Andrew Jackson and the slave trade in the United States

The question of whether Andrew Jackson (lifespan 1767–1845, presidency 1829–1837) 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. 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, fabric, and knives.

Jackson bought and sold slaves from 1788 until 1844, both for "personal use" on his property and for short-term gain through slave arbitrage. While Jackson had a number of business interests in Tennessee, many of Jackson's "negro speculation" slave sales took place in the Natchez District of the lower Mississippi River valley, and occasionally further south in what became Louisiana's Feliciana Parishes, and in New Orleans. Jackson seems to have sometimes accepted slaves as a form of payment for debts owed him. Others were acquired when Jackson collected the stakes of bets on horseraces. According to an account in his own hand, dated February 29, 1812, Andrew Jackson's expense for "Negroes sent to markett [sic]...never averaged more from here than fifteen dollars a head."

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

The tie between Jackson—a native of the Carolinas and pioneer settler of Tennessee in 1788—and distant Mississippi was the geography of commerce. Moving goods from the Cumberland River basin to eastern markets, even those in East Tennessee, was challenging because of the necessary but quite difficult passage through the Appalachian Mountains.^[1]^[a] Moving goods north to market in Kentucky or the Illinois Country was pointless because those places produced, by and large, the same products as Tennessee.^[3] 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 Mississippi River and thence to the Gulf of Mexico and 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

Why Natchez, Mississippi? After the bloody Natchez revolt in 1726, French colonial militias worked to exterminate the Natchez people, and were largely successful, although there were survivors who joined the Muscogee and Cherokee nations. In 1765, the Choctaw ceded the largely unoccupied Natchez lands 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 at 2,000, with approximately 900 slaves laboring for 1,100 white settlers.^[4] Spain took control and opened Spanish West Florida to American colonists on August 23, 1787.^[5] The population of colonial-era Natchez was clustered along the waterways (which also served as the region's commercial thoroughfares),^[6] namely the Big Black River, Bayou Pierre, Cole's Creek, Fairchild's Creek, St. Catherine's, and the Homochitto River, with its right-bank tributaries Second Creek and Sandy Creek.^[7] Everything else between the Mississippi River and Georgia was titled to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muscogee people native to the region.^[7] By the last decade of the 18th century, the Natchez region had a polyglot, pluralistic, creolized culture,^[8] with a changing economy, as tobacco and indigo (and timber and cattle) were being rapidly supplanted by industrial-scale cotton agriculture.^[9] There are no known sources that historians can use to study the slave trade in Mississippi prior to the 1810s, but it is clear that the removal of tariffs and trade barriers that accompanied the end of Spanish tobacco subsidy spurred an increase in the slave trade.^[10]

The primacy of cotton meant that "slavery became very much a central institution and defining feature of what became Mississippi."^[12] Circa 1792, settlers were predominantly Anglo-American and two out of every three slaves in the Natchez District were African-born.^[13] The Mississippi Territory of the United States was organized in 1798.^[5] 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."^[14] The territorial organizing act prohibited the introduction of slaves from outside the U.S. but "the foreign trade ban seems to have been ignored."^[15] 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.^[16] 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.^[17] 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.^[18] Government estimates did not attempt to enumerate Indigenous people in the vicinity of Natchez,^[18] but there were likely 30,000 Native Americans resident within in Mississippi as a whole in 1801.^[19] Mississippi was admitted to the Union as the 20th U.S. state on December 10, 1817.^[20]

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.
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Robert R. Livingston (1802)^[21]

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)^[22]

Accounts of Jackson as trader and gambler

Young Andrew Jackson sought the lifestyle of a Southern gentleman, and when he moved to Tennessee from North Carolina 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. Andrew Jackson bought her on November 17, 1788.^[23] According to historian Whitney Snow:^[24]

"...working as an attorney proved disadvantageous for Jackson because too many lawyers vied for too few cases in which payment all too often proved unpredictable. For this reason, he began dabbling in mercantilism, land speculation, and the interstate slave trade. Of the three, Jackson seemed to perceive the last as the quickest means to alleviate himself from immense debt. Indeed, his frequent gambling and horse racing in the 1780s and early 1790s contributed greatly to his economic plight. In time, however, 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."^[24]^[b]

As Frederick M. Binder put it in his The Color Problem in Early National America (1968), "There was much about him 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."^[26] Yet, according to a study of agriculture in early 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."^[27] One analysis of Jackson's slave ownership in the context of paternalism stated that Jackson's interest in his plantations was centered on the intersections between his business prospects and the lives of the families he held in bondage.^[28] 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, however, 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."^[29]

A succinct summary of the business model, and oddly evocative of Andrew Jackson's later presidential opposition to the Second Bank, comes from James Steer, who wrote in 1818 to his uncle, "After reflecting on the subject, I feel disposed to decline taking any Bank Stock at this period. From a young man, just commencing in life, the best stock, in which he can invest capital, is, I think, negro stock. While cotton can command from 20 to 30 cts per pound, negroes will yield a much larger income than any bank dividend."^[31]

