Andrew Jackson and the slave trade in the United States

Gen. Jackson's Negro Speculations, and His Traffic in Human Flesh, Examined and Established by Positive Proof (1828), written by Andrew Erwin (Library of Congress Miscellaneous Pamphlet Collection)

The Port Gibson Correspondent of Port Gibson, Mississippi produced literal receipts but the scandal did not halt Jackson's electoral progress to the White House ("Gen. Jackson's Negro Trading" Literary Cadet and Rhode-Island Statesman, October 11, 1828)

The question of whether Andrew Jackson had been a "negro trader" was a campaign issue during the 1828 United States presidential election. Jackson denied the charges, and the issue failed to connect with the electorate. Jackson was elected to be the seventh U.S. President and served for two terms, from 1829 to 1837. However, Jackson had indeed been a "speculator in slaves," participating in the interregional slave trade between Nashville, Tennessee and the Natchez and New Orleans slave markets of the lower Mississippi River valley. In addition to slaves, Jackson also dealt in real estate, horses, alcohol, and trade goods like cooking pots, knives, and fabric.

Jackson traded in enslaved people between 1788 and 1844, both for "personal use" on his property and for short-term gain through slave arbitrage. Jackson seems to have sometimes accepted slaves as a form of payment for debts owed him. While Jackson had a number of business interests in Tennessee, many of Jackson's "negro speculation" slave sales appear to have taken place in the Natchez District of the lower Mississippi River valley, and occasionally further south in what became Louisiana's Feliciana Parishes (at the corner where Louisiana meets Mississippi), and in New Orleans. Little is known about the people Jackson sold south. 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 Kissiah, and her two children, a three-year-old named Ruben and an infant named Elsy ($650).

Background

As part of British West Florida, the Natchez District had attracted a handful of Loyalist families during the American Revolutionary War, and a visitor to the Natchez District in 1785 estimated the population at 2,000, with approximately 900 slaves laboring for 1,100 white settlers. Spain opened Spanish West Florida to American colonists on August 23, 1787. The population of colonial Natchez was clustered along the waterways (which also served as the region's highways), namely the Big Black, Bayou Pierre, Cole's Creek, Fairchild's Creek, St. Catherine's, the Homochitto, and its tributaries, Second Creek and Sandy Creek. Everything else between the Mississippi River and Georgia was titled to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muscogee people native to the region. By the last decade of the 18th century, the Natchez region had a polyglot, pluralistic, creolized culture, and a rapidly changing economy, as tobacco and indigo (and timber and cattle) were being supplanted by industrial-scale cotton agriculture. The primacy of cotton meant that "slavery became very much a central institution and defining feature of what became Mississippi."

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)

Mississippi Territory in Carey's general atlas, published Philadelphia 1814 (Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Div. ++02-286, New York Public Library)

Circa 1792, two out of every three slaves in the Natchez District were African-born. The Mississippi Territory of the United States was organized in 1798. The organizing act prohibited the introduction of slaves from outside the U.S. but "the foreign trade ban seems to have been ignored." The importation of these so-called "saltwater slaves" to U.S. ports continued until the 1808 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. 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. Government estimates did not attempt to enumerate Indigenous people in the vicinity of Natchez, but there were likely 30,000 Native Americans resident within in Mississippi in 1801. Mississippi was admitted to the Union as the 20th U.S. state on December 10, 1817.

"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."

— Newly commissioned major general of volunteers Andrew Jackson, addressing Tennessee volunteer militants, 1812

Jackson as trader

Trading in colonial and territorial Mississippi

Juramento de Fidelidad (transl. Oath of Allegiance), signed July 15, 1789, by Andrew Jackson and others—pledging himself to Charles IV of Spain proffered trading privileges and reduced taxes, and offered the opportunity for future land grants. 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)

Warren, Claiborne, and Jefferson Counties above Natchez c. 1816, showing the road from Natchez to Nashville that was later called 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 via Barry J. Ruderman Antique Maps, 49116mp2)

