Andrew Jackson and the slave trade in the United States

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)

Andrew Jackson (lived, 1767–1845; U.S. president, 1829–1837) bought and sold slaves from 1788 until 1844, both for use on his plantations and for short-term gain through slave arbitrage. He was most active in the interregional slave trade, which he termed "the mercantile transactions," from the 1790s through the 1810s. Available evidence shows that speculator Jackson trafficked people between his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, and the slave markets of the lower Mississippi River valley.

Jackson seems to have sometimes accepted slaves as a form of payment for debts owed him, such that slaves served as barter for trade goods, currency for real estate transactions, and as stakes in gambling on horse races. While Jackson had a number of business interests in Tennessee, many of Jackson's slave sales took place in Mississippi's Natchez District, Louisiana's Feliciana Parishes, and in New Orleans. Jackson is believed to have operated a slave-trading stand at the now-extinct riverfront settlement of Bruinsburg, Mississippi, not far from Port Gibson, at the southern terminus of the Natchez Trace. His customers included his wife's sister's extended family and their prosperous neighbors, who owned tobacco farms, and later cotton plantations, that were worked by slave labor. After 1800, Jackson often tasked his business partner and nephew-by-marriage John Hutchings with escorting their shipments to the lower country, where sale prices for slaves were reliably higher than in Tennessee. In 1812, while squabbling over a coffle that he himself had shopped around Natchez, Andrew Jackson admitted in writing that he was an experienced slave trader, stating that his cost for "Negroes sent to markett [sic]...never averaged more from here than fifteen dollars a head."

Jackson's slave trading was a campaign issue during the 1828 United States presidential election. Jackson denied the charges, and the issue failed to connect with the electorate. Some of Jackson's accusers during the 1828 campaign had known him for decades and were themselves affiliated with the trade. His candidacy was also opposed by some on the buy-side, down south, and Natchez elites provided affidavits and/or copies of Jackson's slave-sale receipts to local anti-Jackson newspapers. Little is known about the people Jackson sold south. However, because of the vitriolic 1828 campaign, there are surviving records naming eight individuals carried to Mississippi: Candis, age 20, and Malinda, age 14 ($1000); Fanny ($280); a 35-year-old woman named Betty and her 15-year-old daughter Hannah ($550); and a young mother named Kessiah, and her two children, a three-year-old named Ruben and an infant named Elsey ($650).

Background

Elk River, near the North Carolina–Tennessee border (Photo: Michael Barera, 2022)

Jackson, a native of the Carolinas and pioneer settler of Tennessee in 1788, was connected to distant Mississippi by the geography of commerce. Moving goods between the east coast and the Cumberland River basin was challenging because of the necessary, difficult, and expensive passage through the Appalachian Mountains. Moving goods north to market in Kentucky or the Illinois Country was pointless because those places produced more or less the same products as Tennessee. That left the western inland waterways as the road to market, and in much of what became the territory of the United States in North America, these waters lead to the mouth of the Mississippi River at the Gulf of Mexico and from there to the rest of the Atlantic world.

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)

After the bloody Natchez revolt in 1726, counterrevolutionary violence by French colonial militias all but destroyed the Natchez people. Most of the Natchez were killed, some were sold into slavery on Saint-Domingue, a few survivors were assimilated into the Muscogee and Cherokee nations. In 1765, the Choctaw signed the old Natchez domain over to Great Britain, and as part of British West Florida, the Natchez District attracted a handful of Loyalist families during the American Revolutionary War. In 1785, a visitor estimated the population of the Natchez District at 2,000, with approximately 900 slaves laboring for 1,100 white settlers. Spain took control and opened Spanish West Florida to American colonists on August 23, 1787. The population of colonial-era Natchez was clustered along the waterways (which also served as the region's commercial thoroughfares), namely the Big Black River, Bayou Pierre, Cole's Creek, Fairchild's Creek, St. Catherine's Creek, and the Homochitto River, with its right-bank tributaries Second Creek and Sandy Creek. Just about everything else between the Mississippi River and Georgia was titled to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Muscogee people native to the region. By the last decade of the 18th century, the Natchez region had a polyglot, pluralistic, creolized culture, with a changing economy, as tobacco and indigo (and timber and cattle) were being supplanted by industrial-scale cotton agriculture. There are no known sources that historians can use to study the importation of slaves to Mississippi prior to the 1810s, but it is clear that the end of the Spanish tobacco subsidy and the simultaneous removal of trade barriers spurred an increase in the slave trade.

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)

The primacy of cotton meant that "slavery became very much a central institution and defining feature of what became Mississippi." Circa 1792, settlers were predominantly Anglo-American and two out of every three slaves in the Natchez District were African-born. The Mississippi Territory of the United States was organized in 1798. When the Natchez District transitioned from Spanish to American suzerainty and from "a frontier to a borderland, and eventually to a bordered land...slaves were the losing party in the transfer of power." Although the territorial organizing act prohibited the introduction to Mississippi of slaves from outside the U.S., this "foreign trade ban seems to have been ignored." The importation of these so-called "saltwater slaves" to U.S. ports continued until 1808, when the law prohibiting transatlantic slave shipments went into effect. Available evidence shows that Jackson participated in what is called the internal slave trade, moving American-born slaves from the upper South to the Deep South, where more demand made for higher prices. As of 1800, the total estimated population of the region that would later become Mississippi's Adams, Claiborne, Jefferson, and Wilkinson counties was a little under 4,700 people, about evenly split between free white people and enslaved black people. The interested governments did not attempt to enumerate Indigenous people in the vicinity of Natchez, but there were likely 30,000 Native Americans resident within Mississippi as a whole in 1801.

Historical map of unconquered Mississippi and Alabama, 1803–1812, back when "bears, wolves, and panthers [came] within a few feet of the house" (R. S. Cotterill, 1930)

In 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote Robert R. Livingston, "...there is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural & habitual enemy. it is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from it's fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants." The following year, France sold the 828,000 sq mi (2,140,000 km²) Louisiana territory to the United States. A few months later Jefferson wrote Jackson, "The acquisition of Louisiana is of immense importance to our future tranquility insomuch as it removes the intrigues of foreign nations to a distance from which they can no longer produce disturbance between the Indians & us. it will also open an asylum for these unhappy people, in a country which may suit their habits of life better than what they now occupy, which perhaps they will be willing to exchange with us: and to our posterity it opens a noble prospect of provision for ages. the world will here see such an extent of country under a free and moderate government as it has never yet seen." As Jackson himself purportedly put it in 1812, "Every man of the western Country turns his eyes intuitively upon the mouth of the Mississippi. He there beholds the only outlet by which his produce can reach the markets of foreign and of the atlantic States: Blocked up, all the fruits of his industry rots upon his land—open, and he carries on a trade with all the nations of the earth. To the people of Western Country is then peculiarly committed by nature herself the defense of the lower Mississippi and the city of New Orleans."

Louisiana became the 18th U.S. state on April 30, 1812. Mississippi was admitted to the Union as the 20th state on December 10, 1817.

Jackson spent very few of his formative years anywhere near the center of national politics, and so the ways he behaved as president only make sense in the context of what preceded. His decisions are best understood in light of a bitter and hard-fought experience. To say that he was prosecutor, state judge, congressman, and U.S. senator—all before he rose in stature as a victorious major general during the War of 1812—is to explain little or nothing about Jackson's appeal or even his ambition. To answer the question "Who was he?" requires that we look at building blocks, and separate the individual's lean years, his struggle to achieve respectability, from his subsequent political fashioning.

— The Passions of Andrew Jackson by Andrew Burstein (2003)

Accounts of Jackson as trader and gambler

A list created by David Allison, on November 8, 1790, of "Negroes for A. Jackson," listing 28-year-old sawyer Daniel, Kate, age 32, and their three children, Joe, Bob, and Pompey; note that the prices are expressed as pounds (£) (LOC Manuscript Division maj.01001_0191_0191)

Young Andrew Jackson sought the lifestyle of a Southern gentleman, and when he moved to the Nashville area in 1788 the first two things he acquired (that we have record of) were a horse, and an enslaved woman named Nancy, who was between 18 and 20 years old. According to historian Whitney Snow, Jackson's employment income as an attorney was unpredictable and insufficient to cover his gambling losses, so he "began dabbling in mercantilism, land speculation, and the interstate slave trade" and found that of the three, "slave trading not only relieved Jackson of debt but also allowed him to accumulate a larger-than-average work force of slave labor, a sure sign of status at the time."

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)

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." Yet, according to a study of agriculture in Tennessee, "Jackson's letters in particular are relatively untouched with remarks on the nature of the soil about him, the weather, and the swing of the crops through the seasons...Farming was for Andrew Jackson...a capitalistic enterprise in which he invested, not himself, but only money." The biographer of Joseph Erwin, who was, like Jackson, an interstate slave trader and Nashville racehorse owner, wrote of her subject: "Absurd as it now seems...planters of that early period considered large capital tied up in slaves the best of investments, the most desirable property for a remunerative income...lands were a secondary consideration."

Raftsmen Playing Cards  (1847) by George Caleb Bingham (Saint Louis Art Museum 33813)

Merchant and slave trader Jackson used a flatboat to get from the Cumberland River to the Ohio River to the Mississippi and thence south to the Natchez slave market in Spanish West Florida and/or the New Orleans slave market in French Louisiana. Lacking steamboats, which had not yet been invented, Jackson and companions made the return trip on foot (slaves) or horseback (traders) by the Natchez Trace, an ancient track through the hundreds of miles of Chickasaw and Choctaw territory between the northern fork of Bayou Pierre and the Tennessee River, ending at Jackson's farm, originally Poplar Grove, then Hunter's Hill, and after 1804, The Hermitage. There is no record of Jackson owning land or operating a plantation of his own on Bayou Pierre.

Slavery has made labor dishonorable to the white man; and, as they must have means of living, they generally resort to gambling for support.

— Narrative of Henry Watson, A Fugitive Slave (1848)

Trading in colonial and territorial Mississippi

Juramento de fidelidad (transl. oath of allegiance), as signed July 15, 1789, by Andrew Jackson, pledging himself to Charles IV of Spain. Taking the oath qualified Jackson for trading privileges and lowered his tax bill. Jackson probably gave no thought to the political meaning of such an oath, it was simply a ritual and "cost of international business." (Document found by G. Douglas Inglis, Seville, Spain; published 1995 by Robert V. Remini in Tennessee Historical Quarterly)

Account of Idler

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. I have understood that the original intention of Jackson was to settle in Mississippi, but he subsequently returned through the wilderness to Tennessee..." Idler continued, explaining that "the removal of negroes through the Indian nation into one of the States of the Union was strictly prohibited," and there was a plan made by the Choctaw and their allies "to arrest him by force should he persist in his unlawful attempt" but Jackson "armed his negroes and a few of his friends and boldly marched unmolested through the Indian territory."

Counties above Natchez c. 1816, showing mileage between stands on the Natchez Trace; "Gibsonsport" (later Port Gibson) stood alongside Bayou Pierre; the Grindstone Ford of Bayou Pierre's northern fork marked the southern terminus of the U.S. government survey of the trail (William Darby's 1816 Map of the State of Louisiana with Part of the Mississippi Territory, Barry J. Ruderman Antique Maps 49116mp2)

"Idler" described Jackson participating in foot races and wrestling matches at Bruinsburg, naming "Bruin, Price, Crane, Freeland, Harmon and others" as Jackson's companions in sport. Jackson's most astute 19th-century biographer reported that as a youth, "He was passionately fond of those sports which are mimic battles; above all, wrestling...He was exceedingly fond of running foot-races, of leaping the bar, and jumping; and in such sports he was excelled by no one of his years." Among those taking an oath of allegiance to the United States, on October 30, 1798, were Waterman Crane, Lewellin Price, and James and Hezekiah Harmon. These men swore their oath before Samuel Gibson, a resident since 1788 and the founder of Port Gibson, which "rests tranquilly in the curve of Bayou Pierre."

A surviving letter written to Jackson on October 21, 1791, by George Cochran, mentions "many agreeable hours" spent at Jackson's "friendly retreat at Bayou Pierre." In 1801, Cochran bought land on Bayou Pierre from Crane, property that was adjacent to land owned by territorial judge and Bruinsburg namesake Peter Bryan Bruin, and George Humphreys, father of future Confederate general Benjamin G. Humphreys. One of the Humphreys' properties was called the Hermitage, a name that supposedly inspired the name of the Tennessee plantation Andrew Jackson established in 1804. When the Confederate general's grandfather died, back in the day, he owed money to "many creditors, including Jackson."

Account of Sparks

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 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 about a dozen children, not all are listed here.)

The memoirs of William Henry Sparks, published in 1870, described his knowledge of Jackson's slave-trading business: "Many will remember the charge brought against him pending his candidacy for the Presidency, of having been, in early life, a negro-trader, or dealer in slaves. This charge was strictly true, though abundantly disproved by the oaths of some, and even by the certificate of his principal partner." Sparks said that Jackson had a "small store, or trading establishment...which stood immediately upon the bank of the Mississippi" at Bruinsburg, and there was an accompanying race track and a cockfighting pit, and people told stories for years after about Jackson's "skill" at these sports. Per Sparks, Jackson sold slaves in the vicinity of Claiborne County, including to Sparks' father-in-law Abner Green and his wife's uncle Thomas M. Green Jr. Sparks claimed to have "bills of sale for negroes sold to Abner Green, in the handwriting of Jackson, bearing his signature..."

