Andrew Jackson and the slave trade in the United States

Gen. Jackson's Negro Speculations, And His Traffic In Human Flesh, Examined And Established by Positive Proof (1828), Miscellaneous Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress

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

The question of whether Andrew Jackson had been a "negro trader" was a campaign issue during the 1828 United States presidential election. Jackson denied the charges, and the issue failed to connect with the electorate. However, Jackson had indeed been a "speculator in slaves," participating in the interregional slave trade between Nashville, Tennessee (buying people from the Virginia–Tennessee–Kentucky region) and the Natchez and New Orleans slave markets of the lower Mississippi River valley. Little is known about the people Jackson sold. There are surviving records naming eight individuals carried to Mississippi: Candis, age 20, and Malinda, age 14 ($1000); a young mother named Kissiah, and her two children, a three-year-old named Ruben and an infant named Elsy ($650); a 35-year-old woman named Betty and her 15-year-old daughter Hannah ($550); and Fanny ($280).

Background

Jackson traded in enslaved people between 1788 and 1844, both for "personal use" on his property and for-profit through slave arbitrage.

Jackson's "negro speculation" slave sales took place in the Natchez District of Spanish West Florida, a North American colony of Spain bounded by the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, and the Chattahoochee River, in what is now the U.S. states of Mississippi and Alabama. This area, which became the Mississippi Territory in 1798, was then a remote southwestern frontier, initially opened by the Spanish government to American colonists on August 23, 1787. 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; estimates did not include Indigenous people resident in the area). 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 imported enslaved black people).

On the whole, Spanish Mississippi has been understudied but according to historian William S. Coker, "Population clusters were located along the creeks and bayous which emptied into the Mississippi such as the Big Black, Bayou Pierre, Cole's Creek, Fairchild's Creek, and St. Catherine's, with its two upper branches, Second and Sandy Creek. The rest of the present state of Mississippi at the time was largely Indian territory. A few families had settled on some of the rivers, notably the Tombigbee. Along the Gulf Coast, the old French settlements extended from Bay St. Louis to Pascagoula and from 1780 to 1813 were governed by the Spanish from Mobile." Mississippi became the 20th U.S. state on December 10, 1817.

History

18th century

Warren, Claiborne, and Jefferson Counties above Natchez c. 1816, showing the road from Natchez to Nashville that was later called the Natchez Trace; "Gibsonsport" (later Port Gibson) stands alongside unmarked Bayou Pierre

In 1789, Jackson built a cabin and a trading post at Bruinsburg, on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, near Old Greenville (then just newly established), and just north of Natchez: "Jackson traded in wine and 'sundries' sent from his business associate in Nashville. Those sundries included enslaved Blacks." In July 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 American traders. According to biographer Robert V. Remini, he made the acquaintance of "a great many Natchez businessmen and through them began an extensive trading operation." Preserved letters from 1790 between Jackson and "Melling Woolley, a Natchez merchant" record goods being carried from Nashville to Natchez, including "cases of wine and rum; also a snuff box, dolls, muslin, salt, sugar, knives and iron pots". Another letter of 1790 thanks Jackson for his help with "The Little Venture of Swann Skins," which some scholars believe is a euphemism for a shipment of enslaved people. 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."

Boyd McNairy's analysis of the "Coleman Green & Jackson" business model leaned heavily on italics and exclamation points (1828)

Jackson's slave trading is closely tied to the related Robards–Donelson–Jackson relationship controversy. 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. 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." According to a letter by an author writing pseudonymously as Idler, from Rodney, Mississippi, dated 1854:

"We are now on hallowed grounds, for 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

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

Another letter by the same author, dated August 1854, explained that it was common in the early history of the region for travelers to float down and walk back up: "At that day the trade of the Ohio and Mississippi was carried on entirely by flatboats, keels and barges. Arrived at Natchez or New Orleans, after the cargo was sold, the flats were broken up and the gunwales converted by the City Fathers into sidewalks. Camp street was thus banquetted when I came there, in 1826. There was no other mode of returning to the West in those days except by land, and for their mutual protection they usually went in companies. As there were but few settlements on the road they were compelled to camp out, without the benefit of a tent."