"Slave trader, sold to Tennessee" (Unknown artist, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia)

Slave trader Jackson would have traveled south from the Cumberland District of North Carolina—which shortly became the Territory South of the River Ohio, and is now the Nashville metropolitan area of Middle Tennessee—on an ungainly, oar-steered flatboat, using the Cumberland River to get to Ohio River and thence to the Mississippi River; the return trip from the Natchez District would have been on foot (slaves) or horseback (Jackson and partners) via Natchez Trace through the hundreds of miles of Chickasaw and Choctaw territory between the northern fork of Bayou Pierre and the Tennessee River, ending at the headquarters of his forced-labor camp system, originally Hunter's Hill, and after 1804, The Hermitage. According to a letter by an author writing pseudonymously as Idler, at Rodney, Mississippi, dated 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; and on this, as on many other occasions, showed those striking evidences of obstinacy and indomitable will for which then and after he was so remarkable. The removal of negroes through the Indian nation into one of the States of the Union was strictly prohibited. The Indians, with the few whites then found amongst them, had learned the intention of Jackson to return to Tennessee, and were determined to arrest him by force should he persist in his unlawful attempt. But Jackson was not deterred by this expedition so perilous, he nevertheless persisted; armed his negroes and a few of his friends and boldly marched unmolested through the Indian territory. A formidable array of warriors called out to stop his progress, witnessed his march without the courage either to attack or annoy him. They melted away like the mists of the morning."

— "Old Mississippi Correspondence," 1854

The memoirs of William Henry Sparks, published in 1870, describe 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. Jackson had a small store, or trading establishment, at Bruinsburgh, near the mouth of the Bayou Pierre, in Claiborne County, Mississippi. It was at this point he received the negroes, purchased by his partner at Nashville, and sold them to the planters of the neighborhood. 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 slave 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.

It was during the period of his commercial enterprise in Mississippi that he formed the acquaintance of the Green family. This family was among the very first Americans who settled in the State. Thomas M. Green and Abner Green were young men at the time, though both were men of family. To both of them Jackson, at different times, sold negroes, and the writer now has bills of sale for negroes sold to Abner Green, in the handwriting of Jackson, bearing his signature, written, as it always was, in large and bold characters, extending quite half across the sheet. At this store, which stood immediately upon the bank of the Mississippi, there was a race-track, for quarter-races, (a sport Jackson was then very fond of,) and many an anecdote was rife, forty years ago, in the neighborhood, of the skill of the old hero in pitting a cock or turning a quarter-horse.

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." A surviving letter written to Jackson on October 21, 1791 by a Natchez businessman named George Cochran mentions this place, recalling "many agreeable hours" at Jackson's "friendly retreat at Bayou Pierre."

Forty years after he started his career as a young trader in colonial Mississippi, 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

The writer called "Idler" described Jackson participating in foot races and wrestling matches at Bruinsburg, listing several local residents as participants in these activities. Idler names "Bruin, Price, Crane, Freeland, Harmon and others" as Jackson's companions in sport. 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." In 1801, George Cochran bought land on Bayou Pierre from Waterman Crane, property that was adjacent to land owned by Peter Bryan Bruin and George Humphreys, father of future Confederate general Benjamin Humphreys. The Humphreys property was called the Hermitage, a name that supposedly inspired the name of the Tennessee plantation Andrew Jackson established in 1804.

Natchez, Mississippi in 1822, painted by John James Audubon (Digital Library of Georgia)

According to the local historian for Warren County, Ohio, a local plow manufacturer, 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." Tax records show Jackson ran a whiskey still at his Hunter's Hill plantation in Tennessee in the late 1790s. In 1922, S. G. Heiskell, a pro-Jackson local historian and former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, 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." (A history of the early days of the Cumberland settlement describes "loo and fives" and "assault and battery" as two of the most popular hobbies in the community.)

