29 The Hireling and Slave

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of night or the gloom of the grave

Oh, say, does that star spangled banner yet wave [etc.] …

—Francis Scott Key, “Defense of Fort McHenry,” third verse

TO DESCRIBE MORE FULLY the Jacksonian context, we will briefly backtrack our chronology to quote a journal entry by a clergyman from the year Andrew Jackson was born—1767—and the place: Waxhaw, deep in the wooded, swampy hinterlands on the North Carolina side of the border between the Carolinas.

The most detailed account we have of this frontier life, albeit a biased one, is that of Anglican pastor Charles Woodmason, who was appalled. Woodmason had been shunned by Charleston society for having accepted a commission as a Stamp Act collector in 1765. He changed his life after that; apparently motivated by spiritual concerns, he was ordained so that he could become a circuit-riding Anglican (or Episcopal) priest on the frontier, where the Church of England had no institutional presence but where there were New Light Baptists, Presbyterians, Dunkards, Quakers, and more. (He ultimately returned to Britain after being stigmatized as a Tory.)

[I went to] the Settlement of Irish Presbyterians called the Waxaws, among whom were several Church People…. This is a very fruitful fine Spot, thro’ which the dividing Line between North and South Carolina runs … a finer Body of Land is no where to be seen—But it is occupied by a Sett of the most lowest vilest Crew breathing—Scotch Irish Presbyterians from the North of Ireland—They have built a Meeting House and have a Pastor, a Scots Man among them—A good sort of Man—He once was of the Church of England … His Congregation is very large—This Tract of Land being most surprisingly thick settled beyond any Spot in England of its Extent—seldom less than 9, 10, 1200 People assemble of a Sunday—They never heard an Episcopal Minister, or the Common Prayer, and were very curious.¹

Woodmason’s memoir leaves no doubt that if politics was the popular entertainment of the cities, religion was the great organized participatory experience for the unlettered people of the frontier, as per his outraged description of a New Light Baptist service:

There are so many Absurdities committed by them [New Light Baptists], as wou’d shock one of our Cherokee Savages; And was a Sensible Turk or Indian to view some of their Extravagancies it would quickly determine them against Christianity. Had any such been in their Assembly as last Sunday when they communicated, the Honest Heathens would have imagin’d themselves rather amidst a Gang of frantic Lunatics broke out of Bedlam, rather than among a Society of religious Christians, met to celebrate the most sacred and Solemn Ordnance of their Religion. Here, one Fellow mounted on a Bench with the Bread, and bawling, See the Body of Christ, Another with the Cup running around, and bellowing—Who cleanses his Soul with the Blood of Christ, and a thousand other Extravagancies—One on his knees in a Posture of Prayer—Others singing—some howling—These Ranting—Those Crying—Others dancing, Skipping, Laughing and rejoycing. Here two or 3 Women falling on their Backs, kicking up their Heels, exposing their Nakedness to all Bystanders and others sitting Pensive, in deep Melancholy lost in Abstraction, like Statues, quite insensible—and when rous’d by the Spectators from their pretended Reveries Transports, and indecent Postures and Actions declaring they knew nought of the Matter. That their Souls had taken flight to Heav’n, and they knew nothing of what they said or did. Spect[at]ors were highly shocked at such vile Abuse of sacred Ordinances!²

While Dr. Woodmason never adapted to such a performative religious experience, he did become a voice for the settlers, helping them draft a remonstrance when they organized as “regulators”—vigilantes—in their own defense against roving gangs of bandits. Plantation slavery had not been developed upcountry yet; according to Woodmason, that was because the hazards of warlordism made it hard for white settlers to bring in slaves:

… the people wearied out with being expos’d to the Depredations of Robbers—Set down here just as a Barrier between the Rich Planters and the Indians, to secure the former against the Latter—Without Laws or Government Schools or Ministers—No Police established—and all Property quite insecure—Merchants as fearful to venture their Goods as Ministers their Persons—The Lands, tho’ the finest in the Province unoccupied, and rich Men afraid to set Slaves to work to clear them, lest they should become a Prey to the Banditti—No Regard had to the numberless petitions and Complaints of the people—Thus neglected and slighted by those in Authority, they rose in Arms—pursued the Rogues, broke up their Gangs—burnt the dwellings of all their Harbourers and Abettors—Whipp’d and drove the Idle, Vicious and Profligate out of the Province, Men and Women without Distinction and would have proceeded to Charleston in a Regular Corps of 5000 Men, and hung up the Rogues before the State House in Presence of Governor and Council.