"Sometimes, when the price was better, or the sales were quicker, he carried them to Louisiana. This, however, he soon declined; because, under the [redhibition] laws of Louisiana, he was obliged to guarantee the health and character of the slaves he sold. On one occasion he sold an unsound negro to a planter in the parish of West Feliciana, and, upon his guarantee, was sued and held to bail to answer. In this case he was compelled to refund the purchase-money, with damages. He went back upon his partner, and compelled him to share the loss. This caused a breach between them, which was never healed. This is the only instance which ever came to my knowledge of strife with a partner. He was close to his interest, and spared no means to protect it."

Engraving of the Battle of New Orleans by William Momberger (1861): According to the Tennessee Digital Library catalog description: "Two frontier militiamen and a black man are in forefront. The black man is rummaging through a bag of musket balls. U.S. regulars fire from behind the cotton-bale barricade while British soldiers attack." (TLSA 13951)

A 1912 biography comments, "The biographers of Andrew Jackson strain and strive mightily to ignore the fact that their hero was a negro trader in his early days, but it is a fact nevertheless...Ordinarily, the Memories of Fifty Years is to be rejected as an authority: the book was written in the extreme old age of the author and is full of fable. But William H. Sparks himself married into the Green family, lived in the Bruinsburgh neighborhood, and must be presumed to have known what the Greens had to say concerning their great friend and his beloved wife."

Sparks also recalled that when he and his wife visited the White House in 1835, 67-year-old widower Jackson asked them, "'Is old papa Jack and Bellile living?'...These were two old Africans, faithful servants of her father; and then there was an anecdote of each of them—their remarks or their conduct upon some hunting or fishing excursion, in which he had participated 40 years before."

Account of McCaleb

Ball-play of the Choctaw – Ball Up  by George Catlin depicts what McCaleb calls the Indian ball game; Catlin saw the game being played in Indian Territory in 1834, after Indian removal (Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr., Smithsonian American Art Museum 1985.66.428A)

Dr. James F. McCaleb, writing about the Natchez Trace in the Natchez News-Democrat in 1915, described Jackson as a sportsman and gambler, stated that he had stores at both Bruinsburg and Old Greenville, and that: "Grindstone Ford lane, one mile in length, on the Natchez Trace was the great rendezvous for horse racing, the Indian ball game, and lacrosse. 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. Colthrap lost his horse, his money, and his slaves to General Jackson, returning home a poorer and a wiser man." Per historian and Jackson biographer John Spencer Bassett, "Race paths were laid out in the earliest [Southern] settlements and succeeded by circular tracks, as the settlements developed." In a study of antebellum horse racing, the Journal of Mississippi History recounted the Jackson–Colthrap incident and stated that this straightaway was the first racecourse in Claiborne County and was located near the "Red House" tavern at Rocky Springs. Also, according to the memoir of a Presbyterian minister, Sunday was indeed race day in the vicinity of Old Greenville, an attraction that drew many young men away from church attendance. Neither report addressed whether Jackson kept his winnings for personal use or resold them for short-term gain. There is an E. S. Coltharp (1784–1859) buried at the old Rocky Springs Methodist Church cemetery on the historic road from Natchez to Nashville.

Accounts of Dey and Robinson

"Fighting Cocks" engraving made c. 1962 by unidentified artist (Harmon Foundation collection of artworks by African artists, 1947–1967, NAID 558913)

There are two other first-person accounts of Jackson in pre-statehood Mississippi. According to the county historian for Warren County, Ohio, a local plow manufacturer called John E. Dey travelled widely in the early 19th century via the Mississippi and Ohio River, seeking customers for the company's products. Dey spent his winters at Bruinsburg, and "Andrew Jackson, years before when he was just a Colonel, lived at this place. Colonel Jackson quite often frequented the plantation, and Mr. Dey became well acquainted with him. He remembered that he was a tall, slim man, with a nervous manner. He used to carry a pocket full of shelled corn and play with the grains at the dining table...He says that Colonel Jackson, soon after he came to Mississippi, went back into the woods about four miles from the river to a noted hunting place of the hunting gentlemen of the country. Here he started a saloon which he continued for many years. He never appeared behind the bar, but the establishment was his and he was responsible for it."

Letters and tax records show Jackson sold whiskey from a still running at his Hunter's Hill plantation in Tennessee in the 1790s. In 1922, Jackson biographer and former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee S. G. Heiskell described Jackson's Mississippi business as "slaves and whiskey." Whiskey was the beverage of early Mississippi, while gambling could have been considered the "unofficial state sport." According to court records, popular hobbies in the Cumberland included a card game called loo, another game called fives, and the crime "assault and battery." Corn was the primary staple grain of both Tennessee and Mississippi. The earliest-dated document (albeit not in his hand) in the papers of Andrew Jackson, created March 29, 1779, is a training diet for a fighting cock. The directions were to give him finely chopped "Pickle Beaf" three times a day, "lighte wheat Bread Soked in sweet Milk," smoke-dried Indian corn, and "feed him as Much as he Can Eat for Eaight Days."

"Fortifying of New Orleans," William Croome, 1848: According to the Tennessee State Library and Archives, "General Jackson employed citizens and slave labor to construct what became known as Line Jackson at New Orleans" (TSLA 28062)

Last but not least, according to the slave narrative of James Robinson, published in 1858, when Andrew Jackson needed more men in the lead-up to what became the Battle of New Orleans, he visited the plantation of Calvin Smith on Second Creek near Natchez in approximately December 1814. Smith gave Jackson permission to take a large number of his slaves, and suggested more slaves could be gotten from Springfield, the plantation of Thomas Green. According to Robinson, Smith was willing to part with his slaves because he could always buy new ones whereas if the British captured and sacked the Mississippi River Delta his own irreplaceable children might be killed. Judge Bruin had worked with Smith's brother Philander Smith on territorial administrative and judicial issues. Thomas Hinds, one of the American military heroes of the War of 1812 in the southwestern theater, was also married to a daughter of Springfield. Jackson had kinship ties to the Green family that connected him to Springfield and the Natchez Junto, the Green–Hinds–Hutchins–West political alliance in Mississippi Territory. (Abraham Green's mother-in-law and Andrew Jackson's wife were sisters.) Robinson concluded his narrative with a warning to other American slaves: "Do not forget the promise Jackson made us in the New Orleans war—'If the battle is fought and victory gained on Israel's side, you shall all be free,' when at the same time he had made a bargain with our masters to return home again all that were not killed. Never will a better promise be made to our race on a similar occasion...Avoid being duped by the white man—he wants nothing to do with our race further than to subserve his own interest, in any thing under the sun."

Trading in Tennessee

Map of Tennessee circa 1796 showing early counties and districts, Cherokee settlements, 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." (TSLA 36028)

At the turn of the 19th century, wrote historian J. Winston Coleman, "Tennessee was as wild and rough a frontier country as the Nation possessed. Life in those parts was both hard and turbulent, and a short one for many a man who tried to get on for himself in that fast-growing section of young America. Reckless gambling, hard drinking, and fighting to the death with pistol and knife were the order of the day. Men fought for their rights and for their lives...cut-throats of every description defied the laws of the back country districts, and the towns themselves were scarcely less barbarous." The exact site where the Mississippi store(s) stood has been lost, but it was one of several such outlets for Jackson's business endeavors, all at a time when "Money was scarce, and the interchange of goods was difficult and hazardous. Barter was still commonly employed in conducting commercial transactions." According to the editors of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, "Between 1795 and 1807 Jackson followed general-store merchandising at least as fully as farming, the law, or the military." Goods from Philadelphia resold in the Cumberland were marked up triple. Products for sale include fabric, "salt, grindstones, hardware, gunpowder, cow bells, and whatever else the people of the neighborhood wanted. In payment for these commodities, they took, not money, but cotton, ginned and unginned, wheat, corn, tobacco, pork, skins, furs, and, indeed, all the produce of the country." Middle Tennessee had originally produced mostly corn and stock animals, but by 1800 cotton had become so lucrative a cash crop that cotton bales served as a local currency. The "produce of the country" that was traded included slaves. In 1805, Jackson and his nephew accepted $25 in cash and "A Negro Woman namd. Fan a bout forty five years of age" to pay off the $150 past-due account of Andrew Steele at their store.

Jackson's commercial hub in Tennessee was at Clover Bottom, which was being developed as a plantation when "men from nearby places, Jackson included, formed a jockey club early in the nineteenth century and laid out a racecourse here." In 1805 Jackson oversaw construction of a "race track, stables, stands, store, and a tavern or lodging facility" at Clover Bottom, "on the rise of ground on which spectators stood." There was gambling going on in this establishment. This was also where Jackson's company built and sold flatboats to other travelers going downriver. There is a surviving contract between a riverman and Jackson's partner John Coffee arranging for a flatboat to depart from Haysborough, Tennessee for New Orleans in 1803 loaded with 25 bales of cotton and 77 hogs, which offers some sense of the scale of Jackson's shipments.

Landmarks of Davidson County, Tennessee in the 1790s and early 1800s (map created 1880)

River-traffic statistics involving flatboats illustrate how early Jackson came to Mississippi, and thus how closely he must have been involved in its colonization. According to writer David O. Stewart, in 1792 "only a dozen flatboats made the journey downriver to New Orleans," but by 1802, it was more than 500, and by 1807, the count was closer to 2,000 a year. According to another account, in 1790, 64 flatboats docked at Natchez the entire year, while on a single day in 1808 a visitor counted 150 flatboats tied up at the Natchez landing. In the course of the 1806–07 expedition that came to be known as the Burr conspiracy, Aaron Burr ordered five of Jackson's boats, picked up two that were ready at Clover Bottom, and set off for the south from Jackson's landing at Stones River, weeks later surrendering himself to authorities at Peter Bruin's house at Bruinsburg. These boats were themselves valuable in the lower Mississippi, which had a shortage of planed lumber. The Clover Bottom store, where Jackson built and sold flatboats, raced horses, and took people as a form of payment, was "a two-story building near today's Downeymead Drive."

Jackson also ran saloons in Tennessee. On August 19, 1806, Cage & Black made a rental agreement with Andrew Jackson and James S. Rawlings for a house, lot, and stables in Gallatin, Tennessee. Rawlings was married to a niece of Rachel Jackson. On September 13, 1806, Rawlings advertised that he had opened a tavern in Gallatin that offered "a well-chosen assortment of imported spirits and wines."

Stones River near Murfreesboro, Tennessee (Photo: Casey Fleser, 2009)

Jackson's mercantile enterprises 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 leaders, colonels, legislators, and "land-grabbers" were men whose "classifications...greatly overlapped." As Nashville historian Anita S. Goodstein put it, "Land speculators, merchants, self made lawyers—all dealt in slaves. Indeed they used slaves almost as currency." According to Goodstein's analysis of 452 Nashville-area transactions involving approximately 700 enslaved blacks in the period from 1783 to 1804, "The overwhelming number of sales were of a single slave, man or woman or child. Of the 452 transactions only 116 involved transfers of more than one slave...Almost half of those for whom we have age data were under 16. It was not uncommon for children to be sold separately, away from parents or friends. Witness Aron, age six, sold to Andrew Jackson in 1791."

1789–1799

Etching from a sketch made in 1795 of a flatboat, sometimes called an ark, voiture, broadhorn, Kentucky boat, New Orleans boat, or raft (Voyage dans l'Amerique Septentrionale, 1826, LCCN 01021531)

Andrew Jackson had been left without parents or siblings at age 14, in 1781. Unattached, he gambled and drank in Charleston, he moved to North Carolina, he studied law, and he moved further again. In company with work friends, he went to examine the prospects of the new settlement that was being hacked out of the woodlands along the Cumberland River. He was thus 22 years old in 1789, when he rode the waters of the Mississippi south to Bruinsburg, which was located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Bayou Pierre at what was at that time the northernmost White settlement in the Natchez District. The name Bayou Pierre dates to the French period, but the local pronunciation of bayou "ignores the y and rhymes the word with now." In 1789 there were no riverfront settlements between L'Anse à la Graisse (later known as New Madrid, Missouri) and Bayou Pierre. 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..." 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:

Settlements and landmarks along the Mississippi River in the Natchez District on a survey of the Natchez Trace consequent to the 1801 Treaty of Fort Adams, recorded as "the highway from the Grindstone Ford of Bayou Pierre to Nashville." Settlements listed include Walnut Hills (later Vicksburg), Grand Gulf, Petit Gulf (later Rodney), Bruinsburg, Grindstone Ford, Natchez, White Cliffs, Fort Adams, and Pinckneyville. Natchez and Port Gibson were the biggest towns in Mississippi at statehood in 1817; Vicksburg came into its own as a rival to Natchez in the 1830s. (NAID 102279464)

"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. At this time, what is now known as Claiborne County, was an unbroken wilderness tenanted only by about five white families, a few vagabond Spaniards, strolling Choctaw Indians, the bear, the panther, the catamount, the wolf, and the deer. A horse path leading from Natchez, through what were afterwards known as Washington, Seltsertown, Union Town, Port Gibson, Grind Stone Ford, Rocky Springs to Cayuga in the Choctaw Nation was 'blazed out' by the Spanish Government. From this horse path were lateral paths blazed out by the settlers to their settlements. Corn, rice, indigo, and tobacco were the only agricultural products then introduced. Cotton gins were unknown, mills were unknown, and corn had to be converted into meal by means of coffee mills and the mortar and pestle. Nothing could be spared from the scanty subsistence of the settler for market. The bear, the catamount, the panther, and the wolf destroyed pigs and calves, poultry, and corn fields. Sheep were unknown. In a great measure the pioneer had to rely on his trusty rifle for the 'creature comforts' of life. Peltry, tobacco monopolized by the Government, indigo, and white oak staves transported in piroques to Natchez and N. Orleans were the only articles of commerce and the pioneer's only dependence for a supply of sugar, coffee, medicines, powder, and lead. I heard my father say that he never saw the day his family suffered for want of food or raiment; but for the first 15 years of his married life he did not see $15 in money that he could call his own. My mother and a negro woman...did the 'chores' of the household, spun the thread and wove the cloth for the entire family, white and black. My father, two negro men and two women, cleared the field, built the cabins, cultivated the crops, and replenished the smoke house with wild game and fish. My older brothers and sisters fed the pigs, herded the cattle, gathered the eggs, and wormed the tobacco patch..."

