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Andrew Jackson and the slave trade in the United States

The question of whether or not Andrew Jackson had been a "negro trader" was a campaign issue during his candidacy for President of the United States in 1828. 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 interstate slave trade between Virginia, Tennessee, and what was to become Louisiana and Mississippi.

Gen. Jackson's Negro Speculations, And His Traffic In Human Flesh, Examined And Established by Positive Proof (1828), Miscellaneous Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress
A newspaper in upstate New York endorsed John Quincy Adams for president and described Jackson as a "dealer in human flesh" (Buffalo Emporium and General Advertiser, September 4, 1828)

History

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Jackson traded in slaves between 1788 until 1844, both for "personal use" on his own property and for profit through slave arbitrage.[1] Jackson's "negro speculation" slave sales took place in the Natchez District of Spanish West Florida, where he moved in 1789 and built a cabin and a trading post at Bruinsburg, on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, just north of Natchez: "Jackson traded in wine and 'sundries' sent from his business associate in Nashville. Those sundries included enslaved Blacks."[2] 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". [3] Another letter of 1790 thanks Jackson for his help with "the Little Venture of Swann Skins," which some scholars believe is a euphemism for a shipment of slaves.[3] After Jackson and Rachel Donelson Robards ran off from Nashville together in 1790, leaving behind Rachel's first husband Lewis Robards, Rachel reportedly spent the winter of 1790–1791 with the families of Thomas Green and Peter Bruin (namesake of Bruinsburg), while Andrew Jackson returned to Nashville for work.[3] When they returned to Nashville from Bayou Pierre in September 1791, they went in a company of about 100 including Jackson's cousin's husband's brother, Hugh McGary, and "Considering Jackson's position as a lawyer, trader, and slave dealer, it is safe to assume that he and Rachel were accompanied by black servants on the trip, which generally required twenty-one days. Along the way such slaves handled the baggage and prepared the meals. Perhaps the Jacksons had better fare than ordinary travelers. From the journals of others we know that most people headed northward had as their principal provisions dried beef and a special kind of hard biscuit. They carried one powder of roasted Indian corn and another called Conte, made from the root of the China briar. Travelers high and low praised fritters made of this powder when sweetened with honey and fried in bear oil."[4]

This area was then a remote southwestern frontier; as of 1800 the total estimated population of the region that would later become Mississippi's Adams, Claiborne, Jefferson, and Wilkinson counties was 4,660 people (2,403 white people, and 2,257 enslaved black people; indigenous people resident in the area were not included in estimates).[5] By the last decade of the 18th century the region surrounding Natchez was in the midst of a transition from predominantly tobacco agriculture to cotton production, thanks to the removal of the Spanish tobacco subsidy and an increase in available labor, in the form of enslaved black people imported from elsewhere.[6] In 1796, the area produced 750,000 lb (340,000 kg) of cotton for export.[6]

The memoirs of William Henry Sparks, published in 1870, describe his recollection of Jackson's slave-trading business:[7]

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 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.[7]

Jackson was moving slaves along the Natchez Trace as late as 1811, when he got into a dispute with a Choctaw Indian agent named Simon Dinsmore who was determined to enforce a rule that every slave crossing through Choctaw be accompanied by a document identifying their legal owner and the purpose of their travel. The intention was to prevent runway slaves from using the Choctaw lands as a refuge, which in turn would hopefully reduced complaints from white settlers about the Indians infringing on their chattel-property rights with their land entitlements, etc. Jackson did not like Dinsmore enforcing this rule, and while traveling with " happened to pass by Dinsmore' s agency with a considerable number of slaves, the property of a business firm (Jackson, Coleman and Green) of which he was now an inactive partner." Dinsmore was not at the agency when Jackson passed by, but Jackson left a note promising a future confrontation of Dinsmore persisted in regulating passage of slaves over the Trace. Jackson later saw to it that Dismore was removed from his post.[8] 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."[9]

A 1912 biography comments, "The biographers of Andrew Jackson strain and strive mightily to ignore the fact that their hero was a negro trader in his early days, but it is a fact nevertheless...Ordinarily, the Memories of Fifty Years is to be rejected as an authority: the book was written in the extreme old age of the author and is full of fable. But William H. Sparks himself married into the Green family, lived in the Bruinsburgh neighborhood, and must be presumed to have known what the Greens had to say concerning their great friend and his beloved wife."[10]

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.[11]

Influence

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Map of Mississippi printed 1827, showing lands reserved to the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Yazoo, and the Natchez Trace (as Old Natchez Road) from the Tennessee River through Pigeon Roost, Old Agency, Grindstone Ford, and Port Gibson, with one fork ending at Bruinsburg near "Petite Gulf" (namesake of the famous Petit Gulf cotton cultivar)

Andrew Jackson's business model and actions as part of Coleman Green & Jackson met the definition of "slave trader" as understood by abolitionists, but as a campaign issue it fell flat, according to historian Robert Gudmestad, 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."[12] Further to the point, some Jacksonian scholars have argued that it was Jackson's status as a wealthy slave owner and former slave trader that made him politically attractive to certain voters.[13] If nothing else, according to biographer Robert V. Remini, Jackson and allies "believed that 'slaveholding was as American as capitalism, nationalism, or democracy'."[14]

Additional images

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ Cheathem (2011), p. 327.
  2. ^ Forman (2021), p. 137.
  3. ^ a b c Remini (1991), p. 35.
  4. ^ Daniels (1971), pp. 71–72.
  5. ^ Smith (2004), p. 44.
  6. ^ a b Smith (2004), p. 53–54.
  7. ^ a b Sparks (1870), pp. 149–150.
  8. ^ Remini (1991), pp. 39–40.
  9. ^ Daniels (1971), p. 205.
  10. ^ Watson, Thomas Edward (1912). The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson. Press of the Jeffersonian Publishing Company. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-7950-2373-6.
  11. ^ Miller, Patricia (May 11, 2021). "An especially malevolent form of American entrepreneurship". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 2024-06-21.
  12. ^ Gudmestad (1999), p. 312.
  13. ^ Cheathem (2011), p. 330.
  14. ^ Cheathem (2011), p. 329.
  15. ^ a b "Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. Centenary series v. 4 (1921)". HathiTrust. hdl:2027/nyp.33433081900437. Retrieved 2024-06-21.

Sources

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