For the Mildness of Legislation here is so great and the Clemency of the Cheif [sic] in Authority has been carried to such Excess that when a notorious Robber was with Great Pains catch’d and sent to Town, and there try’d and Condemn’d he always got pardon’d by Dint of Money, and came back 50 times worse than before. The fellows thus pardon’d form’d themselves into a large Gang, ranging the province with Impunity.³ (emphasis added)

That was the world Andrew Jackson grew up in: militantly defensive, self-reliant, and deeply distrustful of government. As a young man, Jackson relocated to the western part of North Carolina, which was now being called Tennessee and was where many veterans of the war with the British were settling. Jackson set up shop as a lawyer in the frontier town of Nashville, which was becoming a business center for the settlers who were pouring into the area. By 1789, he was traveling down the hazardous Wilderness Road—a 450-mile forest path through Native American territory plagued by “land pirates”—to do business in Natchez.

Natchez was already functioning as a slave market in the late 1780s, when the region’s agricultural output was still relatively minor, consisting mostly of tobacco and indigo. It had the distinction of having been a French town, a Spanish town, a British town, and a Spanish town again, with elements of all those populations. It was the site of the Indian uprising that ended French colonial plans for Louisiana. A 1790 report called it “an English [meaning, English-speaking] settlement, subject to the Spaniards,” and by then it had “many negroes,” in the words of Mississippi historian Charles S. Sydnor.⁴

Jackson was a product of the militia system, in which he was a leading officer. Like other merchants, he bought and sold slaves as part of his commercial activity. He was also a horse breeder and a racing enthusiast; a lawyer, land speculator, and plantation owner; a pathological hater of English, Spanish, Creek Indians, and anyone who crossed him; and a master of intimidation—all of which was consonant with being a slave trader.

“Between court terms in Tennessee,” writes Jackson’s biographer Robert V. Remini, “Jackson frequently dropped down to Natchez, where he brought [to Natchez traders] such items as cotton, furs, swan skins and feathers for bedding, lime, pork, beef, boats, and”—the final word in the list seems discreetly tucked in—“slaves.”⁵ In Remini’s delicate words, Jackson carried slaves “frequently” from Nashville to Natchez as a “courtesy” to “his friends,” though that belies the physical effort necessary to transport a prisoner through 450 or so miles of wilderness in the late eighteenth century.

A young white man’s first significant investment on the road to wealth acquisition might well be a young black woman, rather than what the slave trade called a “prime hand.” Such seems to have been the case with Jackson when he was twenty, as per a November 17, 1788, “Bill of Sale from Micajah Crews to Andrew Jackson Esquire for a Negro Woman named Nancy about Eighteen or Twenty Years of Age.” Nancy was the first slave that we have any record of Jackson having purchased, and her purchase was one of his first transactions of any sort of which we have a record. He may have purchased her with the intention of reselling her; we know nothing about what kind of use he put her to, nor do we know anything else about her. The bill of sale is the only indication that Nancy existed.⁶ Between 1790 and 1794, writes Remini, Jackson purchased “at least sixteen slaves … They measured his steady progress toward economic security” while he pursued a career as a merchant and a real estate speculator.⁷

