37 37A slave dreads the punishment of stripes more than he does imprisonment, and that description of punishment has, besides, a beneficial effect upon his fellow-slaves.
THERE NEVER WAS A president of the United States from Mississippi. But Tennessean James K. Polk was the absentee owner of a plantation in Mississippi, for which he bought slaves on an ongoing basis while he was a congressman, and then while he was president.1
Polk’s father, Sam Polk, was a land speculator in Tennessee, of the same generation as land speculator Andrew Jackson, who was an occasional visitor to the household when Jimmy Polk was growing up. Though Polk was as frail as Jackson was tough, the diminutive, sickly Scotch-Irish-descended lawyer was Jackson’s loyal follower. Polk, who suffered all his life from bowel disorders, was apparently sterile and perhaps impotent as the result of an unfortunate operation to remove a urinary stone, performed without anesthetic when he was sixteen. His devoted and religious wife, Sarah Childress Polk, who had no children to occupy her, was instead an active participant in Polk’s political career. She allowed no work or amusements on Sunday, would not serve spirits stronger than wine with dinner at White House functions, and would not sponsor balls with dancing. In order to cut down on the expenses of running the White House, which had to be borne by the president, she discharged its ten-member staff and replaced them with slaves who lived in the White House basement, which had drainage problems and frequently flooded.2
First elected to Congress in 1825, Polk carried Jackson’s water in the House, and with his backing became Speaker for two terms. Hoping in vain to live to an old age in which his plantation income would support him while he lived in a big house in Nashville, he bought young people, typically one at a time, as the opportunity came along or as his farming needs seemed to require.
Polk kept a diary, intended for posterity, that does not mention slaves. But perhaps because he died suddenly, his correspondence was never sanitized, and it contains an extensive paper trail, including a number of letters that document the amount of time and money he spent buying slaves while in office as well as his injunctions to keep it secret. The title of William Dusinberre’s book on the subject expresses it: Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk. In his spare time, while directing a war of conquest that would expand slavery and thus sharply increase the valuation of existing slaveholdings, Polk also directed from the White House, via an overseer, a slave-labor plantation of which he was an inept absentee landlord.
In keeping with the common capital accumulation scenario of the South, Polk rarely sold slaves; he bought them in order to grow his value through their appreciation in price and increase in number. People frequently came offering deals on slaves to his brother-in-law, who bought for him. His collected correspondence contains frequent reference to the business of “negroes” until late in his life, as well as frequent references to their illness.
Polk’s slaves were a miserable, unhealthy lot who couldn’t even sustain “natural increase” over the years. Instead, Polk tried to increase his wealth by buying more slaves—which meant people twenty-one or younger. Every one of them would have been torn away from a family before being sold, so that the social composition of his plantation labor force followed the Deep South cotton-plantation model: a collection of young people bought like mules and cut off from their familiar lives, with few natural or local connections among them, in an atmosphere of violent, daily repression.
Like any absentee plantation owner, Polk had to rely on his overseer, who whipped the workers unmercifully. An overseer’s worth was measured in short-term results—making the best crop possible this year—so his interest was at cross-purposes with the owner’s stake in the workers’ longevity. In 1832, during the cholera epidemic, Polk, then a congressman, received a letter from overseer Herbert Biles, revealing that in spite of the entire work force being sick, Biles had made them produce twenty-five thousand pounds of cotton:
I hav bad news to writ to you. Lucys youngist Child died on the 16th of the instant and the little orphin Child died yester Day and the other little girl I am afraid will go the same way…. Seasor has bean under the Doctr ever senc you ware hear with the Liver Complaint but is likley to recover. The rest of the niggars the most of them has bean sick…. I hav got out About twenty five thousand lb of Cotton and hav got on[e] lo[a]d Reddy to send down but the Colry [cholera] got to Memphis and Alarmed the people so that thay ware Afraid to gone thair.3
Polk’s farm must have been a true horror. His slaves ran away much more than was usual on a well-run plantation. One of them, Gilbert, did it ten times. After Chunky Jack and Ben had absconded and been apprehended, Polk’s brother-in-law and business advisor Silas M. Caldwell wrote him on January 4, 1834: “Your negroes here are very much dissatisfied. I believe I have got them quieted. Some others spoke of running away …” Caldwell’s letter continued, reporting a crib death (which at then-current market rates meant a loss of perhaps $75 to Polk’s net worth), and note the reference to the deceased child as “it,” and apparently to the labor force as “stock”:
Elizabeths child died last night; she smothered it somehow. No person knew it was dead until this morning. It was a very fine child … I had it Buried to day. Maria has a fine boy about one Month old. I Bot you a very fine mule and Brot down with me. I gave $100 for it out of a drove. Your stock looks very well here, your negroes have plenty of Milk.4
Another brother-in-law and business adviser, James Walker, wrote Polk that “I am not sure that to sell some of your most refractory negroes to real negro traders would not be the best thing you could do to reduce the balance to subjection, and if Chunky Jack, could with propriety be sold it ought to be done.”5 (emphasis in original)
By September 1834, Polk had sold his Tennessee plantation and was already on the trail of acquiring more labor in expectation of getting some of that unplowed Mississippi farmland that Jackson had “negotiated” away from the Indians. Hours after having closed the deal, he wrote to Sarah, telling her to keep “the negroes” ignorant of it, and bragged about having gotten a new slave and hoping to acquire another, all without spending any cash:
I am resolved to send my hands to the South, have given money to James Brown to buy a place & have employed Beanland as an overseer…. I bought Mariah’s husband a very likely boy—about 22 years old for $600. And paid for him with the notes I held on his master for land which I sold him several years ago….
