money, and by the debtor’s slipping a few dollars in his hand will suspend that decree during his pleasure.” A few weeks later Caffery wrote again, declaring Florida ripe for the plucking. “The people in this country appear to be on the eve of shaking off the Spanish authority. A few popular men with spirit and sense enough to conduct an enterprise of the kind could at any moment revolutionize the province.” Another informant, a son of Jackson’s close friend (and second) Thomas Overton, was equally encouraging. “If you have never visited this country, I think, sir, it would be well worth your while, as it is much the finest I have ever seen. This, sir, is the place for making fortunes. I have persuaded my father much to remove here, but he pays no attention to my entreaties. I think were you to see this country, you would move the whole neighborhood.”
The allure of Florida—what soldier or American patriot wouldn’t want to conquer such a country?—and the trials of business at home made Jackson wish more than ever that the war against Britain would begin. Spain was Britain’s ally, and a war against the latter might easily involve the former. But everything pointed the opposite way. In the letter offering himself for judge of Madison County, Jackson explained that his interest in the job reflected his discouragement with respect to the big issue confronting the West and America generally. “I am well aware that no act of insult, degradation or contumely offered to our government will arouse them from their present lethargy and temporising conduct until my name sake”—the British minister in Washington happened to be named Jackson—“sets fire to some of our seaport towns. . . . Then perhaps the spirit of ’76 may again arise.”