— "The Life of Benjamin Grubb Humphreys"

George Catlin, View of the Lower Mississippi , painted c. 1860s (Paul Mellon Collection, U.S. National Gallery of Art 1965.16.209)

On July 15, 1789, Jackson was in the Natchez District swearing allegiance to the king of Spain so that he could trade there without paying a tax intended for non-resident American traders. The following month Natchez District planter Thomas M. Green Jr. granted power of attorney to the young lawyer. Jackson might have been a transient or itinerant trader, which was common. If he had a physical store it would likely have been log-built, or possibly the frame cabin of his "emigrant boat" deconstructed and rebuilt to the same purpose on land. According to biographer Robert V. Remini, young Jackson made the acquaintance of "a great many Natchez businessmen and through them began an extensive trading operation." Preserved letters from 1790 between Jackson and "Melling Woolley, a Natchez merchant" record goods being carried from Nashville to Natchez, including "cases of wine and rum; also a snuff box, dolls, muslin, salt, sugar, knives and iron pots." Another letter of 1790 thanks Jackson for his help with the "Little Venture of Swann Skins," which historian Harriet Chappell Owsley asserted were feathers or down stuffing for pillows and mattresses, but which some scholars suspect was a euphemism for a shipment of slaves. As Remini put it, if nothing else, "The business was extremely lucrative and impossible to avoid in the course of regular trade between two distant points such as Nashville and Natchez. His friends frequently asked him to transport slaves as a courtesy, and Jackson was never one to deny his friends. On one occasion he returned a runaway slave to the Spanish governor of Natchez, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, for James Robertson." Jackson could also pursue his hobbies in Natchez: there was a quarter-mile racetrack at Natchez-Under-the-Hill as early as 1788, and the St. Catherine course, later to come to fame as the Pharsalia Race Course, was likely in operation by 1790. The jockeys and grooms at these tracks were enslaved Blacks, and horses and slaves alike were used for stakes.

View from Cypress Swamp Boardwalk along the Natchez Trace Parkway near Canton, Mississippi (Photo: Arthur T. LaBar, 2022)

The study of Jackson's slave trading is closely tied to the study of the Robards–Donelson–Jackson relationship controversy. Jackson and Rachel Robards née Donelson ran off together sometime between the summer of 1789 and July 1790, leaving behind Rachel's allegedly abusive first husband Lewis Robards. An 1890 news article purporting to tell "the true story of the great statesman's matrimonial venture" claimed that "near Natchez...there used to stand a ruined log hut, which was pointed out to strangers as the spot where they had passed their honeymoon. This was, no doubt, the spot to which he carried her when they first ran away..." The couple returned to Nashville in a party of 100 or more via the Natchez Trace in July 1790, with Hugh McGary attesting at Rachel's divorce proceedings that the couple were "bedding together" on the journey.

Cumberland settlement, Watauga settlement, and roads of Tennessee in 1795; in 1801, Williamson County, Tennessee allocated funds for linking local byways to the Natchez Trace. (Map from Albert C. Holt's The Economic and Social Beginnings of Tennessee, 1922)

In his letters, Jackson referred to the path from Natchez to Nashville as a journey through "the wilderness." Another traveler described the Trace in early days as "an impenetrable forest condensed by cane and cemented by grape vines, so that a dozen trees must be cut before one can fall..." British traveler Francis Baily described the rustic nature of the Natchez road in his journal of a 1796–97 trip, with the one-room "tavern" at Grindstone Ford being so unpleasant that he preferred to sleep outside under a tree. Baily also wrote about "encamping grounds," describing wide places in the road, especially at river fords, that were identified by the presence of felled trees, extinguished campfires, and compacted soil. In times of high water, travelers would swim across the intervening rivers and streams, accompanied by cargo rafts built on the spot, so that provisions and supplies could stay dry.

Breaking Down the Wild Horse  by George Catlin, painted c. 1834 (Smithsonian 1985.66.501)

According to an Ohioan, travelers returning northeast on the trace usually went on Opelousas horses, "a small breed of mixed Spanish and Indian...very hardy and accustomed to subsist on grass and the bark of trees. To every three or four persons there was one or more spare horses to carry the baggage." Still, despite its unimproved nature, the trail was already a well-trafficked trade route in the 1790s—a stretch of the southern section was called the Path to the Choctaw Nation, and the run from Tupelo to Nashville was called the Chickasaw Trace—and Choctaw, Spanish, and American leaders alike were preoccupied with protecting and extending their access to the road.

Original extent of Mississippi Territory, as organized April 4, 1798 (Map: Golbez)

It is unclear where Jackson collected the enslaved people he carried south, and in what quantities of people he trafficked. Until Robertson's 1794 Nickajack Expedition tied off the bloody conflict with the Cherokee, the Cumberland district remained "as violent a world as any American ever inhabited." Nashville proper remained but a small settlement in this era, with a total population in 1800 of about 350 people, approximately 150 of whom were slaves. The states of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia were "already net exporters" of slaves in the 1790s, shortly joined by the District of Columbia, and North Carolina, whereas Tennessee, admitted in 1796 as the 16th U.S. state, would not become a net exporter of slaves until the 1850s. Historians know not to what purpose Jackson "crossed the wilderness between Knoxville and Nashville twenty-two times—once alone, 'when the Indians were most numerous and hostile.'" His brief service in the House and the Senate certainly gave occasion to visit the national capital of Philadelphia, and from 1798 to 1804, he had the circuit of a state judge. During Nashville's earliest history, "Philadelphia being the favorite market of the Nashville merchants, they would leave here on horseback, and it would take them nearly six weeks to reach the city of 'Brotherly Love'. All purchases were then sent through by wagons." Similarly, at the turn of the 19th century, shipping between Baltimore and Nashville involved "six-horse teams at a cost of ten dollars per hundred pounds." The route to either city was tiresome, requiring arduous travel through the Blue Ridge Mountains or up around the Alleghenies. In 1795, 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. There Jackson "traded land preemptions for flour, sugar, piece goods, and pocket knives." Before Jackson departed, friend and business associate John Overton cautioned him, "If you purchase Negroes in any of the northern States, be careful in so doing not to subject yourself to the penal Laws of the State." Later, on November 30, 1799, Jackson agreed to a slave swap between himself, John Overton, and a man named Carter. Jackson was to take a couple owned by Carter, writing Overton, "They will [serve] my Purpose to Sell again."

1800–1809

United States main post roads c. 1804 (Charles O. Paullin, 1932)

In his 2013 biography, Andrew Jackson, Southerner, historian Mark R. Cheathem wrote, "Historian Charles Sellers once argued that after 1804 'never again was Jackson to engage in any considerable speculative venture.' The facts do not bear out this claim. Jackson speculated widely in land during the 1810s in an effort to benefit himself. Given his direct involvement in land seizures during the 1810s and his subsequent correspondence about prospects in Alabama, Florida, and the Mississippi Territory, it stretches credulity to imagine that he did not calculate these moves to help his land-speculating associates turn a profit as well." Similarly, Jackson was still opportunistically trading slaves well into the 19th century, certainly until his actions during the War of 1812 made him a national figure. According to Frederic Bancroft's Slave-Trading in the Old South (1931), letters in the Jackson papers at the Library of Congress demonstrate his continuing interest in the market. For instance, William C. C. Claiborne wrote to Jackson from "near Natchez" on December 8, 1801, with an update on local markets:

Mississippi Panorama by Robert Brammer (fl. 1842–1853)

"The Races in this District, commenced yesterday, and will hold for three days; Mr. Hutchings has attended the Race today, and will proceed from thence, to Mr. Green's, where he has left the Negroes & Horses. Mr. H. will be at my House, next Week; in the mean time, I will try to find a purchaser for your Horses, as for Negroes, they are in great demand, and will sell well. There is hardly any Corn in this District, and so soon, as the pumpkins give out, Horses will Suffer, & hence it is, they are not at present in demand; But if Mr. H. should bring his horses to Natchez, I will try to sell them, to the best advantage."

A couple of weeks later, an update from Claiborne:

"I had the pleasure to deliver in person your Letters to Mr. Hutchins; he is now at my House, & is in good health & Spirits. The Negro Woman he has sold for 500 dolls. in Cash, and I believe he has, or will in a few days sell the Boy, for his own price, to Colo. West. The Horses are not yet disposed of, but I hope he will meet a purchaser, in a day or two. I shall on Tomorrow, set off for Fort Adams, & Mr. Hutchings has promised to accompany me; previous to our return, I hope, we shall be enabled to sell the Horses. I can assure you, with great truth, that Mr. Hutchings is a prudent, amiable young man, & is very attentive to your Interest."

Jackson Falls, named for Andrew Jackson, along the Natchez Trace near the Duck River in Hickman County, Tennessee, was ceded to the United States by the Cherokee under the 1806 Treaty of Washington (Photo: Fredlyfish4, 2019)

The tandem vending of horse flesh and human flesh was common. As Bancroft explained in 1931, in many antebellum Southern marketplaces, "the same man dealt in horses, mules and slaves." Similarly, Calvin Schermerhorn, writing about the ocean-going (rather than riverine), or "coastwise" slave trade, stated, "On nearly all American coastal voyages on which slaves were transported in the 1810s and early 1820s, the accent fell on shipping nonhuman cargoes," meaning that the "main" cargo was coal or rum or cowhides or cotton or porcelain, but shippers moving goods between any two points where slavery was legal were as likely as not to have a few slaves aboard as well, bound for resale wherever inventory was low and prices were high.

The John Hutchings who appears in some reports and documents associated with the slave trade was Andrew Jackson's nephew-by-marriage. Rachel Donelson's older sister Catherine married Thomas Hutchings; John Hutchings was their firstborn son. According to the editors of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Hutchings was "Jackson's partner in the Lebanon, Gallatin, and Hunter's Hill stores." 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."

In 1804, as Jackson's Tennessee stores busily traded "groceries, nails, and steele" for "deer and bear skins (provided by Cherokee and Chickasaw hunters)," he wrote a long letter arguing with a trading partner about their arrangement:

"...that he would sell if possible at new orleans, and that I wished you (as I had before stated to you in person) to receive your proportion of your debt at New Orleans, that Mr. H would carry on negroes to exchange for groceries, and wishing you to make a sale of them before he came if you could, that a fellow answering the description you wanted was bought, but I was fearfull he would not suit you as he had once left his master and so forth but as to stating that he had sufficient funds with him to pay all our debts cannot be correct..."

In 1926, Bassett wrote, "This letter shows Jackson's method of carrying on a controversy in his early life. It also contains the clearest available evidence that his trading firm bought and sold negroes." Jackson was up to his neck in debt that year, so, Remini summarizes, "To pay what he owed, Jackson returned full time to his business interests in 1804. He resigned the judgeship, sold his plantation at Hunter's Hill (where for a time he had operated a small store and from a narrow window sold goods to the Indians), disposed of an additional 25,000 acres he held in various parts of the state (he continued his land speculation despite the Allison disaster)...Through consolidation and liquidation he managed to pay off all his debts. It meant starting all over again financially, and it meant living in a log cabin once again."

"The Log Hermitage" of 1805: Per the Ladies' Hermitage Association, "the building in the foreground was once a two-story blockhouse." Dendrochronology studies found that this building, now called West Cabin, was built 1798–1800 from tulip poplar. The building in the background, East Cabin, was built around 1805–1806 and was used as the kitchen during the Log Hermitage days. These buildings were later repurposed as slave quarters. (HABS TN-52-A-7)

In June 1805, Jackson wrote the buyer of Hunter's Hill, Edward Ward, that he could not accept slaves as a form of payment, because of timing: "I cannot believe that you are seriously impressed with the belief, that you are now authorised to discharge a part thereof in negroes—had negroes been offerred before Mr Hutchings descended the river with negroes for sale they would have been recd." Some traders worked all year to collect what were called "shipping lots" of slaves, but Jackson apparently rejected Ward's midsummer offering as inauspiciously timed.