A newspaper in upstate New York endorsed John Quincy Adams for president and described Jackson as a "dealer in human flesh" (Buffalo Emporium and General Advertiser, September 4, 1828)

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

Many will remember the charge brought against him pending his candidacy for the Presidency, of having been, in early life, a negro-trader, or dealer in slaves. This charge was strictly true, though abundantly disproved by the oaths of some, and even by the certificate of his principal partner. Jackson had a small store, or trading establishment, at Bruinsburgh, near the mouth of the Bayou Pierre, in Claiborne County, Mississippi. It was at this point he received the negroes, purchased by his partner at Nashville, and sold them to the planters of the neighborhood. Sometimes, when the price was better, or the sales were quicker, he carried them to Louisiana. This, however, he soon declined; because, under the 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.

Bruinsburg and environs in the 1832 edition of The Western Pilot, a navigation guide for American steamboat people

A surviving letter to Jackson from a Natchez businessman named George Cochran mentions this place, recalling "many agreeable hours" at his "friendly retreat at Bayou Pierre." The writer called "Idler" recalled Jackson and participating in foot races and wrestling matches at this spot, naming several local residents as participants in these activities. 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."

19th century

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

Jackson was still trading 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, "From Natchez, Wm. C. C. Claiborne, wrote to Andrew Jackson, Dec. 9, 1801: 'I will try to find a purchaser for your horses; as for negroes, they are in great demand and will sell well.' And again, Dec. 23, 1801: 'The negro woman he [Mr. Hutchins] has sold for $500, in cash, and I believe he has, or will in a few days sell the boy, for his own price, to Colo. West.'"

We know the most about specific trades made by Jackson in 1811. The Port Gibson Correspondent newspaper of Port Gibson, Mississippi published an "extra" edition on September 13, 1828 to address the subject of "Gen. Jackson's Negro trading.—"

We have, with astonishment, observed the attempt in Nashville to brow-beat and bully the most respectable gentlemen from asserting publicly what is the absolute truth: that Gen. Andrew Jackson was, in the year 1811, a dealer in Negroes: and, believing it to be our duty to expose falsehoods and to aid the truth, we do now assure all men, whether the friends or the opponents of Gen. Jackson, far and near: That in the fall of the year 1811, Gen. Jackson and John Hutchings did descend the river Mississippi and land at Bruinsburg at the mouth of the Bayou Pierre in this county, with from twenty to thirty negroes: that a number of those negroes were brought to this immediate neighborhood, and afterwards encamped for weeks at Mr. Moore's in the McCaleb settlement, ten miles from this town; that on the 27th of December, 1811, Gen. Jackson sold three negroes, "a woman named Kissiah, with her two children, Reuben, about three years old, and a female child at the breast called Elsay, in and for consideration of the sum of $650."—that on the 28th of Dec. 1811, the very day after the former sale, and while at the same encampment, he sold to Mr. James McCaleb, of this county, two other negroes, named Candis and Lucinda, for the sum of $1000:—that he sold other negroes in this county during that trip;—that he sold some at or in the neighborhood of Bayou Sarah;—that after the belief became general in this country that war would be declared against Great Britain, the planters were indisposed to buy negroes, as the market for their cotton would be closed, Gen. Jackson resolved to return to Tennessee, with the remnant of his drove; that while he had his negroes encamped near Mr. James McCaleb's, and was making his preparations to pass through the Indian nation, he was informed by one of the most respectable citizens of this county, now living in it, of the law requiring passports for slaves; of the resolute character of Mr. Dinsmore, and of his punctilious execution of the duties of his office as Indian Agent: These things we do most unequivocally and unhesitatingly charge and assert. We do so on the best of authority,—the notoriety of the facts; the declarations gentlemen of whose truth no doubt can or will be entertained; from written documents, of various kinds, in the hand writing of Gen. Jackson himself: as also from the affidavit of Mr. William Miller of this county, who came down on board the boat with Gen. Jackson and his negroes; all of which we have heard and read. These things Gen. Jackson cannot, dare not, and will not, himself deny; whatever he may suffer others to do."