Cut-paper silhouette of Andrew Jackson, made 1828 by William James Hubard (Tennessee State Museum via Smithsonian Catalog of American Portraits)

Dr. James F. McCaleb, writing about the Natchez Trace in the Natchez News-Democrat in 1915, described Jackson as an avid sportsman and gambler, stating that Jackson 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. Travellers 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. There was keen rivalry between Tennesseeans and Kentuckians about the merits of their thoroughbreds. 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." In a study of antebellum horse racing, the Journal of Mississippi History recounted the Jackson–Colthrap incident and stated that this race course was apparently the first in Claiborne County and was located near the "Red House" tavern at Rocky Springs. 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.

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.)

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 1815. 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 sacked New Orleans his own irreplaceable children might be killed. Jackson may have known Smith through Judge Bruin, who had worked with Smith's brother Philander Smith on multiple territorial political and judicial issues. Thomas Hinds, one of the military heroes of the American side of the War of 1812 in the southwestern theater, was also married to a daughter of Springfield.

Trading in Tennessee

Tennessee circa 1796 showing early counties and districts, Cherokee settlements, and the northern terminus of the Natchez Trace

On August 19, 1806, Cage & Black reached and agreement with Andrew Jackson and James S. Rawlings about renting a house, lot, and stables in Gallatin, Tennessee to Jackson and Rawlings. Rawlings was John Hutchings's brother-in-law, married to another 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." (The Impartial Review and Cumberland Repository, September 13, 1806

There is no record of Jackson owning land on Bayou Pierre. In 1828 the Natchez Ariel specified that Jackson had never had his own plantation near Bayou Pierre. 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. 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."

The Cincinnati Commercial newspaper reported on the life of Jackson in 1879, based on information from Mrs. Mary Wilcox, a descendant of Andrew J. Donelson, and stated, "At a distance of seven miles from Nashville 'Clover Bottom' is reached. It is an immense plain, fronting on Stone River, and at the time of my visit was one vast corn-field. Three quarters of a century ago and subsequently, Jackson did business as a merchant and trader there, built flatboats for the shipment of produce to New Orleans, and generally occupied himself as a man of affairs...For many years there was a racetrack at Clover Bottom, where the blue-blooded horses of the country contested their speed, and which was largely patronized by the General, who, to the day of his death, retained a remarkable fondness for thoroughbred horses." The Clover Bottom store where Jackson built and sold flatboats was "a two-story building near today's Downeymead Drive." This is another general description of this place from an Illinoisan who visited Jackson's Hermitage shortly before his death:

The next morning we started on our way to the Hermitage, which was some ten or eleven miles from Nashville. We traveled on a fine turnpike road which ran through a fertile country. On the road between Nashville and the Hermitage we passed the spot where there had been built at one time a fort or blockhouse, where the people gathered when the Indians were troublesome. This fort, we were told, was afterwards purchased by Gen. Jackson and a man named Coffee and converted into a storehouse, and there they kept store for some years under the name of Jackson & Coffee. They bought large quantities of cotton and produce and shipped it down the Cumberland and Mississippi rivers in flatboats to New Orleans. Near the fort was one of the finest racetracks in the state, and there they also had a place erected for the exhibition of game cocks, where people came from hundreds of miles and from other states with their racehorses and game cocks. Thousands of dollars would be bet on the races and cock fights.

Original extent of Mississippi Territory, as organized April 4, 1798

Map of Nashville as it was in 1804; when Aaron Burr visited in 1805, Jackson hosted a celebration in his honor at the Talbott Tavern (No. 7) (History of Davidson County, Tennessee, 1880)

There is surviving contract made in 1803 between a riverman and Jackson's associate John Coffee arranging for a flatboat to depart from Haysborough, Tennessee for New Orleans loaded with 25 bales of cotton and 77 hogs. 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. River-traffic statistics involving flatboats such as those produced by Jackson give a sense of how early he came to Mississippi, and thus how closely he must have been involved in its colonization. According to historian 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. In the course of the 1806–07 expedition that came to be known as the Burr conspiracy, Aaron Burr ordered five of Jackson's flatboats, picked up two that were ready at Clover Bottom, and set off for the south from Jackson's landing at Stones River. Another letter by Idler, dated August 1854, explained that it was common in the early history of the region for travelers to float down and walk back up: "At that day the trade of the Ohio and Mississippi was carried on entirely by flatboats, keels, and barges. Arrived at Natchez or New Orleans, after the cargo was sold, the flats were broken up and the gunwales converted by the City Fathers into sidewalks...There was no other mode of returning to the West in those days except by land, and for their mutual protection they usually went in companies. As there were but few settlements on the road they were compelled to camp out, without the benefit of a tent."