Also, according to Gen. Jackson's Negro Speculations, Jackson bought an enslaved man from a Dr. Rollings of Gallatin in 1805 or 1806, with the intent to resell him in the "lower country," and later sued the doctor over the man's health condition. This "Dr. Rollings" of Gallatin may be the Dr. Benjamin Rawlings of Sumner County, Tennessee who wrote Jackson in 1798 at the request of their mutual friend Overton, who "told me yesterday Evening that your Negro George had got Snake Bitten And Requested if I was acquainted with any Salutary medicine" for it; Rawlings recommended a plantain poultice, and "If the leg and foot is Much Sweld Bleeding wuld not be Amiss I am Sir With Respect &c. Ben Rawlings." The documents timeline in The Papers of Andrew Jackson includes three mentions of a case known as Andrew Jackson and John Hutchings v. Benjamin Rawlings. The suit seems to have been initiated in approximately September 1805, a decision was rendered in September 1808, and an appeal decision was handed down in March 1813. There is an 1828 letter from Jackson "casually" explaining that possession of this "negro boy," who had been "kept at the Clover Bottom at our store," had been uncertain in part because he was abducted as the result of "a race...the stakes...which was to be in cash or negroes as I understood." Bassett annotated this letter, "An article in the Nashville Banner and Whig of Aug. 1, 1828, had brought up this incident in support of the charge that Jackson was a negro trader. That he took slaves in settlement of accounts and sold them for money is undoubtedly true. But he was never a negro trader in the ordinary meaning of the term." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Washington Jackson to Andrew Jackson, December 20, 1809, Natchez, M.T.: "I have at length made sale of your Wench and Child, to a free French Negro Woman, with whom they have been since they came into my possession, for $325...I think it a fortunate sale as there are but few would take them as a gift, (altho the Wench is a very valuable one) owing to her having the fits and the Child being sickly..." (LOC Manuscript Div. maj.01008_0258_0260)

In October 1828, the final issue of the Monthly Anti-Jackson Expositor published a letter that had allegedly been written by Jackson to William P. Anderson in January 1807. (Anderson, a U.S. Attorney and father of future Confederate general J. Patton Anderson, had been one of Jackson's closest associates in the 1800s and 1810s, but by 1828 had turned into a lacerating critic.) 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. And it is certainly remarkable for the cool indifference with which private receipts, a negro-trading bargain, contempt for the Secretary of War, and consultations for the suppression of a supposed wide-spreading treason are commingled together." As to the bargain, Jackson had written Anderson, "...the Negro girl, if likely, at a fair price, I will receive...if you [find it] Convenient bring the girl with you..." The range of topics covered in the Anderson letter and the course of Jackson's transition from negro speculator to expansionist militia leader to U.S. president were hardly incidental. In the words of political scientist Michael Paul Rogin, "Jackson...won and lost land in horse races, mixed slave trading with land deals, and was plagued like other speculators by problems of tax liens, imperfect title, Indian claims, and bankruptcy. Other speculators lived with these problems and sought to resolve them pragmatically. They had turned virgin land into money; they remained in the material realm in the conflicts that resulted. Jackson, however, did not. His personality and the threat to his fortune forced him to return to the nature of things. Worldly success failed to rescue Jackson...and establish his authority in the world...Plagued by title conflicts and insecure possession, he went back to the Indians, at the beginning of it all."

1810–1812

"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)

In 1810, Andrew Jackson, Joseph Coleman (the first mayor of Nashville), and a "probable" resident of Natchez named Horace Green formed a business partnership on the existing system of transporting trade goods, slaves, etc. downriver from Tennessee to the consumers of Louisiana and Mississippi. Slaves owned by this firm became part of the propaganda leafleting and news coverage of Jackson's business dealings during the bitter 1828 campaign.

According to a political opponent writing as "Philo-Tennesseean," some of the enslaved people that Jackson collected before the outbreak of the War of 1812 were gleaned from a US$4,000 (equivalent to $73,248 in 2023) horse-race bet lost by Newman Cannon, who paid up in cash, a horse, and 11 slaves who represented "the earnings of many years honest labor." Philo-Tennesseean also alleged that Jackson fixed races and asked, "Did you not always carry about with you, to horse-races, cock-fights, &c. a set of bullies, who were ready to fight for you on the slightest occasion? and did they not, on some occasions, when there was a dispute, take the 'stakes' by force?" Using slaves as collateral, mortgaging them, or putting them in the pot of a poker game, was common and guaranteed a lifetime of insecurity for the people used as security. Other slaves that came into the joint ownership of Jackson, Coleman, and Green were bought from a Mecklenburg County, Virginia, tavern owner named Richard Epperson. Per historian Snow, "In essence, the men only paid a down payment of $2,500 on a total agreed price of $10,500 in cash. The rest of the principal was to be paid in two six-month installments. However, when Green...subsequently abandoned the slaves in Natchez, Jackson became entirely responsible for both the debt and the costs of transporting the slaves back to Davidson County."

Negro Mother and Child by Maurice Glickman (Public Works of Art Project, 1934)

A newspaper in upstate New York endorsed John Quincy Adams for president and described Jackson as a "dealer in human flesh" (Buffalo Emporium and General Advertiser, September 4, 1828)

The Port Gibson Correspondent newspaper published an "extra" edition on September 13, 1828, to address the subject of Jackson's work as a slave trader. The Port Gibson coverage was reprinted in Peter Force's National Journal, which was "the official organ of the John Quincy Adams administration."

"We have, with astonishment, observed the attempt in Nashville to brow-beat and bully the most respectable gentlemen from asserting publicly what is the absolute truth: that Gen. Andrew Jackson was, in the year 1811, a dealer in Negroes: and, believing it to be our duty to expose falsehoods and to aid the truth, we do now assure all men, whether the friends or the opponents of Gen. Jackson, far and near: That in the fall of the year 1811, Gen. Jackson and John Hutchings did descend the river Mississippi and land at Bruinsburg at the mouth of the Bayou Pierre in this county, with from twenty to thirty negroes: that a number of those negroes were brought to this immediate neighborhood, and afterwards encamped for weeks at Mr. Moore's in the McCaleb settlement, ten miles from this town; that on the 27th of December, 1811, Gen. Jackson sold three negroes, "a woman named Kissiah, with her two children, Reuben, about three years old, and a female child at the breast called Elsay, in and for consideration of the sum of $650."-that on the 28th of Dec. 1811, the very day after the former sale, and while at the same encampment, he sold to Mr. James McCaleb, of this county, two other negroes, named Candis and Lucinda, for the sum of $1000:—that he sold other negroes in this county during that trip;—that he sold some at or in the neighborhood of Bayou Sarah;—that after the belief became general in this country that war would be declared against Great Britain, the planters were indisposed to buy negroes, as the market for their cotton would be closed, Gen. Jackson resolved to return to Tennessee, with the remnant of his drove; that while he had his negroes encamped near Mr. James McCaleb's, and was making his preparations to pass through the Indian nation, he was informed by one of the most respectable citizens of this county, now living in it, of the law requiring passports for slaves; of the resolute character of Mr. Dinsmore, and of his punctilious execution of the duties of his office as Indian Agent: These things we do most unequivocally and unhesitatingly charge and assert. We do so on the best of authority,—the notoriety of the facts; the declarations gentlemen of whose truth no doubt can or will be entertained; from written documents, of various kinds, in the hand writing of Gen. Jackson himself: as also from the affidavit of Mr. William Miller of this county, who came down on board the boat with Gen. Jackson and his negroes; all of which we have heard and read. These things Gen. Jackson cannot, dare not, and will not, himself deny; whatever he may suffer others to do."

Petit Gulf as viewed from the river, painted by Charles Alexandre Lesueur in the early 1820s; Petit Gulf reincorporated as Rodney in 1828 (Missouri Historical Society N45785)

According to "Sidney" in the Natchez Ariel, the slaves Jackson sold in late 1811 were "landed in chains at the Petit Gulf, in Claiborne county; as far as I can learn about a dozen were sold in that county...Not finding purchases for more in Claiborne county, Gen. Jackson brought the remainder down to Washington in [Adams County] and then to Natchez, where he exhibited them for sale, and the General was notoriously considered at that day as nothing more than a negro trader. About two years after it is thought by many that he took his degrees which qualify him for the presidency—'there indeed was a rise.'"

Andrew Jackson versus Silas Dinsmoor

The Choctaw Agency near Brashears' Stand 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, LCCN 2001626031)

While returning to Nashville with his unsold stock, Jackson got into a dispute with an Indian agent named Silas Dinsmoor. Dismoor was determined to enforce a regulation requiring that every enslaved person crossing through the unceded Choctaw lands carry a document identifying their legal owner and the purpose of their travel. The intention was to prevent runaway slaves from using the Choctaw lands as a refuge, which in turn would hopefully reduce complaints from white settlers about the Choctaw. Jackson disliked Dinsmoor enforcing this rule, and while traveling, had to pass the Choctaw Agency in company of a "considerable number of slaves." Dinsmoor was not at the agency when Jackson passed by. Still, Jackson left a message promising a future confrontation with Dinsmoor, who persisted in regulating the passage of enslaved people over the Trace. Jackson later saw to it that Dismoor was removed from his post. According to The Devil's Backbone, a history of the Natchez Trace, "No explanation has been made as to why Jackson felt this passport ruling was unreasonable when applied to him, except that Wilkinson's treaty of 1801 opened the road through the Indian nations to all white travelers, and presumably also to their slaves."

Silas Dinsmoor was a slave owner. He is also remembered as a man of courage and character, especially in his dealings with the Choctaw. (Dinsmore Homestead)

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. Historian J. M. Opal found "no evidence of any general uproar against the Indian agent. Indeed, the very existence of so many passports suggests a rough consensus between most settlers and a Jeffersonian regime eager to oblige them. Once again, men like Jackson had interests and ambitions that made exceptional demands upon the various authorities around them." An American military officer, Major A. McIllhenny, who had been stationed at Washington Cantonment in Mississippi Territory said as much in a letter to the newspaper in 1828: "...the general, having sent forward his negroes, had mounted his horse, and laying his hand upon his pistols, significantly replied, 'These are General Jackson's passports!!!' I have often thought of this anecdote of Mr. Dinsmore's whenever the Constitution, laws, or the orders of government, have thwarted the arbitrary will of this man. Shall weapons of war be his passport to our suffrage, and to the Chair of State?"

The land uneasy: Jackson's side of the story

View of Natchez landing and Natchez-Under-the-Hill, painted by Henry Lewis, likely from a sketch made shortly before the 1840 Natchez tornado (Das illustrirte Mississippithal, 1857, University of Pittsburgh Libraries)

There are three surviving letters from the then 44-year-old Jackson about this specific platoon of slaves for sale, which was initially under the purview of Green and which he later took control of himself. Jackson wrote that there were 27 people in the group: "...25 grown negroes; with two sucking children they always count with the mother," and that 13 of the group were women, as they needed "habits." As was the case in nearly all preserved letters written about the American slave trade, Jackson's letters about negro speculation were unremarkable in that they were marked by "insensitivity, self-congratulation, and deeply racist complacency."

In the first letter, dated December 17, 1811, and addressed to his wife, Jackson wrote "on tomorrow I shall set out from here homewards, on the Biopierre I expect to be detained Some days preparing the negroes for the wilderness My trusty friend John Hutchings, on the recpt of my letter had come down to this place recd. all the negroes on hand and had carried them up to his farm—I have Just seen Mr. [Horace] Green last evening this morning he was to have Seen me, but as yet, he has not appeared as to the State of the business I can give you no account—untill I have a Settlement with him or have an account of the appropriation of the amount of sales from him I shall bring home with me from twelve to Twenty—I hope to be able to sell some of them on the way at good prices—but many of them I Shall be obliged to bring home and as most of that number will be females I leave you to point out to Mr John Fields [Hermitage overseer] where to have the house built for them." Ten days later, he found a buyer for the mother and children, Kessiah, Ruben, and Elsey. The day after that he sold Candis and Lucinda.

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. (Photo: Indies1, 2014)

On February 8, 1812, Jackson wrote to his sister-in-law Mary Donelson Caffrey: "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..." 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.

Then, in correspondence of February 29, 1812, he made time for a multi-page complaint about the business acumen of young Horace Green. Jackson wrote that "...the highest Expence of any that did accrue during the time we were engaged in the mercantile transactions was (including provissions hands and return expence)" was $250, whereas Green had spent $318.75. Jackson continued, "I also found from examining the acpts of Negroes sent to markett that the expence never averaged more from here than fifteen dollars a head," with the solitary exception of "one wench and three children, who had been subject to the fits remained better than six months in the Natchez" having cost him $25. Jackson argued to the arbitrators to whom he was writing that Green's business expenses were "exorbitant" and that Green did not even provide an itemized report, but rather lumped "charges without any specification." Jackson continued that "taking no notice of the time the negroes have been hired out, or the reduction of their expence by sales, and one having run away" there was a balance of $340 but "from every enquiry I have made on the subject, that fifteen dollars pr head is about the usual expence, and finding this to amount including the amount of the Price of the Boat, and not taking into view the children at the breast, it makes the cost on each negro $44.66,2⁄3" which per Jackson was "more than double what is usual..."

