Andrew Jackson (24 page)

The embargo exploded in Jefferson’s face. New England merchants and shipowners hated it as impinging on their commercial freedom. They responded by smuggling, by voting for Federalists, whose number in the House of Representatives doubled at the next election, and by talking of seceding from a country so dominated by Virginia planters. Nor was the rest of the country spared. Farmers in the West and South watched in alarm and then anger as their crops piled up on wharves awaiting ships forbidden to sail. Those regions that didn’t produce for export felt the embargo’s effects in falling prices from the overall glut the embargo created.

Jackson was already irked at Jefferson over the Burr-Wilkinson affair, and he grew more exasperated upon the failure of the president to confront the British and demand satisfaction for their crimes against American honor and interest. After the
Chesapeake
shelling he led a protest in Nashville against British arrogance and in support of a vigorous American response. Many at the rally were ready to march to war right then, declaration or no declaration. Jackson would have been happy to lead them.

The embargo brought the British challenge closer to home. The depression it produced aggravated the chronic money problems of the frontier, triggering numerous foreclosures and lawsuits for payment of debt. Jackson had to defend himself in several cases, including one involving a farm owned by his brother-in-law John Caffery, who had borrowed two thousand dollars from John McNairy and listed the farm as collateral. When Caffery found himself short of cash, Jackson bailed him out by purchasing the farm and letting Caffery and his family stay on it. McNairy sued Jackson on grounds that he—McNairy—should have had first option on purchasing the farm. Jackson sought to shame McNairy for trying to take advantage of Caffery’s difficulties, which, like those of everyone else caught in the eddies of the embargo and the vicissitudes of American finance, weren’t entirely his fault. “Is it possible under these circumstances that you in your exalted station . . . will endeavour to deprive a numerous and worthy family of a habitation or sustenance?” Jackson demanded. “Impossible—the whole world (when the thing would be known) would execrate the act, and the gods would frown on it with indignation.” McNairy, illiquid himself, refused to be shamed. He pressed the case, which dragged on for months till the courts compelled Jackson and Caffery to pay him $999 to clear the debt.

By then the defaults and foreclosures had become a blizzard. In Tennessee and across the West debtors demanded protection from creditors, asserting that they shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of a decision made by the president and Congress for the presumed benefit of the country as a whole. Most asked for a period of grace, enforced by stay laws to prevent the collection of debts. Had all the creditors been the greedy bankers of the debtors’ rhetoric, the stay laws would have passed easily. But most of the creditors were themselves debtors who, if they couldn’t collect the debts owed them, risked defaulting on debts of their own. Where was the justice in that? they demanded.

Jackson was among the latter class, at once owed and owing. He recognized, not least because he felt in himself, the strains the embargo was inflicting. For this reason he urged his fellow citizens to concentrate on the real cause of their common distress: Britain. At a rowdy Nashville meeting of debtors and creditors, where the former demanded stay laws and the latter denounced the very idea, Jackson turned the debate outward. “Our enemies have long calculated on our divisions,” he said. New Englanders seemed bent on making those enemies right, but Tennesseans—united—must show them wrong. “All must feel the injuries we have received, all must be determined to resist them.” From Nashville the message would echo to the Atlantic and beyond. “Let the event of this day’s meeting prove to the world that no matter what privations we suffer, or inconveniences we feel, we are willing to expend the last cent of our treasure and the last drop of our blood in giving effect to any measures that may be taken in support of our liberty and independence.”

D
uring the early nineteenth century, American practices and attitudes involving slavery continued to change. Additional northern states mandated an end to the institution, although most allowed owners to keep current slaves for years or decades. Congress outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808, a move that assuaged American consciences but posed little hardship on slaveholders, as American slaves reproduced fast enough to meet the needs of the domestic market. (In the West Indies and Brazil, by contrast, the far higher death rate necessitated regular replenishment of slave ranks to sustain the institution.) In fact the ban actually made slave owners wealthier, at least on paper, by restricting supply and driving up the prices of the slaves they owned. And the domestic trade—the buying and selling of slaves within and between states—continued.

Yet even this was acquiring an odor. Slave owners liked to portray their labor system as merely a variant of labor practices elsewhere. Slaves were called “servants,” “hands,” “boys,” “girls,” “my men.” Masters thought of themselves as heads of large families that included slaves, albeit in a different category than the masters’ own flesh and blood. (The categories overlapped when, as happened with unacknowledged frequency, slaves
were
the flesh and blood of the masters.) The slave trade, even the domestic version, intruded on this peaceful picture. It tore mothers and fathers from children, husbands from wives, and generally ripped the mask from the idyllic model. Though necessary to support the business of slavery, it was often relegated to agents from whom the genteel classes tried to distance themselves.

A
ndrew Jackson wasn’t what most of his neighbors would have called genteel, but by the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century his rough edges were beginning to rub smooth. He was one of the best-known men in Tennessee, an important figure in state politics. He didn’t lack rivals or critics, but even they had to respect his ability and concede that he had come a long way from inauspicious beginnings.

His home was the Hermitage, a property he acquired in 1804. Jackson bought the property from Nathaniel Hays, a neighbor next door to Jackson and Rachel at Hunter’s Hill. Hays had staked his claim to the square mile in 1780, at the beginning of white settlement of the Cumberland, but like many others he had been forced to retreat in the face of Indian resistance. Eventually he returned, bringing his wife, three children, and a couple of slaves. He and the slaves built a house of logs—more than a cabin but no mansion—near a gravel-bottomed spring on the tract. He and they cut the mature hardwood trees that covered most of the property, and planted cotton in the black soil deposited during the previous several millennia—and renewed each spring—by the Cumberland and Stones rivers. Hays traded his cotton for merchandise at a store Jackson owned on the Hunter’s Hill property. On those visits and others, he and Jackson talked politics and militia affairs. Rachel got to know Elizabeth Hays and her daughters. As nearest neighbors they became friends.