Merchant and slave trader Jackson 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 was on foot (slaves) or horseback (Jackson and partners) by what is now known as 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 the headquarters of Jackson's forced-labor camp system, originally Hunter's Hill, and after 1804, The Hermitage. There is no record of Jackson owning land or a plantation of his own on Bayou Pierre.^[32]^[33]^[34]

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)^[35]

The ownership of slaves has generally originated in the desire of mankind to escape work and increase wealth.
— Charles S. Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi (1933)^[36]

Trading in colonial and territorial Mississippi

Account of Idler

The first account of "Jackson as slave trader" that was published after his death comes from an author writing pseudonymously as Idler, datelined Rodney, Mississippi, 1854:^[39]^[c]

"...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^[39]

The writer called "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.^[39] 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.^[42] 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."^[43] 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.^[44] One of the Humphreys' properties was called the Hermitage,^[45] a name that supposedly inspired the name of the Tennessee plantation Andrew Jackson established in 1804.^[46] When the Confederate general's grandfather died, back in the day, he owed money to "many creditors, including Jackson."^[47]

Account of Sparks

The memoirs of William Henry Sparks, published in 1870, described his knowledge of Jackson's slave-trading business:^[48]

"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."^[48]

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,^[d] 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."^[50] (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.")^[51]^[52]

Account of McCaleb

Dr. James F. McCaleb, writing about the Natchez Trace in the Natchez News-Democrat in 1915,^[e] 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.^[f] There was keen rivalry between Tennesseans 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."^[57]^[58] 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."^[59] 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.^[60] Also, according to the memoir of a Presbyterian minister, Sunday was indeed race day in the vicinity of Old Greenville, an irresistible attraction that drew many young men away from church attendance.^[61] 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.^[62]

Accounts of Dey and Robinson

There are two other potentially relevant accounts of Jackson in pre-statehood Mississippi. Neither directly refer to slave trading, but they do potentially offer insight into Jackson as trader. 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."^[63]

Tax records show Jackson ran a whiskey still at his Hunter's Hill plantation in Tennessee in the late 1790s.^[64] In 1922, S. G. Heiskell, a friendly Jackson biographer and former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, described Jackson's Mississippi business as "slaves and whiskey."^[65] Whiskey was the beverage of early Mississippi, while gambling could have been considered the "unofficial state sport."^[66] (According to court records, popular hobbies in the Cumberland included a game called "loo and fives," and "assault and battery.")^[67] The detail about corn kernels intrigues because not only was corn the primary staple grain of both Tennessee and Mississippi, but because 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, provide smoke-dried Indian corn, and "lighte wheat Bread Soked in sweet Milk," and "feed him as Much as he Can Eat for Eaight Days."^[68]

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.^[69] 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.^[69] 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.^[69] Jackson may have met Smith through territorial judge Peter Bryan Bruin, who had worked with Smith's brother Philander Smith on multiple territorial political and judicial issues.^[70]^[71] 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.^[72] Jackson had kinship ties to the Green family that connected him to Springfield; through them he was connected to the Natchez Junto, the Green–Hinds–Hutchins–West political alliance in Mississippi Territory.^[73] (Abraham Green's mother-in-law and Andrew Jackson's wife were sisters.)^[74] 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." ^[75]

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^[76]

Trading in Tennessee

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."^[78] 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."^[79] The markup on goods from Philadelphia resold in the Cumberland was as much as triple.^[80] 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."^[80] 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.^[81] 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 Clover Bottom store.^[82]

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."^[83] 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."^[84]^[83]

This is a general description of this place recorded by an Illinoisan who visited Jackson's Hermitage shortly before his death:^[85]

"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."^[85]

Jackson biographer James Parton visited it in the late 1850s: "The old block house is now a pile without inhabitant; the mortar is falling out of the interstices; the windows are broken; the roof is rotting away."^[86] In 1879, the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper reported that Clover Bottom was now out of use for commerce and had reverted to use as "one vast corn-field...but for 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."^[87]

This was also where Jackson built and sold flatboats for other travelers going down river.^[87] There is a 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, which offers some sense of the scale of Jackson's flatboats.^[88]

River-traffic statistics involving flatboats such as those produced by Jackson illustrate 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, three years after Jackson first visited Mississippi, "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.^[89] 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.^[90] 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, weeks later surrendering himself to authorities at Peter Bruin's house at Bruinsburg.^[91]^[92] These flatboats were themselves valuable in the lower Mississippi, which had a shortage of planed lumber, and would be broken up and converted into shanties, and in one case turned into the sidewalk of Camp Street in New Orleans.^[93]^[94]^[g] 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."^[98]

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.^[99] Rawlings was married to a niece of Rachel Jackson, and was John Hutchings's brother-in-law.^[99]^[h] 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."^[100]

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.^[101]^[i] 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."^[103] The route to Philadelphia was tiresome, requiring arduous travel through the Blue Ridge Mountains or up around the Alleghenies,^[104] but there Jackson "traded land preemptions for flour, sugar, piece goods, and pocket knives."^[98] 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."^[101]