Slaves trafficked by Jackson and partners from Nashville to Natchez would likely have been walked through the Sunken Trace near Port Gibson in chained packs called coffles

In 1812, Jackson got into a dispute with a Choctaw agent named Silas Dinsmoor who was determined to enforce a regular that every enslaved person crossing through the Choctaw Nation possess a document identifying their legal owner and the purpose of their travel. The intention was to prevent runaway enslaved people from using the Choctaw lands as a refuge, which in turn would hopefully reduce complaints from white settlers about the Choctaw. Jackson disliked Dinsmore enforcing this rule, and while traveling, he "happened to pass by Dinsmore's agency with a considerable number of slaves, the property of a business firm (Jackson, Coleman and Green) of which he was now an inactive partner." Dinsmore was not at the agency when Jackson passed by. Still, Jackson left a note promising a future confrontation with Dinsmore, who persisted in regulating the passage of enslaved people over the Trace. Jackson later saw to it that Dismore was removed from his post. According to The Devil's Backbone, a history of the Natchez Trace, "No explanation has been made as to why Jackson felt this passport ruling was unreasonable when applied to him, except that Wilkinson's treaty of 1801 opened the road through the Indian nations to all white travelers, and presumably also to their slaves."

Benjamin Lundy covered the story in July 1827, and retold a separate tale about Jackson having whipped a recaptured runaway slave he tied to a joist in a blacksmith shop in Alabama

American abolitionist Benjamin Lundy covered the controversy in his newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, or American Anti-Slavery Journal and Register of News. Lundy felt that there was evidence for Jackson escorting two separate droves for sale, and that Jackson had provided 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."

Specific sales

The receipts resurfaced in part because Abraham Green had died October 6, 1826, and his estate was still being settled in the 1828 election year; Abraham Green's mother-in-law and Andrew Jackson's wife were sisters ("Valuable Plantation and Negroes for Sale" The Weekly Natchez Courier, March 22, 1828)

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

Another sale documented by the Correspondent was the sale of Malinda and Candis on December 28, 1811. The Correspondent stated that the sale record was entirely in Jackson's handwriting (except for the signatures of the witnesses) and "could be viewed at the office of the Democratic Press at any time between the hours 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. daily." Malinda was described as being "about fourteen years old of a yellow complecion." Candis was said to be "about 20 years old of a black complection formerly owned by Mary Coffery." The buyer, James McCaleb, paid $1,000 for the pair. According to May Wilson McBee's extracts of Natchez District court records, in 1804 James McCaleb had filed a claim for "555 acres on Boggy Br. of North Fork of Bayou Pierre, 3 mi. east of Grindstone Ford, Plat shows 513 acres adj. Wm. Kilcrease, John Robinson, Abner Green and the old survey of Catura Proctor." McCaleb also operated a "gin" near Bayou Pierre circa 1814.

Denial and coverup

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

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. Moreover, allies of Jackson were recruited to swear it was not true. The editorial page of The Ariel newspaper of Natchez, Mississippi wrote, "It is a matter of astonishment that the friends of Gen. Jackson have the hardihood to deny that in the year 1811, their idol was not actually and personally engaged in the sale of Negroes as an object of speculation, because like almost every other charge brought against him, the more they endeavor to 'hide the crimes they see' and to screen him from odium, the deeper they impress on the minds of the investigating the strength of the evidence which support them. To the sale of negroes as an object of speculation, the General's bank transactions which have been published at Nashville, show how those negroes were purchased—with this however we have nothing to do—but we unhesitatingly state, that in 1811 Gen. Jackson sent on a number of negroes to this state for sale, they were brought down the river, and landed, at Bayou Pierre forty-five miles from Natchez, in Claiborne county. The General came here to attend to the sales himself, sold some, but in consequence of the low price of cotton he took the remainder back to Tennessee, with the hope to realize a greater profit, not however without first taking them to Washington, six miles from this place and offering them for sale. These facts are known to numbers in this state. We have in our possession two bills of sale, signed by Andrew Jackson, and not by any firm, and we expect in a few days to receive several more.—We publish one of the Bills of Sale, not thinking it necessary unless urged by circumstances to give any more. The one we publish is dated December 27th, 1811, and the Nashville Republican the General's official paper admits that he took back negroes to Tennessee in 1812."

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

As retold in a Mississippi history journal article published 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."

Influence

Mississippi map from Indian land cessions in the United States (1898), showing tribal landmarks, cession boundaries, the Natchez Trace, and Gen. Jackson's Old Military Road

Andrew Jackson's business model and actions as part of Coleman Green & Jackson met the definition of "slave trader" as understood by abolitionists. Still, 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." Further to the point, some Jacksonian scholars have argued that it was Jackson's status as a wealthy enslaver and former slave trader that made him politically attractive to certain voters. If nothing else, according to biographer Remini, Jackson and his allies "believed that 'slaveholding was as American as capitalism, nationalism, or democracy'."