In July 1794, Jackson made a great real estate deal when he became co-owner of some five thousand acres of the lower Chickasaw Bluff, marvelously situated on the Tennessee side overlooking the Mississippi River, where the Wolf River empties into it. The land’s previous owner, the trader John Rice, had bought it in 1783, while it was still part of North Carolina—though under then-current law North Carolina had no right to sell it, as it was Chickasaw land. Rice was killed by Native Americans on his way back from a Nashville-Natchez run in 1791, throwing the property onto the market. The lawyer and slave trader John Overton, a Virginia-born Nashville transplant, purchased it in partnership with Jackson, his lifelong close ally.⁸

Though the area was as yet unpopulated by whites, it was the best site for a town along a far stretch of the Mississippi. Four decades later, in 1830, when steamboats ruled the transportation economy, Overton retroactively credited himself with foresight: “I always … considered that at some day, the water privilege attached to the banks would be worth more than all the lots and lands about the place.”⁹ Jackson had little to do with the property, other than making a profit on his share when he sold it; a third partner, General James Winchester, gave the settlement its fanciful Nile-istic name: Memphis.¹⁰

The Mississippi Territory was organized in 1798, and the United States took over administration of it in 1801. The United States Army went to work building the Natchez Trace—a road of sorts, along the route of the Wilderness Road, to connect the town with Nashville. Fortunately for Jackson, his friend from Tennessee and former colleague in Congress, President Jefferson’s protégé William Charles Cole Claiborne, was now the Mississippi Territory’s first US governor. Claiborne, who addressed Jackson effusively in his letters, made Jackson’s family emissary John Hutchings welcome, helped him find buyers for slaves and horses he had brought, and helpfully advised Jackson of the progress by mail. Claiborne wrote him on December 9, 1801:

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.¹¹

Claiborne wrote Jackson again on December 23, informing him of young Hutchings’s accomplishment as a slave trader: “The Negro Woman he has sold for 500 dolls. in Cash, and I belive he has, or will in a few days sell the Boy, for his own price, to Colo. West.”¹²

Jackson must have been an effective frontier businessman. A violent man and an eager duelist, he once challenged another lawyer for mocking his knowledge of the law. Whether dealing with slaves, soldiers, or politicians, he was an authoritarian leader who, in Remini’s words, “could hate with a Biblical fury and would resort to petty and vindictive acts to nurture his hatred and keep it bright and strong and ferocious.”¹³ When in 1804 he advertised in the Tennessee Gazette for the return of a runaway slave, he made the extraordinarily vicious offer of “ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred.”¹⁴

Jackson got a bad reputation when he killed Charles Dickinson in a May 30, 1806, duel. After Jackson’s pistol jammed and did not fire during the first exchange, he was allowed to recock his pistol and fire a second shot. With a disadvantaged opponent, the gallant move would have been to fire the pistol into the air, shake hands, and considered honor avenged. But there was no doubt that Dickinson had intended to kill Jackson. Dickinson, who made his money on the interregional slave trade by, as Jackson later described, “purchasing Negroes in Maryland and carrying them to Natchez & Louis[ian]a,” had put a bullet into Jackson that fractured a rib or two and, in Remini’s words, “lodged in the chest cavity close to his heart and impinged on his left lung.”¹⁵ Streaming blood from his chest wound, Jackson took aim and shot Charles Dickinson in cold blood from a distance of twenty-four feet. The bullet entered Dickinson’s intestines, and he lived with no hope of recovery, in mortal pain, until he expired about ten o’clock that night. The bullet in Jackson’s body remained there the rest of his life, one of a number of excruciating pains he lived with. The duel had been over a quarrel stemming from a horse race with a $3,000 purse.