P.S…. The negroes have no idea that they are going to be sent to the South and I do not wish them to know it, and therefore it would be best to say nothing about it at home, for it might be conveyed back to them….
N.B. Since writing it occurs to me, that I will have to go a day or two out of my way, with the hope of getting a negro in payment of a debt due me by Silliman to whom I sold land.6
Polk’s whip-happy overseer Ephraim Beanland wrote him on October 4 that Chunky Jack had disappeared into Shawnee Town, opposite Memphis across the Mississippi River, a hidey-hole that would have been a terrifying place to a white farmer: “On last nite I got home from the Arkensis and I hearde of Jack but never co[u]ld get Site of him and it Is supposed that he is in Shauney villige which I was advised not to go theire for they is A den of thieves and to tell you the fact I donte [think] that you will ever git him.”7
Walker, who together with partners ran a stagecoach line from Nashville to Natchez that relied on post office contracts and kept the family connection hidden through the use of a front man’s name, advised Polk on October 15, 1839, of strategies for creating an annuity for the family of Polk’s deceased brother:
The question … would be, in what kind of stocks the money could be invested with perfect safety. I should say not Bank Stock, for experience has proved that not a perfect safe investment. State Bonds bearing an interest of 6 pr. Cent would do and I think would certainly be safe. This investment could now you know be readily made. It is however probable, that a still better & more secure investment could be made, and the money and interest undoubtedly secured, by being upon land and negroes to double the amount.8
In order to keep Tennessee from falling to the Whigs, Democratic party enforcer Polk left the House to run for governor in 1839 for a two-year term; he was elected, but then was subsequently turned down by voters for a second term, then lost the next election two years later.
Isaac Franklin, who according to testimony “was warm and decided in his politics,” was a “strong Polk man.”9 We have found no documentation of Polk and Franklin having met, done business, or corresponded, but there is no way Polk didn’t know Isaac Franklin, who had the finest house in his state, was one of his wealthiest supporters, was a kingpin of the trade of which Polk was such an eager customer, and moreover was a man who knew the value of connections.
Polk was the slave traders’ candidate. Indeed, he was the embodiment of what the one-term antislavery Ohio senator Thomas Morris, in a speech of February 9, 1839, accompanying his presentation to the Senate of abolition petitions with “thousands of signatures,” called the “slave power of the south.” Morris juxtaposed this image with what he saw as the other great evil, the “banking power of the north.” “The cotton bale and the bank note,” he declaimed, “have formed an alliance; the credit system with slave labor.” Morris noted the outsized capitalization of the South in slaves, noting Henry Clay’s valuation of it at $1.2 billion and declaring that sum larger than the world’s money (i.e., precious metal) supply, which was an exaggeration but not an unthinkable one:
Permit me to tell the country now what this power behind the throne, greater than the throne itself, is. It is the power of SLAVERY. It is a power, according to the calculation of the Senator from Kentucky, which owns $1,200,000,000 in human beings as property; and if money is power, this power is not to be conceived or calculated; a power which claims human property more than double the amount which the whole money of the world could purchase.10
Meanwhile, the experience of slavery was getting worse as plantation management became more efficient. The antebellum cotton plantation of the Deep South was a much harsher regime than that of the Upper South; life as a worker there was hell on earth. Cotton planters extracted continually increasing amounts of labor through torture via a system not unlike modern time-metric monitoring of workers that Edward E. Baptist memorably calls “the whipping machine.” Under this regime, failure to meet production targets was punished by vicious, lacerative whippings at the end of the long work day. And the production targets were continually increased, pushing the worker ever harder.11 With this abusive, efficiency-conscious system in place, cotton production reached levels not seen again until mechanization.