This day a negro who found our situation and business sent us a good supply of bread and meat, which was very timely, as we were weary, hungry, and faint in the wilderness. These negroes have been visited with the outpouring of the spirit of God, inducing them to worship Him, to keep the Sabbath day, and to be exemplary in their lives, while their masters remain in a carnal state. God exalts those of low degree, but the rich he sends away empty.
— Journal of Rev. Joseph Bullen Jr., Presbyterian missionary to the Chickasaw, September 14, 1799 ^[105]

1789–1799

In 1789, when he was about 22 years old, Jackson opened a trading post at Bruinsburg, at the confluence of the Mississippi River and Bayou Pierre, where he "traded in wine and 'sundries' sent from his business associate in Nashville. Those sundries included enslaved Blacks."^[108] The name Bayou Pierre dates to the French period, but the local pronunciation "ignores the y and rhymes the word with now."^[109] 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.")^[110] 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...about 2 o'clock; some Houses but no improvements worth notice..."^[111] The fullest description of life on Bayou Pierre before the establishment of the Mississippi Territory comes from the autobiography of Confederate general and Reconstruction-era Mississippi governor Benjamin G. Humphreys:^[45]

"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"^[45]^[j]

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.^[113]^[114] The following month Natchez District planter Thomas M. Green Jr. granted power of attorney to the young lawyer.^[113] Jackson might have been a transient or itinerant trader, which was common;^[115] if he had a physical store it would likely have been log-built, or possibly the frame cabin of his "New Orleans boat" deconstructed and rebuilt to the same purpose on land.^[6]^[116] 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."^[51] 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."^[117] 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,^[118] but which some scholars suspect was a euphemism for a shipment of enslaved people, perhaps previously owned by the Swann family of Virginia and Tennessee.^[117] 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."^[51] 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.^[119] The jockeys and grooms were enslaved and Black, and horses and slaves alike were used for stakes.^[120]^[121]

The study of Jackson's slave trading is closely tied to the study of the Robards–Donelson–Jackson relationship controversy. Jackson and Rachel Donelson Robards ran off together sometime between the summer of 1789 and July 1790,^[122] leaving behind Rachel's abusive first husband Lewis Robards.^[123] An 1890 news article purporting to tell "The True Story of the Great Statesman's Matrimonal Venture" claimed "Near Natchez, Miss., 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..."^[124]^[k] The couple returned to Nashville in a party of 100 or more via the Natchez Trace in July 1790, with "Mercer County military leader" Hugh McGary attesting at the divorce proceedings that the couple were "bedding together" at that time.^[122] Jackson's loyal crony Judge Overton wrote an account in 1828 that pushed the timeline forward a year or two, claiming that Rachel spent the winter of 1790–1791 enjoying the perfectly circumspect hospitality of southern gentlemen Thomas Green and Peter Bryan Bruin.^[117]^[122]^[l]

In his letters, Jackson referred to the path from Natchez to Nashville as a journey through "the wilderness,"^[126] 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..."^[127] British traveler Francis Baily described the exceedingly rustic 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...filled with the bridles, saddles, and baggage of our party, as well as other lumber") being so unpleasant that he preferred to sleep outside under a tree.^[128] Baily also wrote about "encamping grounds" along the trail, describing what were simply wide places in the road, especially at river fords, "marked by the remains of fires, trees cut down, a well-trodden surface, &c."^[129] In times of high water, travelers would simply swim across the intervening rivers and streams, accompanied by cargo rafts built on the spot, so that provisions and supplies could stay dry.^[130]

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."^[131]^[m] 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^[133]—and Choctaw, Spanish, and American leaders alike were preoccupied with protecting and extending their access to the road.^[134]

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."^[135] For that matter, historian Chase C. Mooney, in his 1957 Slavery in Tennessee, concluded "John Overton might be classed as a slave trader—but not of the coffle-driving type—for he both purchased and sold quite a number of Negroes. Some of his purchases follow: Robin and Pol, $530; Sam, Phyllis, and Ezekiel, $1050; Mathew and wife (slaves of John Coffee, purchased through the United States marshal), $710; Charles, $180 in 'horse flesh, and one hundred and ten dollars in notes'; Lewis, $400; Betty, $800; Elijah, $450; Wood, $600; Bob, $500; Huldy, $375; Tom, $300; Ben, $385; Arthur, $315; Washington, $340; Adam, $500; Martin and Oliver, $365; and 'two negroes,' $700.28."^[136]

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."^[137] 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.^[138]

William C. C. Claiborne wrote to Jackson from "near Natchez" on December 8, 1801 with an update on local markets:^[139]

"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."^[139]

A couple of weeks later, an update from Claiborne:^[140]

"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."^[140]

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."^[146] 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 cattle hides 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.^[147]

The John Hutchings who appears in some reports and documents associated with the slave trade was Andrew Jackson's nephew-by-marriage.^[148] Rachel Donelson's older sister Catherine Donelson married Col. Thomas Hutchings; their firstborn child was a son named John Hutchings.^[149] According to the editors of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Hutchings was "Jackson's partner in the Lebanon, Gallatin, and Hunter's Hill stores."^[150]^[n] 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."^[152]

In 1804 Jackson 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..."^[153] In 1926, John Spencer Bassett annotated this letter in volume one of The Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, "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."^[154] Jackson was up to his neck in debt in the year 1804, 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."^[155]