Like many other merchants, Jackson traded in slaves along with everything else—horses, cattle, dry goods, and especially land speculation, which was the foundation of a great many fortunes in Jackson’s day. Jackson made much money selling Tennessee plots to land speculators in Philadelphia, for which he typically got paid in paper, which he traded for goods, which he then had to sell at his own stores. Slaves, however, were cash transactions, as we see in a letter from Jackson’s nephew Donelson Caffery, who was attempting to get started as a merchant, apparently in partnership with Jackson. Caffery wrote him from Bayou Sarah in West Feliciana Parish on May 20, 1810, which was at the time part of the nominally Spanish-controlled area that was about to briefly declare itself the independent Republic of West Florida and would come under Claiborne’s control by year’s end:

I am sorry to inform you that I fear from the situation of this Country business cannot be done to advantage[.] It is true Goods may be sold on credit, but contrary to the opinion I had form’d from the accounts of people; There is no such thing as making collections … As soon as I can make sale of some Negroes, I will go to New Orleans to buy Groceries[.] it’s the only business that can be done here for Cash.¹⁶

There are various instances of Jackson’s using “negroes” in settlement of accounts. A 1795 letter to him requesting him to purchase land for one Joseph Anderson notes that “it would suit me to pay for it, either in a negro and Horses, or in Horses and some Money.”¹⁷ Jackson’s slave-trading past became a political hot potato when he later ran for president. During the election of 1828, a pamphlet authored by a man with whom Jackson had been in litigation over land deals, Andrew Erwin, bore the memorable title of Gen. Jackson’s Negro Speculations, and his Traffic in Human Flesh, Examined and Established by Positive Proof. It brought up a story about which Jackson had to issue a clarification: in a not unusual transaction for the time and place, the mercantile firm of Jackson & Hutchings in 1806 accepted a thirteen-year-old “negro boy” as partial payment to close out a three-year-old debt. In Jackson’s words, “The negro boy was recd. & the account with Rawlings & Bradford closed.” As was all too common in such stories, it had a sad ending: the boy, whose name was Charles, was kept at the Clover Bottom racetrack, run by Jackson’s friends. One of them, William Preston Anderson, bet him in a race and lost him, and Charles subsequently died from an unspecified disease.¹⁸

Jackson was the partner with capital and credit in Coleman, Green, and Jackson, founded in 1810 to sell cotton and tobacco from Nashville to Natchez. After losing money on a cotton deal, the partners attempted to recoup the expenses by going into slaves, buying a group of them from a tavern dealer in Virginia. The men, as Jackson later noted, were received naked; it was not uncommon for a seller to palm off the expense of clothing them on the buyer. The junior partner, Horace Green of Natchez, took the slaves down to Natchez by boat in the summer of 1811, but no one was buying. Business was terrible. Britain was hammering at American shipping pursuant to its Orders in Council, and commerce was dead. It was clear that war was coming with Britain, and there would likely be a naval blockade that would prevent taking the cotton crop out of New Orleans.

Finding a weak market, Green traded a few of the unfortunate people for horses before Jackson arranged for John Hutchings to take them over and house them at his nearby plantation until he could come down personally to salvage what he could of the fiasco. Failing to sell the slaves himself, Jackson drove the unsold slaves back to Nashville, taking the unheard-of step of driving a coffle of slaves from the destination back to the point of origin, through Choctaw and Chickasaw territory.¹⁹ From Natchez he wrote his wife, Rachel, on December 17, 1811:

on tomorrow I shall set out from here homewards, on the Biopierre [Bayou Pierre][.] I expect to be detained Some days preparing the negroes for the wilderness[.] … 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. Fields [the overseer] where to have the house built for them.²⁰

Meanwhile, an apocalyptic fear ran through the region. The New Madrid earthquake, with its epicenter in Arkansas, still believed to be the strongest earthquake ever to hit that part of the country, had struck on December 16, and the aftershocks were continuing. Navigating the Mississippi had become impossible, creating economic havoc in New Orleans. On the way back to Nashville with his coffle, Jackson, already in a bad mood, ran afoul of the federal Choctaw Indian agent, Silas Dinsmore, whose post on the road between Nashville and Natchez, as mandated by law, required passports for slaves being transported. Dinsmore was in the habit of confiscating undocumented slaves, thus creating a barrier for slave traders along the main trading artery. Jackson, who saw Dinsmore as a “highway robber,” defied him, bringing his train through with a conspicuous show of arms. He subsequently began a campaign to have Dinsmore removed from his post, writing to Tennessee governor Willie Blount a letter that bluntly threatened arson and murder: “from the conduct of Silas in this as well as in other cases he must be removed, or our citizens will rise and burn his Tavern and Store with Silas in the middle of them.”²¹