Martin Van Buren’s entire presidency was spent combating the post-panic economic depression, and he was beaten by a Whig in the 1840 election. The Whigs had decided that if the American people wanted a warrior president, they’d run one. Their candidate, Virginia’s William Henry Harrison, hadn’t beaten the English like Jackson had, but he’d massacred Native Americans in the battle of Tippecanoe twenty-nine years earlier and had cheated them out of some three million acres of land in what we now call the Midwest. This land was above the Missouri Compromise line and as such would be free soil, but Harrison had hoped to make it slave territory the way he’d tried to make free-soil Indiana into a slave state when he was its territorial governor in 1804. The ticket’s rhyming, alliterative slogan, permanently engraved in American memory, was “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”; Harrison’s running mate, John Tyler, was an erstwhile Jacksonian and a very conservative states’-rights man—a slaveowner whose family went back to the seventeenth century in Virginia, and whose father had participated in the ratification of the Constitution.
Looking back at Van Buren’s term, Adams wrote in his diary:
[Jackson’s] personal popularity, founded exclusively upon the battle of New Orleans, drove him through his double term, and enabled him to palm upon this nation the sycophant who declared it glory enough to have served under such a chief for his successor. Both the men have been for twelve years the tool of Amos Kendall, the ruling mind of their dominion.12
Harrison was president for only thirty-two days before he caught a cold and died, occasioning the first vice presidential succession: Tyler took office on April 4, 1841. Adams and Clay were outraged that Tyler did not meekly assume the post of “acting president” but, with all but a month of a four-year term to serve, declared himself a full president, which has been the model for vice presidential succession ever since.
In later life, Tyler’s states’-rights enthusiasm was directed toward the cause of secession, and in his final days he was elected a member of the Confederate House of Representatives. As president, not surprisingly, Tyler was an aggressive booster of Texas annexation. Adams referred to him in his diary as “the slave-breeder.”13
“This was a memorable day in the annals of the world,” Adams wrote on April 22, 1844. “The treaty for the annexation of Texas to this Union was this day sent in to the Senate; and with it went the freedom of the human race.”14 Adams had been a pro-expansionist, but not any more. For both abolitionists and slaveowners, Texas was about nothing but expanding slavery. That was the year the gag rule in the House of Representatives was finally overturned, and John C. Calhoun threatened that “if the annexation of Texas is to be defeated by the same sperit [sic] which has induced the reception of abolition petitions, it is difficult to say, what may be the consequence.”15
Then a freak accident brought John C. Calhoun into the position of secretary of state as an emergency replacement for Tyler’s secretary of state, Virginian Abel Upshur, who was killed, along with seven others, when an enormous wrought-iron gun on board a new steam-powered iron warship he had commissioned exploded at its public demonstration. (Tyler was on board but survived.) As secretary of state, Calhoun’s support for Texas annexation merged entirely with his impassioned defense of slavery. In a classic case of diplomatic overreach, Calhoun portrayed the annexation of Texas as an act of self-defense for the Southern states against the possibility—for which there was no credible evidence—of the infiltration by Britain of abolitionists into Texas. He did this in a calculatedly offensive letter to British ambassador Richard Pakenham, which, when leaked by Senator Benjamin Tappan of Ohio and published on April 27, 1844, made explicit to the whole country in ringing, paranoid tones the notion that annexing Texas was essential to preserving slavery. Attempting to show that “in all instances in which the States have changed the former relation between the two races, the condition of the African, instead of being improved, has become worse,” Calhoun reached for the census of 1840, citing figures from its demographic category of “deaf and dumb, blind, idiots, and insane Negroes.”
Former president Martin Van Buren seemed like a favorite to be nominated in 1844, but he was against the annexation of Texas. Jackson, seventy-six and dying, took that as a betrayal. Had Van Buren been the one to run against Clay, Texas would not have been an issue in the election, because neither were annexationists. But Jackson wasn’t about to let that happen, and instead he threw his support to James K. Polk.
After twenty-five years as a professional politician, Polk appeared to be a has-been. But he was pro-slavery, pro-expansion, and anti-tariff, and was thus the perfect presidential candidate for Southerners. For sectional balance, his running mate was George M. Dallas, former mayor of Philadelphia and James Buchanan’s great rival in Pennsylvania.