Jackson's mercantile enterprises appear to have been entangled with his slave-trading, real estate speculation, and his imperial designs on Indigenous lands. 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. During Nashville's earliest history, "Traveling was done pretty much on horse back. 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." The route to Philadelphia was tiresome, requiring arduous travel through the Blue Ridge Mountains or up around the Alleghenies, but 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."

18th-century trading

Settlements and landmarks along the Mississippi River in the Natchez District along with James Wilkinson's 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 state's big towns at statehood in 1817, Vicksburg came into its own as a rival to Natchez in the 1830s. (NAID 102279464)

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 1789, when he was about 22 years old, Jackson opened a trading post at Bruinsburg, on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, near Old Greenville (then just newly established), and just north of Natchez: "Jackson traded in wine and 'sundries' sent from his business associate in Nashville. Those sundries included enslaved Blacks." His stand might have been log-built, or it might have been the frame cabin of his "New Orleans boat" deconstructed and rebuilt to the same purpose on land. Bruinsburg was the northernmost white settlement in the Natchez District as of 1789. According to the memoir of a migration to the lower Mississippi in 1789, there were no other settlements for hundreds of miles north along the river (nothing "from L'Anse à la Graisse to Bayou Pierre, something like sixty miles above Natchez.") 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. According to biographer Robert V. Remini, 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 asserts were feathers or down stuffing for pillows and mattresses, but which some scholars suspect was a euphemism for a shipment of enslaved people, perhaps previously owned by the Swanns of Tennessee. 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."

"A flatboat, such as was used on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, sometimes called an ark, a voiture or a broadhorn"(Voyage dans l'Amerique Septentrionale, 1826, etching from a sketch made in 1795)

One of Jackson's businesses was building and selling flatboats, which were then used to ship people and livestock south; he sold several such boats to Aaron Burr prior to the expedition that resulted in treason charges against Burr (Alfred R. Waud, The Century Magazine, 1916, via Historic New Orleans Collection)

The study of Jackson's slave trading is closely tied to the study of the related Robards–Donelson–Jackson relationship controversy. Jackson and Rachel Donelson Robards ran off together in 1789 or 1790, leaving behind Rachel's abusive first husband Lewis Robards; Rachel reportedly spent the winter of 1790–1791 with the families of Thomas Green and Peter Bryan Bruin (namesake of Bruinsburg). When they returned to Nashville from Bayou Pierre in September 1791, they went in a company of about 100, including Jackson's cousin's husband's brother, Hugh McGary, and "Considering Jackson's position as a lawyer, trader, and slave dealer, it is safe to assume that he and Rachel were accompanied by black servants on the trip, which generally required 21 days. " The earliest surviving description of Bruinsburg was recorded March 25, 1801, and reads, "...pass't Judge Bruin's at the lower side of a creek called Biopere, but a small creek, & pass't Bruins about 2 o'clock; some Houses but no improvements worth notice..."

In his letters, Jackson referred to the path from Natchez to Nashville as a journey through "the wilderness," and 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 camping-out nature of journeys over the Natchez road in his journal of a 1796–1797 trip, with the "tavern" at Grindstone Ford consisting "but of one room, is filled with the bridles, saddles, and baggage of our party, as well as other lumber belonging to the family." He also wrote about what he called "encamping grounds" when they were earlier crossing the Amite River, describing what were simply wide places in the road, especially at river crossings "marked by the remains of fires, trees cut down, a well-trodden surface, &c."