Andrew Jackson explains the correct way to run a slave-trading operation between Tennessee and the lower Mississippi, February 29, 1812 (LOC Manuscripts Div. maj.01009_0208_0215, p. 5 of 8)

Jackson proceeded to lay out a list of expected expenses for such a slaving expedition, based on "the soldiers ration," including the anticipated cost of crewing the boat (with a steersman), housing for Mr. Green "after he left his Boat," two purchases of cornmeal (totaling 100 bushels) for $62.75, two purchases of bacon for $208.121⁄2, as well as an expected clothing expense for at least the female slaves: "one habit each the fellows recd naked." The standard diet for slaves on the march was pork and cornmeal, but, per Sydnor, "as there was no economy in providing new clothes for the journey through the forests, negroes generally reached the market in rags."

In 1829, the Huntsville Democrat used this icon for "cotton boats" and "cotton freighting" advertisements placed by Tennessee River shipping companies

They had hired a keelboat, and Green "had on board a number of Negroes" who could be put to work pulling the oars. An oar-propelled keelboat was better for going upstream than a flatboat (which essentially treated the Mississippi as one long flume ride). Jackson argued that if Green had sense he never would have made a sales call at Natchez, which everyone knew was "glutted" with slaves and slave traders, but instead he should have visited the prosperous old settlement of Bayou Sara (further down on the river near Baton Rouge) and then gone up into the Red River country of Louisiana and sought buyers there. This type of circuit was the life of a slave trader, most of whom "seem to have stayed only a short while in any one place." Green instead landed at Natchez where he traded some of the slaves in his possession for what Jackson called "an old horse foundered." If Green had been a better steward of this merchandise, wrote Jackson, the slaves in question "would have cleared their own expence, if not neated something to the owners."

        Somewhere along the trace, our spill
Of blood will tell the others who and what we were.

— Marvin Solomon, "The Natchez Trace" (August 1962)

Individual slave sales

Andrew Jackson slave sales

Name	Age	Sale date	Price and present-day value (group)	Price and present-day value (individual)	Location	Buyer	Witness(es)	Notes
Betty	35	December 27, 1800	US$550 (equivalent to $9,874 in 2023)	US$225 (equivalent to $4,039 in 2023)	County of Pickering	Abraham Green	Jn. Hutchings, S. Lewis	Betty and Hannah were mother and daughter.
Hannah	15	December 27, 1800	US$550 (equivalent to $9,874 in 2023)	US$225 (equivalent to $4,039 in 2023)	County of Pickering	Abraham Green	Jn. Hutchings, S. Lewis
Faney	Age unknown	Date unknown	US$280	US$280	Mississippi Territory (unconfirmed)	Abraham Green (unconfirmed)	Unknown	Abraham Green in acpt. with Andrew Jackson, Dr. To one Negro Wench named Faney, $290 To 2 Negroe weamen Betty & Hanah 550 To Merchandize from John Anderson 15 18 To cash Pd Taylor for making coat 3 ___ $848.18
Kessiah (or Kissiah)	Age unknown	December 26, 1811	US$650 (equivalent to $11,903 in 2023)	US$216.67 (equivalent to $3,968 in 2023)	Claibo Urne, Missesseppi Territory	Abraham Green	J. Hutchings	Ruben and Elsey were Kessiah's children. Test.-Note the words "named Kissiah" in the 5th line from the Top, interlined before signed. Test. J. Hutchings." January 17, 1801.
Ruben (or Reuben)	3	December 26, 1811	US$650 (equivalent to $11,903 in 2023)	US$216.67 (equivalent to $3,968 in 2023)	Claibo Urne, Missesseppi Territory	Abraham Green	J. Hutchings
Elsey (or Elsy)	0–2	December 26, 1811	US$650 (equivalent to $11,903 in 2023)	US$216.67 (equivalent to $3,968 in 2023)	Claibo Urne, Missesseppi Territory	Abraham Green	J. Hutchings	"female child at the breast"
Candis	14	December 27, 1811	US$1,000 (equivalent to $18,312 in 2023)	US$500 (equivalent to $9,156 in 2023)	Claibourne, Mississippe Territory	James McCaleb	John Hutchings, William Robinson	"about fourteen years old of a yellow complecton"; payment was due March 1, 1812; endorsed on back "Rec'd N. Orls. Apl. 12th 1812 One thousand Dollars by the hands of J Smith Esq in full of the within note. $1000 WASHN. JACKSON & Co.
Lucinda	20	December 27, 1811	US$1,000 (equivalent to $18,312 in 2023)	US$500 (equivalent to $9,156 in 2023)	Claibourne, Mississippe Territory	James McCaleb	John Hutchings, William Robinson	"about twenty years old of a black complecton formerly the property of Mary Coffery"

• Mean age of people sold: 14.67 years old
• Mean price of people sold in 1811 only: US$330 (equivalent to $6,043 in 2023)

(Note: Small sample size likely makes this data meaningless.)

Several of Jackson's bills of sale are dated to late December, at the end of the Mississippi cotton season—"A few days' rest usually coincided with Christmas." Winter and spring were the traditional slave-trading seasons, after the harvest was in, and before the summer heat and mosquitoes and fleas arrived in force. The river was also higher in winter and spring, and the current stronger, making for a faster trip downstream in the days before steam power.

The receipts for several slave sales made by Jackson resurfaced in part because buyer Abraham Green had died October 6, 1826, and his estate was still being settled in 1828. One of the executors of Abraham Green's estate, Benjamin Hughes, had the bill of sale for Kessiah and her children notarized before sharing it with the Ariel.

Abraham Green plantation auction ("Valuable Plantation and Negroes for Sale" The Weekly Natchez Courier, March 22, 1828)

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. daily." According to May Wilson McBee's extracts of Natchez District court records, in 1804 James McCaleb had filed a claim for "555 acres on Boggy Br. of North Fork of Bayou Pierre, 3 mi. east of Grindstone Ford, Plat shows 513 acres adj. Wm. Kilcrease, John Robinson, Abner Green and the old survey of Catura Proctor." According to a newspaper ad placed by P. A. Van Dorn (who married another daughter of Mary Donelson Caffrey, and who was the father of future Confederate general Earl Van Dorn), McCaleb also operated a cotton gin near Bayou Pierre in 1814. The Dr. James H. McCaleb who wrote an article about the Natchez Trace for the Natchez News-Democrat in 1915 was a great-grandnephew of the James McCaleb (1772–1822) who purchased Malinda and Candis from Andrew Jackson. The McCaleb family history states, "James McCaleb was considered a bad manager by his brothers. He never became quite as wealthy as they, but he was very well off in his day."

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)

The Washington Jackson & Co. that accepted the $1,000 for Candis and Lucinda from James McCaleb on behalf of Andrew Jackson was a cotton factor, or cotton brokerage firm, with branches in New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Liverpool, England. Cotton factors were "the most important middlemen" between Southern crops and Northern and European markets. Factors often held crops on consignment and acted as not just business managers for plantation owners but as banks, taking a stake in the consignee's business and perhaps advancing them money against future profits. According to historian Harold D. Woodman, "By 'endorsing' a planter's note, the factor guaranteed that it would be paid when due. The planter would receive credit, but the factor would not be called upon to make any cash outlay unless the planter defaulted." There were three Jackson brothers (including the Washington Jackson who in 1809 had sold Andrew Jackson's slave woman prone to "fits" to a "free French" woman of color). John, James, and Washington were "Irish immigrants but with no verifiable relationship to Andrew." According to The Papers of Andrew Jackson (1984), James Jackson served as a "private banker for Andrew, extending large sums of money on promissory notes. They were later partners in numerous land ventures, including the Chickasaw Purchase speculation." Another instance of Jackson treating the Jacksons as slave brokers appears in a letter of September 18, 1816, written to Rachel: "Mr James Jackson on your application will take order on Sampson if necessary, that family will sell any where, better below than in Nashville, but I suppose in Nashville for $14. or 1500." The Sampson in question was apparently "Big Sampson with wife Pleasant and son George."

Charges, denials, coverup

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), and the details of his face are constructed from the naked bodies of dead Indians. The caption is a quotation from Shakespeare's text: "Me thought the souls of all that I had murder'd came to my tent." (Charles E. Goodspeed Collection, Worcester Art Museum 1910.48.1589)

American abolitionist Benjamin Lundy covered reports of Jackson's slave trading in his newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, or American Anti-Slavery Journal and Register of News. In 1827, when the first allegation appeared in Kentucky, Lundy recounted a separate story about Jackson having whipped a recaptured runaway slave he had tied to the joist of a blacksmith shop. Lundy could not confirm the secondhand report, and expressed hope that the reports of slave trading were exaggerating this tale. If Jackson did whip a man tied to a joist, the use of such violence on a person would not have been out of character: multiple historians have described Jackson as "vengeful and mean spirited," and in the words of Opal, "[Jackson's] willingness to kill, assault, or threaten people was a constant theme in his adult life and a central component of the reputation he cultivated." As the election approached in 1828, Lundy wrote that he felt that Jackson's own account of the deal was effectively a full confession: "This, we repeat, is Gen. Jackson's own story. It amounts to this. A speculation was to be made in cotton, tobacco and negroes: Coleman was to do the business and Jackson to furnish the means; the negroes were bought up, taken to market, followed by Jackson, part of them sold by himself at Natchez, and the rest carried back by him to Tennessee in the year 1812."

Engraving made 1820 by James Barton Longacre based on Thomas Sully's painting of major general of volunteers Andrew Jackson; Jackson was appointed military governor of Florida in 1821 and made his first run at the presidency in 1824 (TSLA 42898)

The close examination in 1828 of Jackson's enslavement of people like Gilbert, and his history of slave trading, was promulgated in large part by a man named Andrew Erwin, who, according to historian Cheathem, was "determined to undermine Jackson's campaign" for both spite and politics. Erwin was related to Henry Clay by marriage. Boyd McNairy, whose bank had held accounts for Coleman, Green & Jackson, later wrote in a public letter to Jackson, "You have been charged...with having been engaged, in one or more instances, in NEGRO TRADING—with having employed your capital and credit in the purchase and sale of slaves, for the sake of pecuniary profit. Is this charge true, or is it not? If it be true, why do you not magnanimously and heroically admit it, and defend yourself upon the ground that the habits prevalent in the country and the peculiar state of our society, in a community where slavery unfortunately exists, justified such speculations?" McNairy, who also published a broadside headlined "Jackson a negro trader," was a brother of the federal judge who gave Jackson his first law job in Nashville, and the Nathaniel A. McNairy who dueled John Coffee in 1806 and advertised slaves for sale in Natchez in 1807–08.

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)

Even though "the slaves he bought and sold as a young man as part of the burgeoning interstate trade in enslaved people helped make him rich," during the 1828 United States presidential election, Jackson repudiated the claim that he was a slave trader. Jackson's dishonesty was not his alone. Allies were recruited to swear, falsely, that it was not true. 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." As retold by Mississippi historian Eron Rowland in 1910, "It may cause some of the warm friends of Old Hickory to scoff to recall the accredited fact that he, in those early days, for a time followed the business of a negro-trader at this place [Old Greenville, Mississippi]. A proof that this fact was not taken with the best grace at that day is that in several political campaigns, his followers were compelled to swear by the eternal that he did not."

John James Audubon lived in Mississippi from 1820 until 1823. 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. (The Birds of America, 1827–1838)

Abolitionists Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké, and Sarah Moore Grimké, under the banner of the American Anti-Slavery Society, wrote in American Slavery As It Is (1839) that "It is well known that President Jackson was a soul driver..." Lewis Tappan wrote in the margins of his copy, now held in the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans, that Weld said the statement about Jackson was the only thing anyone had ever denied or claimed was incorrect in the book, and further noted, "Mr. Weld informs me (Nov 23|49) that the above was stated to him by J. G. Birney who received it from Mr. Kingsbury, missionary among the Choctaws."

The denial was carried forward—for years, decades, daresay, centuries—by what Southern chronicler Harnett T. Kane described as "fist-pounding partisans." In his Jackson bio published 1861 (the first year of the American Civil War), Parton wrote:

"There is an odium attached to this business in the slave States, as is well known; and consequently, the alleged negro trading of General Jackson has excited a great deal of angry controversy. I was myself informed, in a mysterious whisper, by a southern gentleman in high office, that this was the only 'blot' on the character of the General. It is not necessary to investigate a subject of this nature. The simple truth respecting it, I presume, is, that having correspondents in Natchez, and being in the habit of sending down boatloads of produce, the firm of which he was a member occasionally took charge of negroes destined for the lower country, and, it may be, sold them on commission, or otherwise."