Jackson subsequently refused to pay his partner Green’s invoiced expenses, charging that Green was padding the bill to pay his gambling debts, that his transportation and provisions expenses were too high, and that he had hired the “negroes” out in Natchez and pocketed the proceeds. Like a number of items of Jackson’s correspondence, his letter to the arbitrator appears to have been composed in a fit of passionate anger, but from it we can learn something about the deal. Needless to say, it shows not a bit of concern for the victims of his business, who had been trafficked from Virginia to Natchez, then made to trek through the wilderness back up to Nashville. Jackson’s concern was that he was being cheated on the money:

I also found from examining the ac[coun]ts 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 …

[F]rom every inquiry I have made on the subject, [I find] 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 …

Three months of provisions was talked of as necessary to be laid in as an outfit … let us take the soldiers ration for the Basis—there was 25 grown negroes with two sucking children they always count with the mother—then say 25 for three months will take 1125 lb. Beacon [bacon] … let us give $60 for cloathing (there was 13 wenches one habit each[,] the fellows recd naked) …

It was agreed on all hand that the Natchez was glutted with negroes … a sacrafice will be upon the negroes of at least $1500 if not $2000.²²

The trip was, unsurprisingly, hard on the captives. Jackson wrote his sister-in-law, Mary Caffery, who was eager to purchase a laborer: “The negro fellows that I brought through with me owing to their exposure in the wilderness have all been sick and were the[y] well neither* of them is such that I could recommend to you.”²³ Jackson never described the condition of the women and children, torn away from their families, who endured the round-trip forced march.

Given the documentation of this episode that exists, it appears safe to say that Andrew Jackson is the only US president that we know of who personally drove a slave coffle. But then, Jackson was also the first president to have been a merchant.

New England did not want the War of 1812; the Southerners did. They got what they wanted: under cover of war with Britain, a substantial chunk of the Deep South was made safe for plantation slavery when Andrew Jackson vanquished the Creek Nation and took its land.

Jackson was at home at the estate outside Nashville that he called the Hermitage when word arrived: a thousand or so Creek Indians had on August 30, 1813, committed a massacre of some 250 men, women, and children at Fort Mims in Alabama, in retaliation for a murderous attack on them by two settlers who had taken refuge there. They dashed out the brains of children, it was said, swinging them by their legs to bash their heads against the walls, and they slit open the bellies of live pregnant women. They carried off the slaves to be their servants—meaning, they stole the most valuable property there. Among the dead at Fort Mims were 160 unfortunate soldiers under the command of W. C. C. Claiborne’s brother, Ferdinand L. Claiborne, who escaped harm.

Creek Indians were the very devil to white Tennesseans. South Carolina had fought the two-year Yamassee War against them almost a century before. Georgians had been fighting them since their colony was established. The people of Jackson’s society considered it their duty to kill them as a matter of their own survival. For Jackson, the Indians were the flunkeys of the British, as were the Spanish; Britain and Spain were at this point allies, after the humiliation Napoleon had wreaked on Spain. With the United States at war with Britain at last, he sought to neutralize the British in the South by repressing their indigenous allies.