"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"

19th-century trading

1800–1809

In his 2013 biography, Andrew Jackson, Southerner, historian 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, probably at least until the War of 1812 catapulted him to national fame. According to Frederic Bancroft's Slave-Trading in the Old South (1931), letters in the Jackson papers at the Library of Congress at least suggest he had signaled a continuing interest in the market. William C. C. Claiborne wrote to Jackson from "near Natchez" on December 8, 1801 with an update on local markets:

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.

An advertisement for upcoming horse races at Clover Bottom (The Tennessee Gazette and Mero-District Advertiser, March 27, 1805)

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." 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 Donelson married Col. Thomas Hutchings; their firstborn child was a son named John Hutchings. 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 Day 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 1805, Jackson wrote that he could not accept slaves as a form of payment from a man who owed him money, 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."

The pilots of Jackson's flatboats navigated south from Stones River to the Cumberland River to the Ohio River to the Mississippi River, and thence to Natchez

Also, according to the Erwin pamphlet, Jackson bought an enslaved man from a Dr. Rollings in Gallatin, Tennessee 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 Rawlins 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.

1810–1812

"Map of Mississippi—constructed from the surveys in the General Land Office and other documents," published 1819 showing the Natchez Trace as "Road Made by Order of Government from Pierre River to Nashville 383 Miles"; 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

Specific trades made by Jackson in the 1811–1812 season are known because they were the last before the War of 1812 disrupted the U.S. market and changed the course of Jackson's life, and because they were resurfaced as part of the electoral combat of the 1828 election. Winter and spring were the traditional slave-trading seasons, after the harvest was in and before the next season's planting had begun, and before the summer heat and mosquitoes and fleas arrived in force. Several bills of sale for Jackson's trades are dated to late December, which coincided with the end of the Mississippi cotton season—according to historian David J. Libby, "By late December or early January, the cotton crop had been completed. A few days' rest usually coincided with Christmas..." The River was also higher in winter and spring, and the current stronger, making for a faster trip downstream.

In 1810, Jackson, the first mayor of Nashville, Joseph Coleman, and a Natchez resident 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 in 1828, the source of 11 of the enslaved people that Jackson's partners took south in 1811 may have been a horse-race bet lost by a man named Newman Cannon:

Did not you, Gen. Jackson, in the year 1810 or 11, make a horse race with Col. Newman Cannon, then an inexperienced young man, for $4000, and did not peculiar circumstances, before the race, render it a hard case on the side of this young man?— Did you not refuse to let him off? Were you not as rationally certain of, winning, before the race as afterwards? Did you not win the race and literally set him a foot, stripping him of all the money he could raise and borrow, and likewise of eleven negroes, the earnings of many years honest labor?—I answer for you, YES.

2. Were these negroes sent by you to Natchez for sale, with the drove brought by yourself and Coleman about that time, or are they at present working on your farm with their increase—the fruits of your gaming?

3. 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 or as a cash substitute was common and guaranteed a lifetime of insecurity for the people used as security. Other slaves traded by Jackson that year were bought from a Virginian named Richard Epperson,

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 of Port Gibson, Mississippi published an "extra" edition on September 13, 1828 to address the subject of "Gen. Jackson's Negro trading.—"

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."

Andrew Jackson versus Silas Dinsmore

Natchez Trace Road near Lorman and Old Greenville photographed c. 1938

Enslaved people accompanying Jackson or partners back to Nashville from Natchez would likely have been walked through the Sunken Trace segment near Port Gibson, Mississippi, in chained packs called coffles; women with babies and young children might be transported on ox-drawn wagons

In 1812, while returning with this same troupe of prisoners, Jackson got into a dispute with a Indian agent named Silas Dinsmoor, who was determined to enforce a regulation requiring every enslaved person crossing through the unceded Choctaw lands to 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 Dinsmore enforcing this rule, and while traveling, he "happened to pass by Dinsmore's agency with a considerable number of slaves, the property of a business firm (Jackson, Coleman and Green) of which he was now an inactive partner." Dinsmore was not at the agency when Jackson passed by. Still, Jackson left a message promising a future confrontation with Dinsmore, who persisted in regulating the passage of enslaved people over the Trace. Jackson later saw to it that Dismore 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." Jackson's ire seemed to stand out, even on a frontier road regularly traveled by quarrelsome "Kaintucks", horse-stealing Indians, and gangs of homicidal highwaymen. 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 named Maj. 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?"