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."^[159]^[135]^[o] Ward's midsummer offering was apparently inauspiciously timed, perhaps because traders worked to collect "shipping lots" or "shipping parcels" (that is, collections of enslaved people who could be efficiently shipped at the lowest possible cost for transportation, security, provisions) but with trading season months away, cash-strapped Jackson foresaw months of room, board and other space-keeping expenses before young Hutchings could escort another lot to market.^[163]

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.^[164] 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."^[165] 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.^[166]^[p] 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."^[169]^[121]^[q] John Spencer 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."^[171] ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

1810–1812

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.^[172]^[173]^[r] Slaves owned by this firm became part of the propaganda leafleting and news coverage of Jackson's business dealings during the bitter 1828 campaign.^[173]

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:^[175]^[s]

"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?"^[175]

Using slaves as collateral or as a cash substitute, or betting them on a hand of poker or the outcome of a horserace, was common and guaranteed a lifetime of insecurity for the people used as security.^[176]^[177] Other slaves that came into the hands of Jackson, Coleman & Green were bought from a Mecklenburg County, Virginia, tavern owner named Richard Epperson.^[178]^[t] 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."^[172]

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.—"^[180] The Port Gibson coverage was reprinted in Peter Force's National Journal, which was "the official organ of the John Quincy Adams administration."^[181]

"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."^[180]

Andrew Jackson versus Silas Dinsmoor

Demand in Natchez for new slaves was minimal that winter, in part due to rumblings about a coming war with the United Kingdom. While returning to Nashville with his unsold stock, Jackson got into a dispute with an Indian agent named Silas Dinsmoor.^[u] 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, the property of a business firm (Jackson, Coleman and Green) of which he was now an inactive partner." 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.^[183] 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."^[184]

Jackson's ire seemed to stand out, even on a frontier road regularly traveled by hardened boatmen,^[186] quarrelsome Kaintucks,^[187] horse-stealing Indians,^[188] gangs of homicidal highwaymen,^[189] fugitive slaves,^[190]^[191] and bounty hunters seeking their heads.^[192] 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."^[193] 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?"^[194]

The land uneasy: Jackson's side of the story

Remarkably, there are three surviving letters from Jackson himself about this specific troupe of slaves for sale, which was initially under the purview of Green and which he later took control of himself. Jackson, now almost 45 years old, wrote that there were originally 27 people in the group: "There was 25 grown negroes; with two sucking children they always count with the mother."^[195] Jackson wrote that 13 of the group were women, as they needed "habits," and the 12 men had been naked when they were received, and since there was no budget for their clothes, they presumably stayed that way.^[196]

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 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."^[197] Ten days later, he found a buyer for the mother and children, Kissiah, Ruben, and Elsey.^[198] The day after that he sold Candis and Lucinda.^[198]

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..."^[201] 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 acquiring a person already in the lower Mississippi region.^[201]

Then, in correspondence of February 29, 1812, he made time for a multi-page complaint about the business acumen of young Horace Green:^[202]

"...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) two hundred and fifty dollars, that Mr Greens acpt provissions and hands furnished (except a steersman (for he had on board a number of Negroes) amounts to three hundred and Eighteen dollars and 75/100 twenty five of being deducted for difference of vallue for a horse leaves the amount still greater than any sum that any Boat load of cotton ever costs us. 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 except one wench and three children, who had been subject to the fits remained better than six months in the Natchez, she cost with her children Twenty five dollars. finding his acpt so exorbitant, and in lumping charges without any specification...I had further made a statement of what sum would be necessary to have laid in a sufficient supply of provissions and covered all necessary expence and when this is done, 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, from which statement, there is a ballance of three hundred and forty dollars, and 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. this as I am advised is more than double what is usual..."^[203]

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, housing for Mr. Green "after he left his Boat," two purchases of cornmeal totaling 100 bushels for $62.75, two purchases of "beacon" totaling $208.121⁄2, as well as an expected clothing expense for the slaves: "there was 13 wenches; one habit each the fellows recd naked."^[196] The standard diet for slaves on the march was pork and cornmeal—presumably in the form of fritters cooked in bacon fat—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."^[200]

Jackson continued to express his ire as the letter continued:^[204]

"I trust not but law Justice and reason would say that he should keep the horses pay the expence and account in money for the price of the negroes. apply the case—it was agreed on all hands that the Natchez was glutted with negroes, and at that place the negroes was not to be stopped unless for a supply of provisions a keel Boat is therefore Bot that he may go every where below, first to Biosarah, next the rapids of red river etc contrary to this he stops at the Natchez sells some of the negroes for an old horse foundered, encounters as his account states in the lump unusual expences, am I by the rules of law Justice and reason bound to pay for the expence of horse believing as I did when I made the proposition to buy that no expence except Mr Greens would have been on the negroes, believing as I did at that time that he had so managed the negroes that at least they would have cleared their own expence, if not neated something to the owners"^[204]

Keelboats were easier to steer than flats, and were propelled by several oarsmen, so were better for going upstream than flatboats, which essentially used the Mississippi as one long flume ride.^[205] Jackson is saying that Green never should have made a sales call at Natchez but should have visited the prosperous old settlement of Bayou Sara, Louisiana, 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."^[115]

Green instead landed at Natchez and traded some of the slaves in his possession for what Jackson called "an old horse foundered." Jackson also thought Green's expenses were inordinately high, testifying that in reviewing his business records of past slave sales and surveying the community, the average cost to ship slaves was $15 per head, and this shipment, which, in Jackson's mind, should have had expenses totaling $250, instead had expenses of $319. According to Jackson's calculations, Green's spending decisions made the cost closer to $45 per head. If Green had been a better steward of this merchandise, writes Jackson, the slaves in question "would have cleared their own expence, if not neated something to the owners."