When word of Fort Mims arrived, the forty-eight-year-old Jackson was nursing a broken arm with a slug newly embedded in his shoulder, ten days after a seven-man gun battle in the town’s streets against future senator Thomas Hart Benton and his brother. With a seemingly limitless tolerance for pain, he set out on horseback with his swollen arm in a sling to command a militia that would accomplish the white settlers’ agenda: the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from the entire South east of the Mississippi. It took Jackson multiple campaigns over many years to finish the job, which required his attainment of the presidency to complete. Remini describes Jackson’s intention:

Certainly by 1813, if not earlier, Jackson’s course of action was fixed. He intended to eliminate all foreigners along the southern frontier as a necessary prelude to the systematic destruction of the Indian menace and the territorial expansion of the American nation.²⁴

Jackson described his immediate mission unequivocally: “to carry a campaign into the heart of the Creek nation and exterminate them.”²⁵ Though the Creeks were feared for their ambushes, they were unsuccessful at defending themselves against pursuit by organized armies hell-bent on killing them. The conflict had begun as a civil war among the Creeks, pitting the traditionalist Red Sticks, allied with Britain, against the more accommodationist Lower Creeks. Exploiting the division, Jackson ended by wiping out the Creek Nation, burning Native American towns wherever he found them and defeating a force he estimated at four thousand warriors; the Creeks had black slaves, who also participated in combat against US forces and were killed. As the defeated Red Sticks retreated to Spanish Florida, Jackson treated his allies among the Creeks as harshly as if they had been the losers, forcing hard terms on them and expropriating some twenty-two million acres of their land in what is now Alabama and southern Georgia.

Jackson did it without much in the way of resources with which to arm, feed, clothe, and pay his troops, who were frequently in a state of near or actual mutiny. Without a national bank, the federal government had to borrow from state banks, but the largest amount of specie was unavailable for Southern use, because it was in Massachusetts and Connecticut banks, who lent it to Britain instead. During the War of 1812, “New England banks were financial agents of the enemy,” writes Henry Adams. “Boston bought freely British treasury notes at liberal discount, and sent coin to Canada in payment of them.” Another embargo, from December 1813 to April 1814, cut off Southern exports, resulting in a net outflow of what specie there was from that region to New England.²⁶

At the end of the Creek War, Jackson returned eighteen “negroes” who had been captured by the Creeks at Fort Mims to their lawful owners. In three Native American camps, his men found “one hundred and fifty scalps the greater part of which were females supposed to be taken at Fort Mimms.”²⁷

The enslaved of the Chesapeake began slipping away to the British invaders as soon as they arrived. They were particularly valuable defectors, because they could serve as guides to the area. This ongoing drain became formalized as a military strategy on April 2, 1814, when, much as Lord Dunmore had previously done, Admiral Alexander Cochrane, the new British commander, issued a proclamation from Bermuda “that all those disposed to emigrate … will have their choice of either entering into his Majesty’s sea or land forces, or of being sent as FREE settlers to the British positions in north America or the West Indies.”²⁸

Cochrane was attempting to incite slave revolt. Knowing the white Southerners’ fear of black violence—especially in Louisiana, which had so many white survivors of Saint-Domingue—he imagined thousands of runaway slaves joining his troops. A diversionary force sent to harass coastal South Carolina and Georgia under Rear Admiral George Cockburn included black West Indian troops, with the explicit intention of instilling the fear that a British-supported slave insurrection was under way.²⁹ One hundred thirty-eight of Pierce Butler’s slaves ran away, a loss for him calculated by Roswell King Jr. at $61,450.³⁰

Unfortunately for the Americans, the British invasion came at a time when Britain had a surplus capacity of well-trained, victorious soldiers. A beaten Napoleon had abdicated on April 11, 1814, and in August, Cockburn’s troops landed in Maryland and marched toward Washington. After the Baltimore militia turned tail and fled at the Battle of Bladensburg on August 24, the British entered the capital city. President James Madison left the debacle at Bladensburg, and returned to Washington to find the White House in the process of evacuating. He fled to the countryside, humiliated.

British forces under Admiral Cockburn entered Washington, burning the White House, the Treasury, part of the Capitol, and whatever was in the Library of Congress up to that point, while sparing civilian property. Their targeted arson in the capital city was widely believed to have been undertaken in reprisal for the inexcusable American plundering and partial burning of York (Toronto) in April 1813. A providentially violent thunderstorm blunted the British invasion of Washington, and they quickly retreated, having made their point.