"Aboriginal America east of the Mississippi" by Moses & Tuttle, 1840 (New York Public Library b20643866)

Remarkably, there are two surviving letters from Jackson himself about this specific troupe of slaves for sale. In the first letter, dated December 17, 1811 and sent to his wife Rachel, Jackson wrote "on tomorrow I shall set out from here homewards, on the Biopierre [recte Bayou Pierre] 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." On February 8, 1812, Jackson wrote to Mary Donelson Caffrey, his wife's sister and mother-in-law to Abraham Green: "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 ongoing 1811–1812 New Madrid earthquakes had disrupted river traffic to such an extent that she would be better off acquiring a person already in the lower Mississippi region.

Benjamin Lundy covered the story in July 1827, and retold a separate tale about Jackson having tied a recaptured runaway slave to the joist of a blacksmith shop and whipped him; the use of such violence on a person would not have been out of character—in the words of historian J. M. 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."

American abolitionist Benjamin Lundy covered the controversy in his newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, or American Anti-Slavery Journal and Register of News. Lundy felt that Jackson's own account amounted to 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."

The people he sold, and their prices

Documents published by the Natchez Ariel and the Port Gibson Correspondent newspaper shed some light on Jackson's trading. The Correspondent had one bill of sale from Andrew Jackson to Abraham Green of "Betty about thirty-five years of age and Hannah her Daughter about fifteen years of age." A transcript reprinted in a Rhode Island paper had the date of this sale as December 27, 1800, and the sale took place in Pickering County, Mississippi Territory, which existed from 1798 until 1802. The cost to purchase the mother and daughter was $550. The Ariel published a receipt dated December 27, 1811 confirming that Abraham Green had paid $650 cash for "one Negro woman named Kessiah with Two Cheldren, Ruben about three years old and a female cheld at the breast called Elsey." At the bottom of the receipt for Kessiah and her children is a notation "one Negro Wench named Faney $280." Abraham Green was a brother of Abner Green and former delegate to Congress for the Mississippi Territory Thomas M. Green Jr. Abraham Green died in late 1826, and his estate was still being settled as of 1828. One of the executors of Abraham Green's estate had the bill of sale notarized before showing it to the Ariel. Jackson also had kinship ties to the Green family; by extension, he would have been connected to the Green–Hutchins–West–Hinds political alliance in Mississippi Territory. (Abraham Green's mother-in-law and Andrew Jackson's wife were sisters.)

One vignette from Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, painted by John J. Egan circa 1850, showing slaves hired to excavate the works of the Mound Builders (St. Louis Art Museum 34-1953)

Another sale documented by the Ariel and the Correspondent was the sale of Malinda and Candis on December 28, 1811. The Correspondent stated that the sale record 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." Malinda was described as being "about fourteen years old of a yellow complecion." Candis was said to be "about 20 years old of a black complection formerly owned by Mary Coffery." The buyer, James McCaleb, paid $1,000 for the pair. 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." McCaleb also operated a "gin" near Bayou Pierre circa 1814. The Dr. James H. McCaleb who wrote an article about the Natchez Trace for the Natchez News-Democrat in 1915 was likely a great-grandnephew of the James McCaleb who purchased Malinda and Candis from Andrew Jackson.