The election turned on the issue of bringing Texas into the Union. William Seward described in a letter to Thurlow Weed a Whig rally at which “one of the banners, and the most popular one, was a white sheet, on which was Polk dragging a negro in chains after him.”16
Louis Hughes recalled in his memoir that when he was being taken by coffle down South at the age of twelve,
as we passed along, every white man we met was yelling, “Hurrah for Polk and Dallas!” They were feeling good, for election had given them the men that they wanted. The man who had us in charge joined with those we met in the hurrahing. We were afraid to ask them the reason for their yelling, as that would have been regarded as an impertinence, and probably would have caused us all to be whipped.17
The term Thomas Morris had popularized—the Slave Power—became a commonplace of abolitionist political discourse. A transform on Jackson’s demonized “Money Power” of financial capitalism, it was a useful phrase with which to describe something that really did exist. Eric Foner writes, citing Marvin Meyers: “If … the Money Power was the ‘master symbol’ for the Age of Jackson, the Slave Power was equally effective as a symbol for all the fears and hostilities harbored by northerners toward slavery and the South.”18
Only the abolitionists wanted to end slavery in the Southern states immediately; no ranking governmental official proposed such a thing, certainly not Adams. Despite the spectacularly belligerent reaction by the Slave Power to abolitionist literature, white abolitionists were few in number in the 1830s and ’40s. But many non-abolitionist white northerners were antislavery, less because of compassion for black people than because they saw slavery as setting an unacceptably low floor for working conditions.
The sectional controversy over slavery was about its expansion to the new territories. Free labor did not want to go where there was slavery, and slaveowners felt locked out of any place where they couldn’t sell slaves. Would the nation be a slave-labor nation with a free-labor section confined to the northeast, or a free-labor nation with a slave-labor section confined to the southeast? Or would it be all one way or the other: all-slavery or all-free? In 1844, Texas was the battleground.
Of the ten United States presidents up to that point, only two had been antislavery, both of them named Adams. Martin Van Buren, who grew up in a household that owned slaves who worked at the family tavern in Kinderhook, New York, had been “servile” to the Slave Power, in John Quincy Adams’s words, while riding Jackson’s power train.
As president, Van Buren had resisted the clamor for prohibition of slavery in the District of Columbia, but now he had been purged by his own party, from Jackson on down, over the annexation of Texas as a slave state.
For many observers, Polk’s nomination represented the final takeover of the Democratic Party by the Slave Power, even though South Carolina, responding to John C. Calhoun’s wishes, did not participate in the nominating convention and remained standoffish.
Both major parties held their 1844 conventions in Baltimore, an indication of how central the city had become to the country’s communications. Polk’s nomination was announced by the newly patented electrical telegraph, a machine that would make Samuel F. B. Morse’s well-connected business partner Amos Kendall very wealthy. Committing from the outset to be a one-term president, Polk won the election, barely. He was what in another era was called a wonk—focused on his agenda, which was to take as much of Mexico’s territory as he could, all the way out to California, and to settle the Oregon question with Britain.
The lame duck Tyler signed the Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas on March 1, 1845. It contemplated dividing Texas up into five states, each of which, needless to say, would get two senators.19 After becoming president, Polk signed the Joint Resolution for the Admission of the State of Texas into the Union, which did not contain the five-state clause, on December 29.
Mexico’s government had long since announced that it would consider the annexation of Texas by the United States to be an act of war.
Polk was eager to have a Mexican War.
The Mexican conquest was a warmup for the war that would be fought fifteen years later between Richmond and Washington. Many of the generals who fought in the later war, both Union and Confederate, knew each other from serving together in the Mexican War. Ulysses S. Grant, a junior officer in that war, later wrote in his memoir that “I was bitterly opposed to the measure [of annexing Texas], and to this day regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Grant’s quick summary of it will do for our purposes:
Americans who had received authority from Mexico to colonize … paid very little attention to the supreme government, and introduced slavery into the state almost from the start, though the constitution of Mexico did not, nor does it now, sanction that institution. Soon they set up an independent government of their own, and war existed, between Texas and Mexico, in name from that time until 1836, when active hostilities very nearly ceased upon the capture of Santa Anna, the Mexican President. Before long, however, the same people—who with permission of Mexico had colonized Texas, and afterwards set up slavery there, and then seceded as soon as they felt strong enough to do so—offered themselves and the State to the United States, and in 1845 their offer was accepted. The occupation, separation and annexation were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union … the Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war.20
Florida, the obsession of presidents from Jefferson to Jackson, finally became a state on March 3, 1845. Its first senator was a secessionist who would ultimately join the Confederate Congress: the sugar planter David Levy, who was already serving as Florida’s territorial representative to Congress. Levy, who owned some thirty thousand acres in the Jacksonville area, and whose Sephardic Moroccan-born father Moses Levy had been a weapons dealer in Puerto Rico and made a fortune in shipping in Cuba, became the first Jewish US senator. The following year he married a politically connected Christian woman, changed his name to David Yulee, and raised his children as Christians.