Thus it was with some regret that the Jacksons learned in 1804 that the Hayses would be moving. Nathaniel was as restless as many other westerners, and he decided the future looked brighter in Bedford County, south of Nashville. When he told Jackson he intended to sell, Jackson did some quick calculating. His business activities had left him holding thousands of dollars of debt he couldn’t collect. He needed to raise cash lest he lose even more money and perhaps lose the Hunter’s Hill farm. As that farm was worth much more than the Hays property, if he purchased the Hays place and sold Hunter’s Hill he could pay his debts and still live in the neighborhood, which suited him and Rachel quite well.

Negotiating the switch required some ingenuity, but during the summer of 1804 Jackson accomplished it. He sold Hunter’s Hill for $10,000 in July and purchased Hays’s farm for $3,400 in August. The swap eased his debt burden substantially, although it damaged his cash flow, as the new place, which he and Rachel soon began calling the Hermitage, produced crops of considerably less value than Hunter’s Hill’s. The log house, moreover, was rustic compared with the home he and Rachel had been living in. But he hired a carpenter and paperhanger to spruce up the interior and added a new kitchen outbuilding a short while later. Meanwhile he set crews to work felling trees, cutting brush, erecting fences, repairing barns, and doing the hundred other chores required to make the Hermitage a profitable farm.

The heavy work on the Hermitage was done by slaves. Jackson owned fewer than a dozen field hands during the early years at the new place, but as the operations expanded he purchased more. By 1820 he held four dozen slaves, including his cook and house servants. During the next several years he continued to purchase slaves, so that by 1829 he held perhaps a hundred. This left him well short of the largest slaveholders in America—the big planters of the Carolinas and the Gulf coast, who owned several hundred slaves—but it made him one of the larger slave owners in Tennessee.

Jackson treated slavery as a business matter but one not devoid of humanity. He bought and sold slaves as his business required. He bargained for the highest prices when he was selling and the lowest when he was buying. He tried to avoid selling young children away from their mothers, in part because it was bad for business—being hard on the mothers and children—but also because it offended his sympathies. Jackson could see both the logic and the feeling in a comment by a business associate regarding a decision to rescind the sale of a young boy apart from his mother: “They are family Negroes. . . . The sale I had made and the distance would create great affliction among their relations.”

Jackson could be a hard man, as the many who ran afoul of him during his life discovered. Yet toward Rachel he was tender to a fault, as he was toward children and horses. His feelings toward slaves fell between his feelings for children and for horses. The slaves were under his authority and therefore must obey him. When they didn’t, he could be brutally severe. “Fifty Dollars Reward,” he advertised after one slave ran away. “All reasonable expenses paid—and ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred.” But if the slaves did obey him, he treated them as humanely as his need to profit by their labor allowed. He housed them decently, by the standards of the time, and he fed them fairly well. He purchased medicine for them when they became ill. His account books list “1 bottle castor oil . . . for negro woman” and “2 ozs. unguent basilic for negro man’s leg” among the prescriptions for his family and his horses.

As the operations at the Hermitage expanded, and especially as he spent more time away from home, he came to rely on overseers to manage the slaves. The overseers were a source of chronic concern to Jackson, as they frequently failed to strike what he considered the appropriate balance between authority and kindness. Cruelty was as out of place as excessive lenience. Both were bad for the slaves and bad for business. They were also bad for the reputation of a public man.

I
t was Jackson’s concern for his reputation that prompted his withdrawal from the traffic in slaves. The exit wasn’t easy or uncomplicated. In 1810 he formed a partnership with Joseph Coleman and Horace Green, the former of Nashville and the latter of Natchez. Like most of Jackson’s many partnerships, this one served multiple purposes and traded in various commodities, including cotton, tobacco, and slaves. In 1811 Green led some two dozen slaves, recently purchased from Richard Apperson, from Nashville to Natchez, where he hoped to sell them for a higher price than they could fetch on the Cumberland. But the market for slaves on the Mississippi was saturated that season, and Green found no satisfactory buyer. Apparently his tolerance for disappointment was low, for he quit the partnership suddenly, leaving the slaves with John Hutchings, an erstwhile Jackson partner.

Jackson learned of the situation several weeks later, and he traveled to the Mississippi to reclaim his property. The market for slaves hadn’t improved by the time he got there, so he brought them back to Nashville. The route crossed the lands of the Choctaws, whose agent insisted that Jackson show a passport. Jackson had no passport and moreover was already annoyed at having to travel a thousand miles to remedy another business venture gone bad. He defied the agent and pressed past him to Nashville. Upon his arrival he made a point of denouncing the man to Governor Blount and in doing so didn’t disguise the reason for his journey. Nor had he disguised it to anyone along the way. “It was well known that my business to that country was to bring away a number of negroes which had been sent to that country for sale, and from the fall of the market and scarcity of cash remained unsold,” he told Blount.

Yet seventeen years later, when Jackson was running for president, he attempted to hide his slave-trading past. His rivals had heard of the Natchez trip and now publicized it to show that Jackson dealt in human flesh. A friendly newspaper responded by publishing a document dated May 18, 1811—about the time Horace Green acquired the slaves he took to Natchez—asserting that “the said Andrew Jackson has no interest in the purchase . . . of the negroes. . . . He only holds a lien on them for the payment of the purchase money.” The wording of the affidavit is unusual. Business documents generally state matters positively rather than negatively. Equally curious, and perhaps more significant, is that the original document, if any, has disappeared.