Charges, denials, coverup

"I have never seen, in this small section of old Mississippi River country and its little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez, anything so mundane as ghosts, but I have felt many times there a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me. The clatter of hoofs and the bellow of boats have gone, all old communications. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use; it is deep in leaves. The river has gone away and left the landings. Boats from Liverpool do not dock at these empty crags. The old deeds are done, old evil and old good have been made into stories, as plows turn up the river bottom, and the wild birds fly now at the level where people on boat deck once were strolling and talking of great expanding things, and of chance and money. Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the nights there are no mansions, no celebrations. Just as, when there were mansions and celebrations, there were no more festivals of an Indian tribe there; before the music, there were drums."—Eudora Welty in Some Notes on River Country (1944), about her explorations of Bruinsburg, Rodney, and Grand Gulf

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 Mark Cheathem was "determined to undermine Jackson's campaign out of personal spite, as well as for political benefit. The national media then seized on the accusations against Jackson as part of a larger discussion about abolitionism and disunion, prompted by the sectionalism of the 1820s." Erwin was related to Henry Clay by marriage. Among other efforts, Erwin convinced Nashville Bank director Boyd McNairy to publicly disclose relevant transactions in Jackson's accounts. McNairy later wrote, "You have been charged—but not by me, for I expressly disavow any agency in the matter—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?"

Lithograph of watercolor painting of Petit Gulf, the next settlement south on the river from Bruinsburg, made by Charles Alexandre Lesueur in the early 1820s (Missouri Historical Society N45785)

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. In private he may have been more self-aware and cognizant of how the slavery-friendly U.S. Constitution had sheltered and buttressed his wealth. For example, during the War of 1812 against the United Kingdom (a country that had abolished its slave trade in 1807), Jackson wrote Willie Blount on January 4, 1813 that "Brought up under the tyrany of Britain—altho young embarked in the struggle for our liberties, in which I lost every thing that was dear to me ...—for which I have been amply repaid by living under the mild administration of a republican government. To maintain this, and the independent rights of our nation is a duty I have ever owed to my country to myself and to posterity, and when I do all I can to it support, I have only done my duty."

Jackson did not stand alone in his dishonest denial that he had been a slave speculator. Allies of Jackson were recruited to swear it was not true. The editorial page of The Ariel newspaper of Natchez, Mississippi wrote:

It is 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. To the sale of negroes as an object of speculation, the General's bank transactions which have been published at Nashville, show how those negroes were purchased—with this however we have nothing to do—but we unhesitatingly state, that in 1811 Gen. Jackson sent on a number of negroes to this state for sale, they were brought down the river, and landed, at Bayou Pierre forty-five miles from Natchez, in Claiborne county. The General came here to attend to the sales himself, sold some, but in consequence of the low price of cotton he took the remainder back to Tennessee, with the hope to realize a greater profit, not however without first taking them to Washington, six miles from this place and offering them for sale. These facts are known to numbers in this state. We have in our possession two bills of sale, signed by Andrew Jackson, and not by any firm, and we expect in a few days to receive several more.—We publish one of the Bills of Sale, not thinking it necessary unless urged by circumstances to give any more. The one we publish is dated December 27th, 1811, and the Nashville Republican the General's official paper admits that he took back negroes to Tennessee in 1812.

According to American Art Journal, this 1828 caricature of Jackson by Davis Claypoole Johnston is entitled Richard III, and the details of his face are "composed of naked bodies of Indians. A quotation from Shakespeare's text reads, 'Me thought the souls of all that I had murder'd came to my tent.'"

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 had told him the statement about Jackson was the only thing in the book that anyone had ever denied or claimed was incorrect, and 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."

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."

Connection to other Jackson controversies

Andrew Jackson's early arrival in the Deep South as a businessman led to his later military conquest of the southwest; "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." ("Map to Illustrate the Acquisition of West Florida" from The West Florida Controversy, 1798–1813 by Isaac Joslin Cox)

Two of Jackson's interpersonal conflicts may have had ties to the slave trade. Erwin, primary author of the Gen. Jackson's Negro Speculations pamphlet, was mentioned in Weld and the Grimkés' 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." Similarly, in a preserved early letter about the duel that killed Charles Dickinson (which later came to be another point of attack on Jackson's character), the correspondent (Jackson himself?) 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—can it be that because he was engaged in this human trafic, he commands this unusual respect from his honour the Judge, the two Doctors, and the petyfoging lawyer..."