The British offensive into the Chesapeake was stopped at Baltimore.

The War of 1812 is not well remembered today—except for its two most heroic tableaux, both of which inspired familiar songs.

When the British forces continued on from Washington to Baltimore on the night of September 13, 1814, they failed to get past Fort McHenry, which controlled the access to the town at the mouth of the Patapsco River. The Americans had plenty of gunpowder—the factory of E. I. du Pont de Nemours was in nearby Wilmington, Delaware—and there was a prolonged cannonade that stopped the British advance. “For two hours,” writes Harold R. Manakee, “houses in Baltimore, four miles distant, trembled on their foundations.”³¹

One week after the battle, Francis Scott Key’s lyric “Defense of Fort McHenry” was published in full on page two of the two-page Baltimore American and Commercial Daily Advertiser of September 21, 1814, though it subsequently became better known as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” To indicate how it should be sung, it was sufficient to place at the head of Key’s lyric the name of the risqué and ubiquitous English glee club drinking song his words had been composed to fit: “Tune — Anacreon in Heaven,” the final two lines of which read in the original:

And besides, I’ll instruct you like me to entwine

The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.

Frank Key, a twenty-five-year-old lawyer from Georgetown,* was a slaveowner and, as he would demonstrate in his later career, a thoroughgoing white supremacist. As of 1806, he was the brother-in-law of Roger B. Taney, another politically savvy slaveowning Maryland lawyer. Out of the successful defense of Baltimore, as witnessed by Key from aboard a British ship, he spun a disastrous war into something victorious.

The third, or “vengeful,” verse of Key’s poem (quoted in this chapter’s epigraph), which is never sung today, brags of terrorizing and killing “the hireling and slave,” implying that the British soldiers were mercenaries and explicitly condemning the renegade ex-property who fought as enemies of the star-spangled banner.^†

The tune was already being sung with a patriotic lyric, “Adams and Liberty,” in praise of John Adams, but Key repurposed it—a political act, right there, which he had already attempted with an earlier lyric (in praise of Jefferson’s actions against the Barbary Pirates) that had included the phrase “the star-spangled banner.”

The other great heroic-tableau moment of the War of 1812 was, of course, kept alive in popular memory through Johnny Horton’s 1959 recording of “The Battle of New Orleans,” composed by songwriting Arkansas schoolteacher Jimmie Driftwood (“We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’ …”) The war had been ended by the Treaty of Ghent before the battle took place, but no one in America knew that yet. For Andrew Jackson, the war against Britain was never over.

New Orleans, which Jackson was tasked with saving, was well on its way to becoming one of the world’s great ports. The first steamboat arrived in New Orleans from Pittsburgh in 1811. The patrician Livingston brothers, early American practitioners of the political revolving door, were in the steamboat business with Robert Fulton (whose first steamboat was named the Clermont, the name of the Livingston estate). Robert Livingston, negotiator of the Louisiana Purchase and Fulton’s principal backer, died in February 1813, but his brother Edward, in disgrace over missing funds during his tenure as New York district attorney, had relocated to yellow-feverish New Orleans in 1804—with, wrote John Quincy Adams in his diary, “one hundred thousand dollars of the public money.”³² After his first wife died, he married a nineteen-year-old aristocratic Domingan beauty and became the attorney for slave trader and pirate Jean Lafitte. As of 1814, Livingston and Fulton were offering infrequent but regularly scheduled steamboat runs up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Natchez and back, despite the tendency of the boilers to explode, scalding workers and passengers to death, and despite the many lethal obstacles that were so many wooden land mines in the still-uncleared river.

Sugar and cotton went downstream, and now slaves could be shipped upstream: New Orleans and Natchez were already the major slave distribution hubs of the emergent Deep South. With Alabama pacified by Jackson and Louisiana a newly minted state, an economic boom was already under way, especially in New Orleans, even under wartime conditions. New Orleans was going to get the benefit of joining the United States: military aid.

