Andrew Jackson and the slave trade in the United States

This article is part of a series about Andrew Jackson
Personal Early life Revolutionary War service Early career Personal life Slave trading Military career Creek War Battle of New Orleans First Seminole War Presidential aspirations 1824 election Corrupt bargain 7th President of the United States Presidency First term 1828 campaign election 1st inauguration Jacksonian democracy Spoils system Petticoat affair Maysville veto Indian Removal Trail of Tears Nat Turner's rebellion Bank War Nullification crisis Foreign affairs Second term 1832 election 2nd inauguration Senate censure Payment of national debt Specie Circular Assassination attempts Reaction to anti-slavery tracts Texas Revolution Exploring expedition Panic of 1837 Judicial appointments Post-presidency Later life and death Legacy Legacy Memorials Manifest destiny The Hermitage Second Party System Bibliography
v t e

Andrew Jackson (lived, 1767–1845; U.S. presidency, 1829–1837) bought and sold slaves from 1788 until 1844, both for use on his plantations and for short-term gain through slave arbitrage. He was most active in the interregional slave trade, which he euphemistically termed "the mercantile transactions," from the 1790s through the 1810s. Available evidence shows that speculator Jackson trafficked people between his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, and the slave markets of the lower Mississippi River valley.

Jackson bought and sold outright, but slaves also served as barter for trade goods, currency for real estate transactions, and as stakes in gambling on horse races. While Jackson had a number of business interests in Tennessee, many of Jackson's slave sales took place in the Natchez District, Feliciana District, and in New Orleans. Jackson is believed to have had a stand in the vicinity of Bruinsburg, Mississippi (not far from Port Gibson), and/or at Old Greenville, now-extinct settlements at the southern end of an ancient and rugged Indigenous trade route known to history as the Natchez Trace. Jackson's customers included his wife's sister's extended family and their neighbors who owned tobacco farms and cotton plantations worked by slave labor. After 1800, Jackson often tasked his business partner and nephew-by-marriage John Hutchings with escorting their shipments to the lower country.

In 1812, while arguing over a coffle that he himself had shopped around Natchez, Andrew Jackson admitted in writing that he was an experienced slave trader, stating that his cost for "Negroes sent to markett [sic]...never averaged more from here than fifteen dollars a head." In addition to the substantial evidence of slaving to be found in his letters, Jackson was identified as a slave trader in his own lifetime by abolitionist writers including Benjamin F. Lundy and Theodore Dwight Weld, and there are a number of secondhand accounts attesting to Jackson's business interests in the "lower country." Jackson's slave trading was a campaign issue during the 1828 United States presidential election. Some of Jackson's accusers during the 1828 campaign had known him for decades, and were themselves affiliated with the trade. His candidacy was also opposed by a number of Natchez elites who provided affidavits or copies of Jackson's slave-sale receipts to local newspapers. Jackson denied the charges, and the issue failed to connect with the electorate.

Little is known about the people Jackson sold south. However, because of the partisan hostility of the 1828 campaign, 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 Kessiah, and her two children, a three-year-old named Ruben and an infant named Elsey ($650).