And measured out our length, as once our height. How far
From home our luggage takes us!
But, farther, still, Our hanker; till a trail's eroded
Down how far we've come. Rock in belly, bullet in gut,
Axe in skull, quelling passion in whatever name,
Kill pain; but ache out-aches the crime,
The gun. Somewhere along the trace, our spill
Of blood will tell the others who and what we were.
— Marvin Solomon, "The Natchez Trace" (August 1962) ^[206]

Individual slave sales

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.)

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 this 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.'"^[210] 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.^[104]^[211]^[212]^[v]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.^[215] 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..."^[216]

Abraham Green was a brother of Abner Green and former delegate to Congress for the Mississippi Territory Thomas M. Green Jr.^[74] The receipts for several slave sales made by Jackson resurfaced in part because buyer Abraham Green had died October 6, 1826,^[217] and his estate was still being settled in 1828.^[218] 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.^[207] Abraham Green's mother-in-law and Andrew Jackson's wife were sisters.^[219]

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."^[208] 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."^[220] McCaleb also operated a "gin" near Bayou Pierre circa 1814.^[221] 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.^[57]^[222] 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."^[223]

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.^[224] Cotton factors were "the most important middlemen" between Southern crops and Northern and European markets.^[225] 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.^[226] According to historian Harold D. Woodman [d], "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."^[227] There were three Jackson brothers (including the Washington Jackson of Natchez and New Orleans, who in 1809 had sold Andrew Jackson's slave woman prone to "fits" and her "sickly" enslaved child to a "free French" woman of color).^[228] The three Jacksons, John, James, and Washington, were "Irish immigrants but with no verifiable relationship to Andrew."^[229] According to the editors of volume two of 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."^[229]

Charges, denials, coverup

American abolitionist Benjamin Lundy covered reports of Jackson's slave trading in his pioneering abolitionist newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, or American Anti-Slavery Journal and Register of News, as the story was developing throughout 1827 and 1828. In 1827, when the first allegation made the news, 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.^[230] 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 characterized Jackson as "vengeful and mean spirited,"^[231] and 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."^[232] 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."^[233]

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."^[235] Erwin was related to Henry Clay by marriage.^[236]

A man named Boyd McNairy whose bank had held accounts for Coleman, Green & Jackson later wrote in a public letter to Jackson, "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?"^[237] Curiously, Boyd McNairy, who also published an 1828 anti-Jackson broadside headlined "Jackson a negro trader,"^[238] was a brother of the Nathaniel A. McNairy who dueled John Coffee in 1806 and advertised slaves for sale in Natchez in 1807–08.^[239]

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.^[240] 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:^[207]

"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."^[207]

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."^[241]

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..."^[244] 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."^[245]

The denial was carried forward—for years, decades, daresay, centuries—by what southern chronicler Harnett T. Kane described as "fist-pounding partisans."^[246] In his biography 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."^[247] Always the word odium. In his 1933 Slavery in Mississippi, historian Sydnor commented, "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."^[248]

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, Some Notes on River Country (1944), about her explorations of Bruinsburg, Rodney, and Grand Gulf^[249]

Connection to other Jackson controversies

The slave trade repeatedly surfaced in Jackson's personal and political conflicts. 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."^[244] There was evidence that Erwin had illegally imported 47 slaves from Amelia Island off the coast of Spanish Florida.^[251]

Similarly, in an early letter about the duel in which Andrew Jackson 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—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..."^[252]

A dozen years later Jackson pointed the finger again. According to historian Frederick M. Binder, "...in 1819, 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..."^[253] 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:^[254]

"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. He seems to have been unable to comprehend that some looked upon the Negro slave as the necessary foundation of a great civilization, and still others looked upon him as a human being denied the basic human rights."^[254]

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,"^[255] 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."^[256]

These things had other names once, before English or French or Spanish or Latin were even languages. A study of toponyms of the Natchez Trace noted, accurately enough, "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.^[257]

...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)^[258]

Influence

Andrew Jackson's business model and actions met the definition of "slave trader" as understood by abolitionists. According to historian Mark R. Cheathem, at a bare minimum, Jackson's surviving business records show that "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."^[260] 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."^[261]

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."^[262] 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'."^[263] 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.^[263]^[w]

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.^[264] 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."^[265] 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!"^[266]

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

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."^[267] 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."^[268] So here, behold, the gaping maw of the Slave Power, as it looked after the life and work of U.S. president 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."^[268]