The Creek War had transformed Jackson’s image from that of disreputable brawler to one of savior. He repeatedly asked James Monroe, who was doubling as secretary of state and secretary of war, for permission to seize Spanish-governed Pensacola, with the self-assigned task of driving the British and Indians away. Monroe responded “that you should at present take no measures, which would involve this Government in a contest with Spain.”³³ Jackson did it anyway. “This will put an end to the Indian war in the South,” he wrote when he informed James Monroe what he was about to do, “as it will cut off all foreign influence.”³⁴ After leaving Pensacola, he wrote Monroe, “I flatter myself that I have left such an impression on the mind of the [Spanish] Governor of Pensacola, that he will respect the American character.”³⁵

The British had been so sure of their victory that some of the officers had brought their wives, ready to assume their colonial posts after the locals were subdued. But the British troops were caught in a crossfire between massive volleys from behind earthworks and bombardment from the ship Louisiana. The one-sided killing of so many British was unprecedented in the history of two wars fought between the United States and Britain.

The Kentucky militia that came down to fight as part of Old Hickory’s motley crew didn’t even have flints for their guns. As had previously happened with Washington at Yorktown, a combination of black soldiers and Frenchmen—in this case, the Lafitte brothers’ well-trained, experienced pirate force—played key roles in carrying the day.

Jackson emerged from the slaughter covered in glory. The burning of the capital city was avenged. America would defend itself. The Mississippi River would remain open to commerce. Almost immediately the price of cotton went up sharply, giving an enormous shot in the arm to the nascent cotton kingdom and its associated slave trade.³⁷

The slaveholders of the South paid a price for the war in lost slaves, because, as in the War of Independence, once again slaves had accepted the British offer of freedom. But after mediation by the czar of Russia, the British paid $1.2 million in compensation to the slaveowners, which they could use to restock their fields with young people. The slaveowners were the ones who had wanted to go to war in the first place, and as a class, they were the solid victors of the War of 1812. Jackson’s land grab from the Creeks had made vast new acreage available for plantation slavery.

Many of the black soldiers who fought on the British side retreated to East Florida, which was still in Spanish hands and was only weakly guarded. Secretary of War William Crawford wrote Jackson on March 15, 1816, instructing him to remove a maroon community that occupied a fort built by the British in 1814 in West Florida: “It appears … that the negroe fort, erected during the war, at the junction of the Chathouchie and Flint rivers, has been strengthened since that period, and is now occupied by between two hundred and fifty and three hundred blacks, who are well armed, clothed and disciplined. Secret practices to inveigle negroes from the frontiers of Georgia, as well as from the Cherokee and Creek nations, are still continued by the negroes, and hostile Creeks.”³⁸ Jackson’s subordinate Edmund P. Gaines reported to him that “the Negroes are attempting to raise Corn … They have red Coats and are supplied with a large quantity of British muskets, Powder and other supplies.”³⁹

Free blacks wearing British redcoats, carrying guns, and teamed up with Indians: nothing could have provoked Jackson more violently. When gunboats from the US Navy attacked the “Negro Fort,” a lucky shot from their first volley hit the fort’s powder magazine. The spectacular explosion killed 270 of the 334 people in the fort—men, women, and children—and wounded all but three of the rest.⁴⁰

Meanwhile, the number of cotton plantations was exploding. As large amounts of cotton shipped out of the port of New Orleans bound for Lancashire, tens of thousands of African Americans were forcibly relocated into the area—by oceangoing vessel, by flatboat, and in coffles.

*i.e., none.

*Part of Maryland at the time Key was born, Georgetown was redistricted as the third town in the District of Columbia, along with Washington and Alexandria.

^†Hireling and the Slave was subsequently the name of a lengthy 1855 pro-slavery poem that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, furnishes the first known occurrence of the term “master race.” Written by William J. Grayson of Beaufort, South Carolina, it was prominently serialized in DeBow’s Review.