See also

• Andrew Jackson § Planting career and slavery
• Category:People who were enslaved by Andrew Jackson
• James Robinson, whose 1858 slave narrative described Jackson's use of Natchez District slaves during the Battle of New Orleans
• Cypress Grove Plantation – President Zachary Taylor's slave-labor camp in Jefferson County, Mississippi, about 15 miles (24 km) south of where Jackson's stand had been
• Forks of the Road slave market
• Natchez-Under-the-Hill
• List of slave traders of the United States
• List of presidents of the United States who owned slaves
• History of slavery in Mississippi
• History of slavery in Tennessee
• Coffin Handbills
• Glossary of American slavery
• Bibliography of the slave trade in the United States
• Finley's 1827 map of Mississippi via Wikimedia Commons

References

Sources

• Bancroft, Frederic (2023) [1931, 1996]. Slave Trading in the Old South (Original publisher: J. H. Fürst Co., Baltimore). Southern Classics Series. Introduction by Michael Tadman (Reprint ed.). Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-64336-427-8. LCCN 95020493. OCLC 1153619151.
• Cheathem, Mark R. (April 2011). "Andrew Jackson, Slavery, and Historians". History Compass. 9 (4): 326–338. doi:10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00763.x.
• Coker, William S. (1972). "Research in the Spanish Borderlands: Mississippi, 1779–1798". Latin American Research Review. 7 (2): 40–54. doi:10.1017/S0023879100041364. JSTOR 2502625.
• Daniels, Jonathan (1971) [1962]. The Devil's Backbone: The Story of the Natchez Trace. American Trails Series. Map and headpieces by Leo and Diane Dillon (1st paperback ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. ISBN 978-0-07-015306-6. LCCN 61018131. OCLC 6148466 – via Internet Archive.
• Forman, Samuel (2021). Ill-fated frontier: peril and possibilities in the early American West. Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press. ISBN 978-1-4930-4462-7.
• Gudmestad, Robert (2003). A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade, 1808–1840. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0-8071-2884-8. LCCN 2003009434. OCLC 1412563835.
• Lundy, Benjamin, ed. (July 19, 1828). "Jackson Again". The Genius of Universal Emancipation, or American Anti-Slavery Journal, and Register of News. Vol. VIII, no. 206. Baltimore, Maryland: Microfilmed by Open Court Publishing Co. p. 178. New series, No. 22, Vol. II – via Internet Archive.
• McBee, May Wilson (1953). The Natchez Court Records, 1767–1805: Abstracts of Early Records. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Edwards Brothers, Inc. – via Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, Internet Archive.
• Remini, Robert V. (1977). Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. ISBN 978-0-8018-5912-0. OCLC 1145801830.
• 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.
• Rowland, Mrs. Dunbar (1910). "Marking the Natchez Trace: An Historic Highway of the Lower South". Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. XI. Jackson, Mississippi: 345–361. hdl:2027/mdp.39015039482057 – via HathiTrust.
• Rowland, Mrs. Dunbar (1921). "Mississippi Territory in the War of 1812". Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. Centenary Series. IV. Jackson, Mississippi: 7–233. hdl:2027/nyp.33433081900437 – via HathiTrust.
• Smith, Lee Davis (2004). A settlement of great consequence: the development of the Natchez District, 1763–1860 (Master thesis). Louisiana State University (LSU). 2133.
• Sparks, W. H. (1870). The memories of fifty years: containing brief biographical notes of distinguished Americans and anecdotes of remarkable men. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger. hdl:loc.gdc/scd0001.00100906478. LCCN 06005624. OCLC 1048818176. OL 23365380M.  This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
• 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. Project MUSE 572973.
• Watson, Thomas Edward (1912). The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson. Press of the Jeffersonian Publishing Company. LCCN 14003722. OCLC 3218913.

Further reading

• Heiskell, S. G. (November 19, 1922). "General Andrew Jackson and the Natchez Country". The Commercial Appeal. Memphis, Tennessee. p. 62. Retrieved 2024-08-15.

External links

• WikiSource: Gen. Jackson's Negro Speculations, and His Traffic in Human Flesh, Examined and Established by Positive Proof
• Matthews, Dylan (April 20, 2016). "Andrew Jackson was a slaver, ethnic cleanser, and tyrant. He deserves no place on our money". Vox.