To sell cotton in order to buy negroes—to make more cotton to buy more negroes, 'ad infinitum,' is the aim and direct tendency of all the operations of the thorough-going cotton planter; his whole soul is wrapped up in the pursuit. It is, apparently, the principle by which he 'lives, moves, and has his being.' There are some who 'work' three and four hundred negroes, though the average number is from thirty to one hundred. 'This is all very fine,' you say, 'but the slaves!—there's the rub.' True; but without slaves there could be no planters, for whites will not and cannot work cotton plantations, beneath a broiling southern sun.—Without planters there could be no cotton; without cotton no wealth. Without them Mississippi would be a wilderness, and revert to the aboriginal possessors. Annihilate them to-morrow, and this state and every southern state might be bought for a song. I am not advocating this system; but destroy it—and the southern states become at once comparative ciphers in the Union.
— Joseph Holt Ingraham, The South-West. By a Yankee. (1835)^[269]

1st. Your besetting sins are, ambition, and the love of money. To acquire the latter you will act miserly and oppress your best friends; and when in pursuit of either, you are not what you profess to be.
2d. You are naturally and constitutionally irritable, overbearing and tyrannical.
3d. You are incapable of expending any charity toward those who happen to differ with you in opinion.
4th. You cannot investigate dispassionately any interesting or important subject, and if you could, your knowledge and abilities are not equal to the task.
5th. When you become the enemy of any man, you will put him down if you can, no matter by what means, fair or foul, honorable or dishonorable; if it be consistent with your views of popularity and interest, you will turn about and support the very man you have before attempted to destroy and pull down. These examples will suffice for the present; the Hon. Wm. H. Crawford, Gen. John Adair, and Col. Thos. H. Benton.
6th. You are miserably deficient in principle, and have seldom or never had power without abusing it.
— Col. William P. Anderson, former friend of Jackson (1828)^[270]^[x]

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)^[276]

Epilogue

On Wednesday evening, April 29, 1863, a little over 25 years after the end of Jackson's presidency, a recently emancipated slave came to the camp of U.S. Army general Ulysses S. Grant on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi 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 from Bruinsburg to capture Vicksburg, breaking the spine of the Confederacy at the Mississippi River.^[277]

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)
United States main post roads c. 1804 (Charles O. Paullin, 1932)
Indian Land Cessions map of Tennessee and portions of bordering states (1898)
Indian Land Cessions map of Mississippi (1898)
Indian Land Cessions map of Alabama (1898)
Indian Land Cessions map of Florida (1898)
The Hermitage (WPA Guide to Tennessee, 1939)