James Douglas Anderson, in the course of extracting "Jackson's record as slave trader" from the Correspondence in 1928, commented that Parton's use of "or otherwise," was "a fortunate afterthought to catch and hold any stray omissions, such as Jackson left of record for the truth of history." Regarding the repeated appearance of the word odium, in his 1933 Slavery in Mississippi, historian Sydnor said, "To the present day a certain odium clings to the term slave-trader. It may seem illogical that owners of slaves, who from time to time purchased from traders, would have scorned men in this business, but this seems to have been the case. It is debatable whether the disapproval of the trader in negroes was honest, or whether it was a convenient sentiment which made the slave-trader a scapegoat for much of the evil of slavery."

Connection to other Jackson controversies

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.

Several of Jackson's interpersonal conflicts involved the trade. An Andrew Erwin is mentioned in American Slavery As It Is: "It is known in Alabama, that Mr. Erwin, son-in-law of the Hon. Henry Clay, and brother of J. P. Erwin, formerly postmaster, and late mayor of the city of Nashville, laid the foundation of a princely fortune in the slave-trade, carried on from the Northern Slave States to the Planting South." The genealogy is a bit mangled but this may refer to either Erwin or Andrew Erwin Jr. (born 1800). Similarly, in an early letter about the 1806 duel in which he killed Charles Dickinson, Jackson wrote, "...for the present it will only be observed that the deceased, could not be called a Citizen of this state—that he was engaged in the humane persuit of purchasing Negroes in Maryland and carrying them to Natchez & Louisa and thus making a fortune of speculating on human flesh..." In 1882, the Denton Journal described a derelict outbuilding on what had once been Dickinson's property near Preston, Maryland, where "staples and ringbolts" for chaining slaves were still embedded in the "massive timbers" of the old barn, originally constructed as a trader's slave pen.

Following the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson imposed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, resulting in the cession of more than half of what became the U.S. state of Alabama. (The Life of Andrew Jackson, 1911)

Jackson pointed the finger again in 1819. According to Binder, "Jackson tangled with William Crawford, a severe critic of his Florida adventure. Jackson had information which linked Crawford with the alleged slave-smuggling activities of Georgia's former governor, David B. Mitchell. On September 28, 1819, Jackson, the former slave trader, wrote a 'Private' letter to President Monroe proposing an investigation of Crawford's activities..." This, argued Binder, writing in 1968, was a part of a lifelong pattern in Jackson's dealings with slaves and slavery, in which he remained "emotionally uninvolved" while alternately using appeals for and against various moral and social positions in pursuit of his own ends: "He viewed slavery as a convenient weapon of political warfare for obtaining objectives often quite remote from the Negro...His attitude toward the Negro appears to have been governed at all times by immediate and practical expediency. Whether in the fields of commerce, plantation management, military tactics or politics...He thought of the Negro in the present tense and appreciated him primarily as a tool in hand." Forty years earlier, Thomas P. Abernethy had come to the same conclusion, but even more broadly: "No historian has ever accused Jackson, the great Democrat, of having had a political philosophy. It is hard to see that he even had any political principles. He was a man of action, and the man of action is likely to be an opportunist."

Historical map of the slave trade in the United States from 1830 to 1850, showing overland and sea routes (Map: Albert Bushnell Hart, 1906)

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. Jackson's actions in the Creek War and the War of 1812 "greatly accelerated the transformation of ethnic relations already underway in the Mississippi Territory," such that "the final shot in the Battle of New Orleans signaled the beginning of a race into the Old Southwest...with the acquisition of West Florida from the Pearl River to the Perdido, numerous waterways had become available for unrestricted shipment of cotton, timber, and naval stores to the seacoast." Turning and turning, in the widening gyre... In 1834, with Indian Removal well underway, The Liberator abolitionist newspaper published Nashville minister Marius R. Robinson's report on the internal slave trade: "In Mississippi and Louisiana the slave market is literally crowded. There are three principal reasons for the large demand.—1st. The high price of cotton last fall, induced many planters to go more largely into the cultivation of it, which increased the demand for laborers. 2d. The cholera has swept off thousands of negroes during the last two years, and the planters are now filling up the ranks made thin by this scourge. 3d. The country wrested from the Choctaw Indians has recently been brought into market. Of course the lands must now be cultivated by slaves."

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.

— Journal of Stephen Minor, Spanish emissary to the Choctaw, March 27, 1792

Influence

According to the prologue of the 1939 MGM film Gone With the Wind, "There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South...Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow...Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave...Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered." (The Sunny South, LCCN 92504595)

Andrew Jackson's business model and actions met the definition of "slave trader" as understood by 19th-century abolitionists and 21st-century scholars. Still, as an 1828 campaign issue, "Andrew Jackson as human trafficker" got little traction. According to historian Robert Gudmestad, information about "Gen. Jackson's negro trading" failed to swing voters in part because "Southerners wanted to believe that there was a small group of itinerant traders who created most of the difficulties. It was this type of speculator, most thought, who destroyed slave families, escorted coffles, sold diseased slaves, and concealed the flaws of bondservants. They were the 'slave-dealers.' All others who bought or sold slaves, even if they did so on a full-time basis, were innocent."

In memoriam—our civil service as it was, a political cartoon by Thomas Nast about the reformation of the spoils system, depicting Jackson astride a saddled hog wallowing in human skulls and long bones, "fraud," "bribery," and "spoils," while eating out of a open pocketbook marked "plunder." (Harper's Weekly, April 28, 1877)

Forty years after he started his career as a young trader, Jackson was elected to be the seventh President of the United States; an equestrian statue of Jackson in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. was vandalized in 2021 during a pipeline protest on Indigenous Peoples' Day (Photo: Remember)

This privileged denial of the reality of the American interregional slave trade continued well into the 20th century. Joseph Erwin's biographer, writing in 1944, concluded in delusion: "Here as head of the firm, Erwin, Spraggins and Wright—Real Estate and Slave Dealers, Erwin speculated in plantations and 'trafficked' in slaves. However, he was not a designing speculator, bent on gain at all hazards, but the honorable, high-minded, upright dealer who believed that in business success could be obtained by self-reliance and honest and legitimate methods." In 1915, a plantation heir named James T. Flint wrote that "Andrew Jackson, who owned a few slaves in Tennessee, brought them down, with others belonging to friends, over the old Natchez trace to sell to well-to-do neighbors of his wife's former home near Greenville and Natchez, Miss., and for this reason he was accused by his political enemies in after years of being a 'nigger trader'." A few lines later, Flint recorded that, while visiting in the vicinity of Greenville, his forebears "talked with one of the negroes brought from Tennessee and one from Kentucky" by Andrew Jackson.

Further to the point, some Jacksonian scholars have argued that it was Jackson's status as a wealthy slave owner and slave trader that made him politically attractive to the electorate. If nothing else, according to biographer Remini, Jackson, his allies, and his successors believed "slaveholding was as American as capitalism, nationalism, or democracy...the white southern celebration of liberty always included the freedom to preserve black slavery. That states Jackson's own position precisely." In an 1841 column about local politics, the Mississippi Free Trader of Natchez defended the slave trade as the profession of a number of esteemed Southern gentlemen, listing as icons of genteel American prosperity John Armfield, Rice Ballard, Isaac Franklin, John L. Harris, Eli Odom, Thomas Rowan, and Sowell Woolfolk—"A desperate set of ruffians these, with old Andrew Jackson at their head!"

Slaves, 1790–1800–1810–1820–1830–1840, per cent of slaves in total population (Atlas of Historical Geography of the United States, 1932)

American empire at the Gulf of Mexico, 1839 (NAID 271844924)

"Levee at New Orleans" postcard image, published by the Detroit Photographic Company c. 1900

Moreover, Jackson has been credited with "almost single-handedly [setting] in motion the beginnings of rapid American economic development. The cotton kingdom, including the land Jackson won from the Indians, financed the American economic expansion of the succeeding decades. For [more than a] quarter-century Jackson continued to acquire from the Indians lands necessary for capitalist development." Historian Walter Johnson has described the lower Mississippi River valley of the antebellum United States as an anthropophagus landscape driven to consume people and transmute their flesh into American dollars: "The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit." Underlining the fact that the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous American people resident in the Old Southwest was prefatory to the establishment of a new economy and ecology predicated on the forced labor of African-American slaves, "when the surveyors hired by the General Land Office began their work in Mississippi in 1831, they used the 'Old Choctaw Line' as the 'base meridian' of their efforts to transform the landscape from a landscape of imperial violence to a field of national development." 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."

Fortunately, no one these days seriously indicts Jackson as a mad racist intent upon genocide...General Jackson's commitment to the principle of removal resulted primarily from his concern for the integrity and safety of the American nation. It was not greed or racism that motivated him...Nor was he involved in a gigantic land grab for the benefit of his Tennessee cronies.

— Robert V. Remini, The Legacy of Andrew Jackson: Essays on Democracy, Indian Removal, and Slavery (1988)

Statesmen from all sections of America asserted paternal authority over Indians. Southern-planter paternalism, however, offered primitive accumulation its most important indigenous model. Slavery helped Jackson define the paternal state in whose name he removed Indians. Marrying paternalism to liberal egalitarian assumptions, he provided a structure for American expansion. But the slave model of paternalism, appropriate enough to Indian removal, contained force and violence at its core.

— Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975)

As you read, you will see, again and again, the same pattern acted out: A person or a group of people rejects injustice by rebelling and seizing the reins of power. As soon as those reins are in the hands of the rebels, the rebels become the establishment, the victims become the tyrants, the freedom-fighters become the dictators...Revolution shatters the structures; but the men who build the next set of structures haven't conquered the evil that lives in their own hearts.

— Susan Wise Bauer, The Story of the World, Vol. 4 (2021)

These things had other names once, before English or French or Spanish or Latin were even languages. A study of Natchez Trace toponyms noted, "The wary pioneer who 'said his prayers with his shotgun cocked' might notice a thrush or a butterfly but would not name a place for it..." reserving his animal place names only for those things that he could kill to eat or those things that could kill and eat him.

...his heritage, the land which old Carothers McCaslin his grandfather had bought with white man's money from the wild men whose grandfathers without guns hunted it, and tamed and ordered or believed he had tamed and ordered it for the reason that the human beings he held in bondage and in the power of life and death had removed the forest from it and in their sweat scratched the surface of it to a depth of perhaps fourteen inches in order to grow something out of it which had not been there before and which could be translated back into the money he who believed he had bought it had had to pay to get it and hold it and a reasonable profit too: and for which reason old Carothers McCaslin, knowing better, could raise his children, his descendants and heirs, to believe the land was his to hold and bequeath since the strong and ruthless man has a cynical foreknowledge of his own vanity and pride and strength and a contempt for all his get...

it was the new country, his heritage too as it was the heritage of all, out of the earth, beyond the earth yet of the earth because his too was of the earth's long chronicle, his too because each must share with another in order to come into it and in the sharing they become one...

— William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (1942)

Epilogue

"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)

On Wednesday evening, April 29, 1863, a little over 25 years after the end of Jackson's presidency, a recently emancipated slave entered an Army of the Tennessee encampment on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River and met with Major-General Ulysses S. Grant. The free man informed Grant of an excellent boat landing at Bruinsburg—entirely undefended, and much closer than the one Grant had planned to use. The next day, at the site of Andrew Jackson's old slave-trading stand, the U.S. Army made what stood until 1942 as the largest amphibious landing in U.S. military history.

General Grant and his men went on from Bruinsburg to capture Vicksburg, breaking the spine of the Confederacy at the Mississippi River.