Influence

On April 23, 1863, a recently emancipated slave came to the camp of U.S. Army general Ulysses S. Grant on the Louisiana side of the river, and informed him that there was an excellent, undefended boat landing at Bruinsburg, much closer than the one Grant had planned to use. There, at the site of Andrew Jackson's old slave-trading stand, Grant successfully made what stood as the largest amphibious landing in U.S. military history until 1942—Grant's men went on to capture Vicksburg, breaking the spine of the Confederacy at the Mississippi River. That same week, George Meade's soldiers rolled back the Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the so-called high-water mark of the Confederacy. American slavery was abolished by constitutional amendment in 1865. Grant was elected to be the 17th U.S. president in 1869. (1876 map of the Vicksburg campaign, Office of the U.S. Army Chief of Engineers, LCCN 99447409)

Andrew Jackson's business model and actions as met the definition of "slave trader" as understood by abolitionists. According to historian Mark R. Cheathem, at a bare minimum, Jackson's business records show "At least six of the slaves that Jackson bought between 1790 and 1803 were purchased from men listed as being residents of other states; a number of his slave transactions also occurred outside of Tennessee." 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." This privileged denial of the reality of the American interregional slave trade continued well into the 20th century. For example, in 1915, a local historian and plantation heir named James T. Flint wrote in the Nashville Banner 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 on one of his trips to see Mrs. Robards."

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 and his allies "believed that 'slaveholding was as American as capitalism, nationalism, or democracy'." In 1841, the Mississippi Free Trader of Natchez, while writing about local politics, defended the slave trade as the profession of a number of esteemed Southern gentlemen, listing John Armfield, Rice Ballard, Isaac Franklin, John L. Harris, Eli Odom, Thomas Rowan, and Sowell Woolfolk, as icons of genteel American prosperity—"A desperate set of ruffians these, with old Andrew Jackson at their head!"

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

Walter Johnson describes 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." Here then, as mapped 1839 by John La Tourette of Mobile, Alabama and engravers S. Stiles, Sherman & Smith of New York, is the gaping maw of the Slave Power, as it looked after the life and work of U.S. president Andrew Jackson. "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.'"

See also

• 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
• List of presidents of the United States who owned slaves
• List of slave traders of the United States
• Bibliography of the slave trade in the United States
• Glossary of American slavery
• History of slavery in the United States by state
• History of slavery in Tennessee
• History of slavery in Mississippi
• History of Natchez, Mississippi
• Territorial evolution of the United States

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• 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.
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Further reading

• Abernethy, Thomas P. (1961). Stephenson, Wendell Holmes; Coulter, E. Merton (eds.). The South in the New Nation, 1789–1819. A History of the South. Vol. IV. Littlefield Fund for Southern History at the University of Texas. Maps by Harold E. Cox. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. LCCN 61015488. OCLC 476957.
• Chappell, Gordon T. (November 1949). "Some Patterns of Land Speculation in the Old Southwest". The Journal of Southern History. 15 (4): 463–477. doi:10.2307/2198383. JSTOR 2198383.
• 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.
• Matthews, Dylan (April 20, 2016). "Andrew Jackson was a Slaver, Ethnic Cleanser, and Tyrant. He Deserves No Place on Our Money". Vox.
• Opal, J. M. (2017). Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-975170-9. LCCN 2016044301. OCLC 960030315.
• Wyatt-Brown, Bertram (Spring 1997). "Andrew Jackson's Honor". Journal of the Early Republic. 17 (1). Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. University of North Carolina Press: 1–36. doi:10.2307/3124641. eISSN 1553-0620. JSTOR 3124641. OCLC 44849568.

External links

• WikiSource: Gen. Jackson's Negro Speculations, and His Traffic in Human Flesh, Examined and Established by Positive Proof