Notes

^ How difficult? Anecdotally, from a study of one of Jackson's contemporaries and rivals: "When Captain Joseph Erwin made the rough passage across the mountains into Tennessee, the nurse let the baby, Isaac, fall, which resulted in a broken nose."^[2]
^ It may or may not be telling about the relative significance of Jackson's career as an attorney, compared to Jackson's careers in slave trading, land speculation, and betting on horse racing, that historian C. Edward Skeen, in a review of The Legal Papers of Andrew Jackson (1987), opined, "Historians have written little about Andrew Jackson's law practice and career as judge of the Superior Court of Tennessee...this period of his life is largely a void...The editors are to be applauded for their considerable effort in producing this volume, but it would appear that all they have shown is that the documentary evidence of Jackson's legal career is too skimpy to be recovered."^[25]
^ Idler was most likely John A. Watkins (December 3, 1808 – August 27, 1898), a native of Jefferson County, Mississippi, who worked as a merchant and town officer in Rodney as a young man. He later moved to New Orleans, where was a county assessor and councilman, and "never ceased to be a correspondent of several newspapers in various parts of the United States," as well as writing articles about the Choctaw people for The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal. His recollections of the Creek War were republished as "Idler" in the Times-Picayune in 1886, in the Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society (volume IV), and in a small, incomplete collection of his writing called Some Interesting Facts of the Early History of Jefferson County, Mississippi.^[40] He likely also published under the pseudonym "Opa" in the Fayette Chronicle of Fayette, Mississippi.^[41]
^ Sparks married Mariah Amanda Green Carmichael, the last-born of Abner Green's offspring, in Natchez in 1827.^[49]
^ James F. McCaleb (November 26, 1866 – July 25, 1943) was a plantation owner and physician who was educated at the University of Virginia and Tulane Medical School.^[53] A prolific writer and amateur historian, McCaleb regularly contributed articles to the Port Gibson Reveille [d], beginning in 1896.^[54]
^ Wooldridge's Stand was located eight miles northeast of Port Gibson.^[55] For a study of the Wooldridge family, see Dawson A. Phelps' "Stands and Accommodations on the Natchez Trace" (1949), pp. 9–10.^[56] McCaleb expands further on the history of Lemon's place elsewhere in his article published 1915.^[57]
^ The development of steam-powered boats between roughly 1815 and 1830 allowed shipping to move upstream as easily as the current carried flatboats and keelboats downstream towards the Gulf. ^[95] In 1821, cargo tonnage delivered to New Orleans by steamboat surpassed the amount of cargo tonnage delivered by flats, keels, and barges.^[96] According to Phelps, the Natchez Trace was out of use as a long-distance post road by 1824.^[97]
^ Family trees in both volume one of Remini and The Papers of Andrew Jackson appear to erroneously name this man as John Rawlings but call him by his correct name elsewhere.
^ Philadelphia was the capital city of the United States until 1800.^[102]
^ This passage has been lightly edited for readability, primarily commas and numerals, along with the excision by ellipsis of some distracting emotional racism. Catamount and panther are both common names for Puma concolor.
^ This claim from the 1890 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article was pointedly attacked by S. G. Heiskell in his "History Again Refutes Slanders of Noted Hero" article three decades later.^[65]
^ For an examination of the long association between Overton and Jackson, see Clifton, Frances (1952). "John Overton as Andrew Jackson's Friend". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. 11 (1): 23–40. ISSN 0040-3261. JSTOR 42621095.
^ The name Opelousas horse is possibly because the Opelousa people acted as middlemen in trade exchanges between native people of the lower Mississippi and native people of Texas who lived between the Brazos and Guadalupe Rivers.^[132]
^ For a Jacksonian map of Davidson County, Tennessee c. 1803, including locations of Hunter's Hill, Clover Bottom race track, and the stores, see pp. 386–387 of volume one of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, available as a free downloadable PDF through the generosity of the University of Tennessee Press.^[151]
^ Edward Ward was land owner and Tennessee state legislator.^[160] Ward served as president of the Clover Bottom Jockey Club, reportedly won $500 in gold off Jackson in a bet on a fight between gaffed cocks, and along with Jackson was involved in land speculations in vicinity of Huntsville, and Florence, Alabama.^[161] Ward was brutally murdered in 1837 by four of his nephews.^[162]
^ Per The Papers of Andrew Jackson, the decision is reported in Tennessee Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions Record Book, 1808–1809, pp. 59–60, and Tennessee Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions Minutes, September 1805–December 1808, pp. 431–433, found in the Sumner County Court Archives at Gallatin, Tennessee.^[167] The appeal decision is reported in Tennessee Circuit Court Minutes, 1810–1815, pp. 203–229 passim, also to be found in the Sumner County Court Archives.^[168]
^ Jackson's use of boy should be not presumed to describe a male child under 12, but rather boy is likely here used in the Oxford English Dictionary sense 1.a.ii. for boy: "Used (chiefly by white people) with reference to non-white slaves and (in English-speaking colonies) to non-white servants, labourers, etc. Also as a form of address (esp. as a summons). Now historical and rare (usually considered offensive)."^[170]
^ Horace Green has not been conclusively identified, but John Spencer Bassett believed he was likely a "young relative" of Rachel Jackson.^[174] The firm name is usually rendered Green but the person appears to have signed his name Greene with an E.
^ The "Newman Cannon" mentioned by Philo-Tennesseean is most likely Newton Cannon, later the eighth governor of Tennessee.
^ This Richard Epperson is possibly the Richard Epperson Jr. whose father Richard Epperson served as a major during the American Revolutionary War and who had a land grant surveyed by George Washington in the part of Virginia that eventually became Kentucky.^[179]
^ Dismoor's name is often spelled Dismore, even in otherwise reliable sources, but per Dismoor himself, this is "misnaming" him. The spelling Dismore is retained in primary sources.^[182]
^ Malaria, cholera, and especially yellow fever flourished in the summer. A Presbyterian missionary to the Chickasaw living on the Natchez Trace in 1799 observed, "Those who return after 20th of June, are generally sick; those who come sooner are generally in very good health. Those who carry on this trade ought therefore to send early."^[213]^[214] For a full examination of how communicable diseases shaped the slave trade, see Olivarius, Kathryn M. M. (2022). Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-24105-3.
^ Flint's grandmother's adventure-filled life story, which does not mention Jackson, can be found in Owsley, Harriet C. (1962). "Travel Through the Indian Country in the Early 1800s: The Memoirs of Martha Philips Martin". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. 21 (1): 66–81. ISSN 0040-3261. JSTOR 42621555.
^ Once upon a time, "Anderson had supplied Jackson with such goodies as game cocks from Virginia and hot tips on land investments."^[271] Anderson sold the Clover Bottom racetrack land to Jackson, Hutchings, and Coffee, and he and his brother won $4,000 by betting on Jackson's horse Truxton against Joseph Erwin's horse Ploughboy.^[272] Anderson served under Jackson in the Tennessee militia before and during the War of 1812.^[271] The cause of their falling out is unknown,^[270] but it might have started with "the ridiculous hotel brawl" between Jackson, Jesse Benton, and Thomas Hart Benton.^[273] During the 1828 election cycle, Anderson presented letters from the duel surgeon, Dr. May, about potential misconduct by Jackson during the Dickinson duel.^[274] This got Anderson called a man "whose mind is much disturbed and shattered" by Jackson partisans, and the effort was ultimately to no avail: Jackson went on to eight years in the White House, while Anderson returned to private life. One of Anderson's sons by his second marriage was Confederate general J. Patton Anderson.^[275]