Additional images

• 
  "Gen. Jackson's Negro Speculations, and His Traffic in Human Flesh, Examined and Established by Positive Proof" (1828) (LCCN 11017861)
• 
  "Jackson a negro trader" & "Anti-Tariff Jacksonism" broadside (1828) (LCCN 2020772160)
• 
  The Hermitage (WPA Guide to Tennessee, 1939)

See also

• Family separation in American slavery
• Lyncoya Jackson – Creek Indian child adopted by Andrew Jackson
• Andrew Jackson and slavery
• Andrew Jackson § Planting career and slavery
• Presidency of Andrew Jackson § Slavery controversies
• Historical rankings of presidents of the United States § Scholar surveys of diversity and racism
• Political eras of the United States
• List of presidents of the United States who owned slaves
• List of slave traders of the United States
• Bibliography of Andrew Jackson
• Bibliography of the slave trade in the United States

Sources

Books

• Abernethy, Thomas Perkins (1932). From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee: A Study in Frontier Democracy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. LCCN 32012393. OCLC 988186705.
• Bancroft, Frederic (2023) [1931, 1996]. Slave Trading in the Old South (Original publisher: J. H. Fürst Co., Baltimore). Southern Classics Series. Introduction by Michael Tadman (Reprint ed.). Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-64336-427-8. LCCN 95020493. OCLC 1153619151.
• Binder, Frederick M. (1968). "V: Andrew Jackson and the Negro". The Color Problem in Early National America as Viewed by John Adams, Jefferson and Jackson. Studies in American History VII. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton & Co., N.V. pp. 120–135. LCCN 68017871. OCLC 426813.
• Bogan, Dallas R. (1997). Warren County, Ohio and Beyond. Bowie, Maryland: Heritage Books. ISBN 0788406787. LCCN 97211841. OCLC 37700686.
• Bunn, Mike; Williams, Clay (2023). Old Southwest to Old South: Mississippi, 1798–1840. Heritage of Mississippi Series, Vol. IX. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi for the Mississippi Historical Society and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. ISBN 978-1-4968-4380-7. LCCN 2022042580. OCLC 1348393702. Project MUSE book 109599.
• Burstein, Andrew (2003). The Passions of Andrew Jackson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-375-41428-2. LCCN 2002016258. OCLC 49385944.
• Caldwell, Mary French (1933). Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. Ladies' Hermitage Association, Nashville, Tennessee. Kingsport, Tennessee: Kingsport Press. LCCN 34042460. OCLC 682462818 – via HathiTrust.
• Cheathem, Mark R. (2014). Andrew Jackson, Southerner. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-5099-3. LCCN 2012049695. OCLC 858995561. Project MUSE book 26506.
• Clark, Thomas D.; Guice, John D. W. (1996). The Old Southwest, 1795–1830: Frontiers in Conflict. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-2836-8. LCCN 95042772. OCLC 33243351.
• Cole, Donald B. (2009). Vindicating Andrew Jackson: The 1828 Election and the Rise of the Two-Party System. American Presidential Elections. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0-7006-1661-9. LCCN 2009015244. OCLC 318645762. Project MUSE book 87476.
• Coleman, J. Winston (1953). "II. Andrew Jackson vs. Charles Dickinson". Famous Kentucky Duels: The Story of the Code of Honor in the Bluegrass State. Frankfort, Kentucky: Roberts Printing Co. LCCN 53009268. OCLC 745531387 – via HathiTrust.
• Daniels, Jonathan (1971) [1962]. The Devil's Backbone: The Story of the Natchez Trace. American Trails Series. Map and headpieces by Leo and Diane Dillon (1st paperback ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. ISBN 978-0-07-015306-6. LCCN 61018131. OCLC 6148466 – via Internet Archive.
• Dew, Charles B. (2016). The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press. ISBN 9780813938882. LCCN 2015043815. OCLC 956713856.
• Goodstein, Anita Shafer (1989). Nashville, 1780–1860: From Frontier to City. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. ISBN 978-0-8130-0940-7. LCCN 89033186. OCLC 19669897.
• Grabau, Warren (2000). Ninety-Eight Days: A Geographer's View of the Vicksburg Campaign. United States Civil War Center. Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 9781572330689. LCCN 99050509. OCLC 1359089503.
• Gudmestad, Robert (2003). A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade, 1808–1840. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0-8071-2884-8. LCCN 2003009434. OCLC 1412563835.
• Hulbert, Archer Butler (1920). The Paths of Inland Commerce: A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway. The Chronicles of America Series, Vol. 21. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. LCCN 20004902. OCLC 1225847. OL 6623382M. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Johnson, Walter (1999). Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/9780674039155. ISBN 9780674039155. LCCN 99-046696. OCLC 923120203.
• ——— (2013). River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674074880. LCCN 2012030065. OCLC 827947225. OL 26179618M.
• Kane, Harnett T. (1947). Natchez on the Mississippi. New York: William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-517-06881-6. LCCN 47011784. OCLC 1404534 – via Internet Archive.
• Libby, David J. (2004). Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781423732099. LCCN 2003010748. OCLC 62257672.
• Kennedy, Roger G. (2000). Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character. New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195140552.001.0001. ISBN 9780199848775. LCCN 99022453. OCLC 181840559.
• Mooney, Chase C. (1971) [1957]. "Chapter Two: Hire, Sale, Theft and Flight of Slaves". Slavery in Tennessee. Indiana University Publications, Social Science Series No. 17 (Reprint ed.). Westport, Connecticut: Negro Universities Press. OCLC 609222448 – via HathiTrust.
• Mooney, Katherine C. (2014). Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/harvard.9780674419551. ISBN 9780674419551. JSTOR j.ctt6wpr00. LCCN 2013037080. OCLC 880147852.
• Parton, James (1861). Life of Andrew Jackson. Vol. I. New York: Mason Brothers. LCCN 11016613. OCLC 864685. OL 14020167M. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Pinnen, Christian; Weeks, Charles A. (2021). Colonial Mississippi: A Borrowed Land. Heritage of Mississippi Series, Vol. VIII. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi for the Mississippi Historical Society and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. ISBN 978-1-4968-3270-2. LCCN 2020051280. OCLC 1228912751. Project MUSE book 82844.
• Powell, Susie V., ed. (1938). Jefferson County (PDF). Source Material for Mississippi History, Volume XXXII, Part I. WPA Statewide Historical Research Project – via Mississippi Library Commission (mlc.lib.ms.us). This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Remini, Robert V. (1977). Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-8018-5912-0. LCCN 77003766. OCLC 1145801830.
• ——— (1988). The Legacy of Andrew Jackson: Essays on Democracy, Indian Removal, and Slavery. The Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-1407-0. LCCN 87024137. OCLC 16685223.
• Rogin, Michael Paul (1975). Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-394-48204-0. LCCN 74021310. OCLC 1111310.
• Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. (1945). The Age of Jackson. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. LCCN 45008340.
• Stewart, David O. (2011). American Emperor: Aaron Burr's Challenge to Jefferson's America. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4391-6032-9. LCCN 2011002647. OCLC 892924831.
• Sydnor, Charles S. (1933). Slavery in Mississippi. American Historical Association, Carnegie Corporation of New York. New York: D. Appleton-Century Co. LCCN 33033678. OCLC 1968805.
• Tadman, Michael (1996) [1989]. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-11854-9. LCCN 89040269. OCLC 34825947.
• Tweet, Roald D. (January 1983). History of Transportation on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers (Report). National Waterways Study. United States Army Corps of Engineers, Water Resources Support Center, Institute for Water Resources. LCCN 83601963. OCLC 555658274. Navigation History NWS-83-6 – via HathiTrust. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Watson, Thomas Edward (1912). The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson. Press of the Jeffersonian Publishing Company. LCCN 14003722. OCLC 3218913. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Woodman, Harold D. (1968). King Cotton & His Retainers: Financing & Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. LCCN 67029337. OCLC 234145. OL 5550166M.
• WPA Federal Writers' Project (1938). Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State. American Guide Series. Mississippi Advertising Commission. New York: The Viking Press. LCCN 38012400. OCLC 813029. OL 6369720M. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• ——— (1939). Tennessee: A Guide to the Volunteer State. American Guide Series. Tennessee Department of Conservation, Division of Information. New York: The Viking Press. LCCN 49005822. OCLC 751379. OL 6046937M. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.

Articles

• Abernethy, Thomas P. (October 1927). "Andrew Jackson and the Rise of South-Western Democracy". The American Historical Review. 33 (1). American Historical Association. Oxford University Press: 64–77. doi:10.2307/1838111. ISSN 0002-8762. JSTOR 1838111.
• Arnow, Harriette Simpson (December 1960). "The Pioneer Farmer and His Crops in the Cumberland Region". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. XIX (4): 291–327. ISSN 0040-3261. JSTOR 42621803.
• Bacon, H. Phillip (1956). "Some Problems of Adjustment to Nashville's Site and Situation 1780–1860". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. 15 (4): 322–329. ISSN 0040-3261. JSTOR 42621308.
• Carson, W. Wallace (June 1920). "Transportation and Traffic on the Ohio and the Mississippi Before the Steamboat". The Mississippi Valley Historical Review. VII (1). Organization of American Historians. Oxford University Press: 26–38. doi:10.2307/1886569. ISSN 0161-391X. JSTOR 1886569. OCLC 1776316.
• Cheathem, Mark R. (April 2011). "Andrew Jackson, Slavery, and Historians". History Compass. 9 (4). John Wiley & Sons: 326–338. doi:10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00763.x. ISSN 1478-0542.
• ——— (October 2011). Slavery, Kinship, and Andrew Jackson's Presidential Campaign of 1828 (PDF). Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting. jacksonianamerica.com. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2024-08-22. Retrieved 2024-08-22.
• ——— (October 2012). The Evolution of the Enslaved Community at Andrew Jackson's Plantations, 1790s–1840s (PDF). 2012 BrANCH (Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians). jacksonianamerica.com. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2024-09-12. Retrieved 2024-09-12.
• Coker, William S. (1972). "Research in the Spanish Borderlands: Mississippi, 1779–1798". Latin American Research Review. 7 (2). Latin American Studies Association. University of Texas Press: 40–54. doi:10.1017/S0023879100041364. ISSN 1542-4278. JSTOR 2502625.
• Cotterill, R. S. (1921). "The Natchez Trace". Tennessee Historical Magazine. 7 (1). Tennessee Historical Society: 27–35. ISSN 2333-9012. JSTOR 42637460. OCLC 33024153. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• DesChamps, Margaret Burr (September 1947). "Early Days in the Cumberland Country". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. VI (3): 195–229. ISSN 0040-3261. JSTOR 42620950.
• Din, Gilbert C. (1971). "The Irish Mission to West Florida". Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association. 12 (4). Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana Historical Association: 315–334. ISSN 0024-6816. JSTOR 4231215.
• Ely, James W. (1979). "The Legal Practice of Andrew Jackson". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. 38 (4): 421–435. ISSN 0040-3261. JSTOR 42626016.
• Eriksson, Erik McKinley (March 1937). "President Jackson's Propaganda Agencies". Pacific Historical Review. 6 (1). Arthur H. Clark Co., Glendale, California. University of California Press: 47–57. doi:10.2307/3634106. ISSN 0030-8684. JSTOR 3634106. OCLC 45954834.
• Hamilton, William B. (May 1948). "Politics in the Mississippi Territory". Huntington Library Quarterly. 11 (3). Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California. University of Pennsylvania Press: 277–291. doi:10.2307/3815950. ISSN 0018-7895. JSTOR 3815950. OCLC 979924936.
• Harrell, Laura D. S. (July 1951). "Horse Racing in the Old Natchez District, 1783–1830". Journal of Mississippi History. XIII (3). Jackson, Mississippi: Mississippi Historical Society: 123–137. ISSN 0022-2771. OCLC 1782329.
• ——— (November 1966). "Jockey Clubs and Race Tracks in Antebellum Mississippi, 1795–1861". Journal of Mississippi History. XXVIII (4). Jackson, Mississippi: Mississippi Historical Society in cooperation with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History: 304–318. ISSN 0022-2771. OCLC 1782329.
• Hawkins, Rev. H. G. (1909). "History of Port Gibson, Mississippi". Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. X. Oxford, Mississippi: 297–300 – via HathiTrust.  This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain. 
• Kinard, Margaret (March 1949). "Frontier Development of Williamson County". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. VIII (1): 3–33. ISSN 0040-3261. JSTOR 42620999.
• Marshall, Park (March 1916). "The Topographical Beginnings of Nashville". Tennessee Historical Magazine. 2 (1). Tennessee Historical Society: 31–39. ISSN 2333-9012. JSTOR 42637962. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Opal, J. M. (October 2013). "General Jackson's Passports: Natural Rights and Sovereign Citizens in the Political Thought of Andrew Jackson, 1780s–1820s". Studies in American Political Development. 27 (2): 69–85. doi:10.1017/S0898588X13000060. ISSN 0898-588X.
• Owsley, Harriet Chappell (1977). "The Marriages of Rachel Donelson". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. 36 (4). Nashville, Tennessee: Tennessee Historical Society: 479–492. ISSN 0040-3261. JSTOR 42625784. OCLC 551288487.
• Phelps, Dawson A. (January 1949). "Stands and Accomodations on the Natchez Trace". Journal of Mississippi History. XI (1). Jackson, Mississippi: Mississippi Historical Society in cooperation with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History: 1–54. ISSN 0022-2771. OCLC 1782329.
• ——— (July 1953). "Travel on the Natchez Trace: A Study of Its Economic Aspects". Journal of Mississippi History. 15 (3). Jackson, Mississippi: Mississippi Historical Society in cooperation with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History: 155–164. ISSN 0022-2771. OCLC 1782329.
• ———; Ross, Edward Hunter (October 1952). "Names Please: Place-Names Along on the Natchez Trace". Journal of Mississippi History. XIV (4). Jackson, Mississippi: Mississippi Historical Society in cooperation with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History: 217–256. ISSN 0022-2771. OCLC 1782329.
• Pratt, Julius W. (October 1945). "Aaron Burr and the Historians". New York History. 26 (4). Fenimore Art Museum. Cornell University Press: 447–470. ISSN 0146-437X. JSTOR 23149934.
• Remini, Robert V. (Summer 1991). "Andrew Jackson's Adventures on the Natchez Trace". Southern Quarterly. 29 (4). Hattiesburg, Mississippi: University of Southern Mississippi: 35–42. ISSN 0038-4496. OCLC 1644229.
• ——— (Spring 1995). "Andrew Jackson Takes an Oath of Allegiance to Spain". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. 54 (1). Loyalty oath document surfaced by Dr. G. Douglas Inglis of Seville, Spain. Nashville, Tennessee: Tennessee Historical Society: 2–15. ISSN 0040-3261. JSTOR 42628387. OCLC 551288487.
• Rowland, Mrs. Dunbar (1910). "Marking the Natchez Trace: An Historic Highway of the Lower South". Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. XI: 345–361. hdl:2027/mdp.39015039482057. ISSN 0885-792X. OCLC 5110834 – via HathiTrust. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• ——— (1921). "Mississippi Territory in the War of 1812". Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. Centenary Series. IV: 7–233. hdl:2027/nyp.33433081900437. ISSN 0885-792X. OCLC 5110834 – via HathiTrust. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Schermerhorn, Calvin (2016). "Chapter 10. The Coastwise Slave Trade and a Mercantile Community of Interest". In Rockman, Seth Edward; Beckert, Sven (eds.). Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 209–224. doi:10.9783/9780812293098-011. ISBN 978-0-8122-4841-8. JSTOR j.ctt1dfnrs7. LCCN 2016304619. OCLC 945028802.
• Skeen, C. Edward (1988). "The Legal Papers of Andrew Jackson Ed. by James W. Ely Jr. and Theodore Brown Jr". Book Reviews. West Tennessee Historical Society Papers. XLII. Memphis, Tennessee: 66–67. ISSN 0361-6215. OCLC 1769643.
• Snow, Whitney Adrienne (2008). "Slave Owner, Slave Trader, Gentleman: Slavery and the Rise of Andrew Jackson" (PDF). Journal of East Tennessee History. 80. Knoxville, Tennessee: East Tennessee Historical Society: 47–59. ISSN 1058-2126. OCLC 23044540.
• Toplovich, Ann (2005). "Marriage, Mayhem, and Presidential Politics: The Robards–Jackson Backcountry Scandal" (PDF). Ohio Valley History. 5 (4). Cincinnati, Ohio & Louisville, Kentucky: Cincinnati Museum Center & Filson Historical Society: 3–22. ISSN 2377-0600. OCLC 1332991166. Project MUSE 572973.
• Usner, Daniel H. (September 1985). "American Indians on the Cotton Frontier: Changing Economic Relations with Citizens and Slaves in the Mississippi Territory". The Journal of American History. 72 (2). Organization of American Historians: 297–317. doi:10.2307/1903377. ISSN 0021-8723. JSTOR 1903377.
• Warshauer, Matthew (2006). "Andrew Jackson: Chivalric Slave Master". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. 65 (3): 203–229. ISSN 0040-3261. JSTOR 42627964.
• White, Alice Pemble (April 1944). "The Plantation Experience of Joseph and Lavinia Erwin, 1807–1836". Louisiana Historical Quarterly. XXVII (2). Cabildo, New Orleans: Louisiana Historical Society: 343–477. ISSN 0095-5949 – via Internet Archive.

