Andrew Jackson and slavery

Not to be confused with Andrew Johnson and slavery.

Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, was a slave owner and slave trader who demonstrated a lifelong passion for the legal ownership and exploitation of enslaved black Americans. Unlike Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, Jackson "never questioned the morality of slavery."

"Stop the Runaway. Fifty Dollars Reward." Andrew Jackson offered to pay extra for more violence (The Tennessee Gazette, October 3, 1804)

In 1822, John Coffee offered a $50 reward for the return of Gilbert, who had run away from Jackson's plantation near Big Spring (present-day Huntsville, Alabama); Gilbert was killed by an overseer in 1827, which became a campaign issue in the 1828 presidential election

Slave trade

Main article: Andrew Jackson and the slave trade in the United States

Jackson was active in the interregional slave trade, transporting people by boat from the Cumberland River district of Tennessee to the Natchez District of Mississippi. In 1811 a Choctaw Indian agent, Silas Dinsmore, theoretically tried to enforce a prohibition on trafficking slaves through Choctaw territory. According to his political opponents, Jackson declared his intention to disregard this law, ranting, "I am no kidnapper. I am no slave. I want no passport. I am a freeman, and if I cannot pass freely with my property, my rifle and my pistols wilt pass me; they have never yet failed me; and while I have strength of arm to use them, they never will?"

Plantations

In addition to his Hermitage labor camp, which had an enslaved population of 150 people at the time of Jackson's death. During his presidency, the Hermitage all but fell to ruin, and Jackson's slaves suffered the consequences. According to a history of agriculture in early Tennessee, "Jackson had, beginning in 1795, an overseer; and all his race horses were fed and trained and cared for by other men. He managed very well—as long as Rachel lived to manage for him. The frantic, yet always hopeful letters to his adopted son during his second term as President, though coming long past this period, demonstrate too well the problem of the absentee owner on the Cumberland, trying to keep a plantation going almost entirely on money from the crop...The letters tell a tale of mismanagement and bad judgement...Neighbors wrote Jackson of Negroes sick and several dead, one suspects from brutality and ill treatment in general from the overseer, for there was no Rachel around to oversee the overseer...There is something infinitely pathetic about Jackson, honest, patient—a strange role for Jackson—old, watching the ruin of everything he had worked for all his life."

Jackson and his son Andrew Jackson Jr. bought a plantation in Coahoma County, Mississippi called Halcyon. Halcyon was managed by overseer J. M. Parker.

Jackson also owned 640 acres of former Creek lands "south of the Tennessee on the Military road between the river and big spring."

Slave quarters

A visitor to the Hermitage described the slave quarters there: "Each family had a one-story frame house that was painted either white or red, and with it about an acre of ground, all fenced in with palings or board fence and whitewashed; and around each of these houses were a lot of fruit trees and shrubbery."

Fugitives

Andrew Jackson is known to have placed two runaway slave ads, one for "a mulatto Man Slave" in 1804, and one for Gilbert in 1822. The year before the 1828 U.S. presidential election, pioneering American abolitionist Benjamin Lundy republished news items suggesting that Andrew Jackson had been a slave trader in his younger days, commenting, "I shall be slow to believe that General Jackson would at this day be guilty of carrying on the 'lawful business' of men-dealing, although it is strongly commended by high authority in Maryland. It may be, that the following circumstance gave rise to the suspicion entertained by the Kentuckian. Some years since, a gentleman, residing near the mouth of the Ohio river, informed me that a slave belonging to General Jackson having absconded, was taken up and committed to jail (if I mistake not) in Alabama. The General got word of it, and went for him. After identifying him, he took him out of the jail, tied him to a joist, in a blacksmith-shop, and gave him a very severe flogging. He then took him home. This case has often been related in Kentucky, and possibly magnified so as to give rise to the statement relative to the General's connection with the slave trade."

War of 1812

According to James Robinson, after Jackson used slaves to fight and win the Battle of New Orleans, he made a speech recanting promises to free the slaves who fought in his command and added, "Before a slave of mine should go free, I would put him in a barn and burn him alive." Some 50 years later, amid the public debate about the formation of African-American military units during the American Civil War, an Ohio newspaper editorialized, "Out, we say, upon that squeamish Democracy that would shield the negro from the privations and dangers of the war! Gen. Jackson, whose Democracy no Democrat, at least, will question, had no scruples about negroes going into the army. They fought like veterans at the battle of New Orleans--(an event that Democrats even now delight to commemorate)--and publicly commended them for their bravery. If it was right that negroes should fight then, what makes it wrong now?"

Presidency

This section is an excerpt from Andrew Jackson § Slavery.[edit]

During Jackson's presidency, slavery remained a minor political issue. Though federal troops were used to crush Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831, Jackson ordered them withdrawn immediately afterwards despite the petition of local citizens for them to remain for protection. Jackson considered the issue too divisive to the nation and to the delicate alliances of the Democratic Party.

Jackson's view was challenged when the American Anti-Slavery Society agitated for abolition by sending anti-slavery tracts through the postal system into the South in 1835. Jackson condemned these agitators as "monsters" who should atone with their lives because they were attempting to destroy the Union by encouraging sectionalism. The act provoked riots in Charleston, and pro-slavery Southerners demanded that the postal service ban distribution of the materials. To address the issue, Jackson authorized that the tracts could be sent only to subscribers, whose names could be made publicly accountable. That December, Jackson called on Congress to prohibit the circulation through the South of "incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection".

See also

• List of presidents of the United States who owned slaves

Sources

• Aptheker, Herbert (1974) [1943]. "The Turner Cataclysm and Some Repercussions". American Negro Slave Revolts. International Publishers. pp. 293–394. ISBN 9780717800032. OCLC 1028031914.
• Brands, H. W. (2005). Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times. New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-4000-3072-9. OCLC 1285478081.
• Breen, Patrick H. (2015). The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood : A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199828005. OCLC 929856251.
• Henig, Gerald S. (1969). "The Jacksonian attitude toward Abolitionism". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. 28 (1): 42–56. JSTOR 1901307.
• Latner, Richard B. (2002). "Andrew Jackson". In Graff, Henry (ed.). The Presidents: A Reference History (3 ed.). New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 106–127. ISBN 978-0-684-31226-2. OCLC 49029341.
• McFaul, John M. (1975). "Expediency vs. morality: Jacksonian politics and slavery". The Journal of American History. 82 (1): 24–39. doi:10.2307/1901307. JSTOR 1901307.
• Remini, Robert V. (1984). Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. ISBN 978-0-8018-5913-7. OCLC 1285459723.

Further reading

• Hopkins, Callie (August 1, 2019). "The Enslaved Household of President Andrew Jackson". WHHA (en-US).
• "Enslaved Community". Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. Retrieved 2024-09-01.