References

^ Bacon (1956), p. 323.
^ White (1944), p. 345.
^ Bacon (1956), p. 326.
^ Libby (2004), 844.
^ a b Din (1971), p. 321.
^ a b Bunn & Williams (2023), p. 191.
^ a b Coker (1972), p. 40.
^ Pinnen & Weeks (2021), p. 91.
^ Smith (2004), pp. 53–54.
^ Pinnen (2012), p. 222.
^ Hawkins (1909), p. 282.
^ Pinnen & Weeks (2021), p. 98.
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^ Rawlings, James S. (September 13, 1806). Eastin, Thomas (ed.). "Tavern". The Impartial Review and Cumberland Repository. Vol. I, no. 40. Nashville, Tennessee. p. 2.
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^ "How Philly lost the nation's capital to Washington". National Constitution Center. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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^ a b Snow (2008), p. 50.
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^ Cheathem (2014), p. 98.
^ Bancroft (2023), p. 300.
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^ Schermerhorn (2016), p. 211.
^ Erwin (1828), p. 14.
^ Stephenson (1922), pp. 89–90.
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^ Correspondence, Vol. 1 (1926), p. 109.
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^ Hall (2010), pp. 53–56.
^ Hall (2010), pp. 47–48.
^ Dew (2016), pp. 111–112.
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^ Papers of A. Jackson, Vol. 1 (1980), p. 160.
^ Papers of A. Jackson, Vol. 2 (1984), pp. 553, 580.
^ Papers of A. Jackson, Vol. 2 (1984), p. 553.
^ Papers of A. Jackson, Vol. 2 (1984), p. 580.
^ Correspondence, Vol. 3 (1928), pp. 418–419.
^ "s.v. boy (n.1 & int.)". Oxford English Dictionary. 2008. doi:10.1093/OED/9377728539.
^ Correspondence, Vol. 3 (1928), p. 418.
^ a b Snow (2008), p. 52.
^ a b Cheathem (2014), p. 51.
^ Correspondence, Vol. 1 (1926), p. 217.
^ a b Philo-Tennesseean, Davidson County, Tennessee (August 23, 1828). Cook, James K. (ed.). "To the editor of the Kentucky Reporter". The Ariel. Vol. IV, no. 5. Natchez, Mississippi: John C. Allison. p. 3.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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^ Brinkman (1933), pp. 177–178, 181.
^ a b n.a. (October 7, 1828). Force, Peter (ed.). "Gen. Jackson's Negro Trading". Daily National Journal. Vol. V, no. 1513. Washington, D.C. p. 3 – via Newspapers.com.
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^ Remini (1991), pp. 39–40.
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^ Bunn & Williams (2023), p. 189.
^ Menck (2017), pp. 17–18.
^ Cotterill (1921), p. 29.
^ WPA Guide to Mississippi (1938), pp. 84–85.
^ Hinds, T. (September 30, 1809). Terrell, Samuel (ed.). "Twenty Dollars Reward". The Weekly Chronicle. Vol. II, no. 65. Natchez, Mississippi Territory. p. 3. Retrieved 2024-09-10.
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^ Watson (1848), p. 10.
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^ Libby (2004), 1091.
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^ Papers of A. Jackson, Vol. 2 (1984), pp. 22, 225–226.
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^ Lundy (1827), p. 30.
^ Warshauer (2006), p. 205.
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^ a b Usner (1985), p. 315.
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———; 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.
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———; ——— (1984). Moser, Harold D.; MacPherson, Sharon (eds.). The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume II, 1804–1813. Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 978-0-87049-441-3. LCCN 79015078. OCLC 5029597.
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Articles

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.
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.
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.
Hall, Rita Hiltenbrand (2010). "Colonel Edward Ward: The Life and Death of a Tennessee Senator". West Tennessee Historical Society Papers. LXIV. Memphis, Tennessee: 45–89. ISSN 0361-6215. OCLC 1769643.
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.
Johnson, Patricia Givens (April 1973). "William P. Anderson and 'The May Letters'" (PDF). Filson Club History Quarterly. 47 (2). Louisville, Kentucky: 171–178. ISSN 0015-1874. OCLC 6674913.
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.
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.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
Sherwin, Oscar (April 1945). "Trading in Negroes". Negro History Bulletin. 8 (7): 160–166. JSTOR 44214396.
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". 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.

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.
Fundaburk, Emma Lila (2008) [1957]. Fundaburk, Emma Lila; Foreman Fundaburk, Mary Douglass (eds.). Sun Circles and Human Hands: The Southeastern Indians Art and Industries. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. ISBN 978-0-8173-8368-8. LCCN 00049103. Project MUSE book 982.
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.
Welty, Eudora (2003) [February 1944]. Some Notes on River Country (Originally published in Harper's Bazaar.). Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-57806-525-7. LCCN 2002012197. OCLC 50404011 – via Internet Archive.

Kinship networks

Brinkman, Edna Epperson (1933). The Story of David Epperson & His Family, of Albemarle County, Virginia. Hinsdale, Illinois – via Internet Archive, Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Dilley, Ora Iona (1986). History and Genealogy of the Greens, Carpenters, Dilleys, Ushers. Vicksburg, Mississippi: Self-published typescript. OCLC 18666244. FHL 3461497 – via Digitized by the 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.
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.

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)
Visualizations and Maps: The Spread of U.S. Slavery, 1790–1860 (lincolnmullen.com)