Primary sources

• Baily, Francis; Herschel, John F. W.; De Morgan, Augustus (1856). Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 & 1797. London: Baily Bros. – via Internet Archive, digitized from the collections of University of Pittsburgh Library System. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Buckner, Philip; McGroarty, William Buckner (July 1926). "Diary of Captain Philip Buckner". The William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine. VI (3): 173–207. doi:10.2307/1921270. ISSN 1936-9530. JSTOR 1921270. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Carter, Clarence Edwin, ed. (1937). Territorial Papers of the United States. Records of the U.S. Department of State. Vol. V: The Territory of Mississippi, 1798–1817. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Publication No. 1032 (E173 147) – via HathiTrust; digitized by Google Books from a copy held by the University of California Libraries. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Forman, Maj. Samuel S.; Draper, Lyman C. (1888). Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1789–90. Cincinnati: R. Clarke & Co. hdl:loc.gdc/scd0001.00144977178. LCCN 03014069. OCLC 1700028. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Hildreth, Dr. S. P. (March 1842). Williams, John S. (ed.). "History of an Early Voyage on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, with Historical Sketches of the Different Points Along Them, &c, &c". The American Pioneer. I (3). Logan Historical Society. Cincinnati, Ohio: R. P. Brooks: 89–145 – via Internet Archive, Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Lundy, Benjamin, ed. (July 28, 1827). "General Jackson". The Genius of Universal Emancipation, or American Anti-Slavery Journal, and Register of News. Vol. VII, no. 144. Baltimore, Maryland: Microfilmed by Open Court Publishing Co. p. 30. New series, No. 4, Vol. I – via Internet Archive. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• ———, ed. (July 19, 1828). "Jackson Again". The Genius of Universal Emancipation, or American Anti-Slavery Journal, and Register of News. Vol. VIII, no. 206. Baltimore, Maryland: Microfilmed by Open Court Publishing Co. p. 178. New series, No. 22, Vol. II – via Internet Archive. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• McBee, May Wilson (1953). The Natchez Court Records, 1767–1805: Abstracts of Early Records. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Edwards Brothers, Inc. – via Internet Archive, digitized from a copy held at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
• Minor, Stephen (October 1953). "A Journey Over the Natchez Trace in 1792: A Document from the Archives of Spain". Journal of Mississippi History. 15 (4). Translated by Ross, Edward Hunter; Phelps, Dawson A. Jackson, Mississippi: Mississippi Historical Society in cooperation with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History: 252–273. ISSN 0022-2771. OCLC 1782329.
• Rainwater, P. L. (September 1934). "The Autobiography of Benjamin Grubb Humphreys (August 26, 1808 – December 20, 1882)". The Mississippi Valley Historical Review. 21 (2). Organization of American Historians. Oxford University Press: 231–255. doi:10.2307/1896893. ISSN 0161-391X. JSTOR 1896893. OCLC 1776316.
• Roberts, J. (1945) [1858]. The Narrative of James Roberts, Soldier in the Revolutionary War and at the Battle of New Orleans. Heartman's Historical Series No. 71. Hattiesburg, Mississippi: The Book Farm. LCCN 45009855. OCLC 1381602. - Also digitized by UNC's Documenting the American South project. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Ross, Harvey Lee (1899). The Early Pioneers and Pioneer Events of the State of Illinois Including Personal Recollections of the Writer: of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and Peter Cartwright, Together With a Brief Autobiography of the Writer. Chicago: Eastman Brothers. LCCN 09030102. OCLC 181327605. OL 7013514M – via HathiTrust.
• Sparks, W. H. (1870). The Memories of Fifty Years: Containing Brief Biographical Notes of Distinguished Americans and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger. hdl:loc.gdc/scd0001.00100906478. LCCN 06005624. OCLC 1048818176. OL 23365380M – via HathiTrust, copy digitized by Library of Congress. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Various; Jackson, Andrew (1926). Bassett, John Spencer (ed.). Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, Volume I, to April 30, 1814. Carnegie Institution of Washington Papers of the Historical Research Department No. 371. Baltimore, Maryland: The Lord Baltimore Press. LCCN 26007292. OCLC 2533564 – via HathiTrust. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• ———; Jackson, Andrew (1928). Bassett, John Spencer (ed.). Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, Volume III, 1820–1828. Carnegie Institution of Washington Papers of the Historical Research Department No. 371, Vol. III. Baltimore, Maryland: The Lord Baltimore Press – via Internet Archive.
• Various; Jackson, Andrew (1980). Smith, Sam B.; Owsley, Harriet Chappell; Moser, Harold D. (eds.). The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume I, 1770–1803. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 978-0-87049-219-8. LCCN 79015078. OCLC 5029597.
• ———; ——— (1984). Moser, Harold D.; MacPherson, Sharon (eds.). The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume II, 1804–1813. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 978-0-87049-441-3. LCCN 79015078. OCLC 5029597.
• ———; ——— (1994). Moser, Harold D.; Hoth, David R.; Hoemann, George H. (eds.). The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume IV, 1816–1820. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 978-0-87049-219-8. LCCN 79015078. OCLC 5029597.
• Watkins, W. H., ed. (n.d.). Some Interesting Facts of the Early History of Jefferson County, Mississippi. No publisher or publication date stated; includes a biography of John A. Watkins by R. S. Albert, two previously published articles by John A. Watkins, and one previously published article by V. N. Russell. OCLC 17887012. F347.J42 W3 – via University of Mississippi Libraries Special Collections, Oxford, Mississippi.
• Watson, Henry (1848). Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave. Boston: Bela Marsh. hdl:loc.rbc/rbaapc.32910. LCCN 92838849. OCLC 13167971. - Also digitized by UNC's Documenting the American South project. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Weld, Theodore Dwight; Grimké, Angelina; Grimké, Sarah Moore (1839). American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. American Anti-Slavery Society. New York: Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, office, no. 143 Nassau Street. LCCN 11008377. OCLC 14906369. OL 20509019M. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.

Campaign materials

• An Association of Individuals (1828). Hammond, Charles (ed.). Truth's Advocate and Monthly Anti-Jackson Expositor. Cincinnati, Ohio: Lodge, L'Hommedieu, and Hammond. hdl:2027/nyp.33433115687075. LCCN 10011988. OCLC 909227829. OL 22895763M. Sabin 97272; ULS V, p. 4270. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Erwin, Andrew (1828). Gen. Jackson's Negro Speculations, and His Traffic in Human Flesh, Examined and Established by Positive Proof. No publisher stated. hdl:loc.gdc/scd0001.00118965036. LCCN 11017861. OL 6532737M. Shoemaker 33082. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Erwin, Andrew; McNairy, Boyd; Greene, H.; Weakley, R.; Blythe, S. K.; Tannehill, Wilkins (1828). A Brief Account of General Jackson's Dealings in Negroes in a Series of Letters and Documents by His Own Neighbors. [National Republican Party of New York State]. Tennessee State Library and Archives E376 .N33.
• McNairy, Boyd (July 14, 1828). "Jackson a negro trader. From the Nashville Banner and Whig. To the public" (Broadside). Nashville, Tennessee. LCCN 2020772160 – via Library of Congress Digital. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.

Unpublished theses

• Menck, Mary (2017). The Devil's Backbone: Race, Space, and Nation-Building on the Natchez Trace (M.A. thesis). Medford, Massachusetts: Tufts University.
• Pinnen, Christian (2012). Slavery and Empire: The Development of Slavery in the Natchez District, 1720–1820 (Thesis). Hattiesburg, Mississippi: University of Southern Mississippi. 821.
• Smith, Lee Davis (2004). A Settlement of Great Consequence: The Development of the Natchez District, 1763–1860 (M.A. thesis). Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University. 2133.

Interdisciplinary perspectives

• Bumgardner, Georgia Brady (Autumn 1986). "Political Portraiture: Two Prints of Andrew Jackson". American Art Journal. XVIII (4). New York: Kennedy Galleries: 84–95. doi:10.2307/1594466. ISSN 0002-7359. JSTOR 1594466.
• Faulkner, William (1973) [1942]. Go Down, Moses. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-307-79214-3. LCCN 72008062. OCLC 774911593.
• Solomon, Marvin (August 1962). "The Natchez Trace". Poetry. Vol. 100, no. 5. Chicago, Illinois: Poetry Foundation. pp. 286–287. ISSN 0032-2032. OCLC 1762510.
• Stephens, Rachel (2018). Selling Andrew Jackson: Ralph E. W. Earl and the Politics of Portraiture. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-61117-867-8. LCCN 2017041622. OCLC 1023818256. Project MUSE book 59054.

Kinship networks

• Dilley, Ora Iona (1986). History and Genealogy of the Greens, Carpenters, Dilleys, Ushers. Vicksburg, Mississippi: Self-published typescript. OCLC 18666244. FHL 3461497 – via LDS Family History Library from a copy at the Dallas Public Library.
• Headley, Katy McCaleb (n.d.). MacKillop (McCaleb) Clan of Scotland and the United States. Vol. I. Descendants of Captain William and Ann (Mackey) McCaleb. Publication date before 1965, likely 1964. Chillicothe, Missouri: Self-published typescript by Elizabeth Prather Ellsberry. OCLC 866105689. FHL Film 876563, DGS 7831231 – via Internet Archive, FamilySearch.
• Patton, J. (1850). Biography of James Patton. Asheville, North Carolina: No publisher stated. OCLC 46452157. OL 25397531M – via HathiTrust. – Also digitized by UNC's Documenting the American South project. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• Stephenson, Mrs. J. P. (1922). "Donaldson–Donelson". In Armstrong, Zella (ed.). Notable Southern Families. Vol. II. Chattanooga, Tennessee: The Lookout Publishing Co. pp. 87–127. LCCN 18019145. OCLC 1037236047. OL 23416064M – via HathiTrust, digitized by Google Books from a copy at Harvard University Libraries. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.

Online

• Historic American Buildings Survey (1933). "West Cabin, 4580 Rachel's Lane, Hermitage, Davidson County, TN" – via Library of Congress Digital.
• Historic American Buildings Survey (1933). "East Cabin, 4580 Rachel's Lane, Hermitage, Davidson County, TN" – via Library of Congress Digital.

External links

• "Gen. Jackson's Negro Speculations, and His Traffic in Human Flesh, Examined and Established by Positive Proof" (WikiSource)
• Creating the American South, 1790–1860 (storymaps.arcgis.com)