The South’s black-or-white two-caste system worked to the advantage of Jews. In the North, where anti-Jewish sentiment could be intense, they were Jews; in the South, they were white people. “For Southern Jews, loyalty to the Confederacy was often a matter of intense personal gratitude,” writes Howard M. Sachar.21 In Richmond, New Yorker Frederick Law Olmsted noted their presence with racialized distaste: “very dirty German Jews … abound, and their characteristic shops (with their characteristic smells, quite as bad as in Cologne), are thickly set in the narrowest and meanest streets, which seem to be otherwise inhabited mainly by negroes.”22
Though more Jews went to the urban areas of the North than to the South—Robert N. Rosen estimates 120,000 in the North versus 25,000 in the South—Southern Jews played an important role as commercial intermediaries in the emerging slavery nation.23 The Jewish peddler, a fixture in many places of the world during the nineteenth century, and seen in every part of the United States, found a special niche among the plantations of the South.24 Charleston, home of the first Reform congregation in the United States, had the nation’s largest Jewish community in 1820—about seven hundred—until New York surpassed it. Until about 1830, Jews were part of Charleston’s elite, and, like most of Charleston’s white population, most of them were slaveowners.
Perhaps no story better illustrates how the explosive profits to be made in the cotton kingdom were foundational to American business than that of Chaim (or Heyum) Lehman, a twenty-two-year-old cattle dealer and wine merchant who arrived into New York’s harbor on September 11, 1844. He was one of perhaps one hundred thousand Ashkenazi immigrants who came from Central Europe and the German states in the years between 1800 and 1860, transforming the American Jewish community, which had previously been dominated by Sephardim.25 Lehman had been forced to leave his Bavarian hometown of Rimpar, where the law required the departure of second and subsequent sons of a Jewish family. Changing his name to Henry, he sailed down to Mobile and traveled upriver, where he began a career as an itinerant peddler, one of many who sold dry goods and supplies to plantations and also served as conduits for news. The workaholic, well-informed merchant quickly built up enough of a stake to open a general store in Montgomery a few months before it became the state capital in 1846.26
With the banking system still in post-Jackson disarray and hard currency nowhere to be had, farmers paid for goods at Lehman’s store in cotton, which he happily accepted. His brother Emanuel came over to join him; then in 1850 came another brother, Mayer. Though the Lehmans did not convert to Christianity as some did, they assimilated; they ate pork, did business on Saturday, spoke English with Southern accents, and were pro-slavery.
We do not know whether Lehman ever sold slaves, but it would not be surprising if he did. It was certainly not illegal, it could be profitable, and few merchants did not at one time or another, in one way or another, become involved in a slave sale. Jacob Barrett, a Jewish merchant in partnership with his brother Judah in Columbia, South Carolina, and another brother, Isaac, in Charleston, sold:
dry goods, groceries, provisions, liquors, (both at wholesale and retail,) hardware, crockery, shoes, hats and saddles. Besides all this, he sometimes bought a drove of hogs and made bacon for sale. He also speculated in negroes, horses and real estate…. a cargo of government soldiers’ condemned coats or jackets, bought at a great sacrifice, were readily taken by the planters for their negroes at an advance of one or two hundred per cent. over cost. A gang of some twenty negroes from Charleston he soon disposed of at very large profits, keeping for his own use Armstead Booker, a good-looking, active carriage driver and barber, who attended to his horses and in the store, and Aunt Nancy, a first-rate cook, with her children.27
Barrett subsequently “married the daughter of his cousin, Jacob Ottolengui of Charleston, another speculator in Negroes, and claimed before the Civil War to have around a thousand slaves working his rice plantations near the Savannah River,” in the words of Bertram Wallace Korn.28
All Southern towns of any size had Jewish residents in their business community. Some of them were, like other Southern merchants, slave traders, but the domestic slave trade was in no way a specialty of Jewish merchants. Jews were a tiny minority and were not disproportionately represented in the ranks of slave traders, nor were any of the biggest slave traders Jewish. Bancroft’s list of seventy slave traders in Richmond lists only three Jews. The most important Jewish slave-trade firm was probably the Davis family of four brothers in Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia, who were named in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, quoting a letter from abolitionist Gamaliel Bailey: “The Davises, in Petersburg, are the great slave-dealers. They are Jews, came to that place many years ago as poor pedlers; and, I am informed, are members of a family which has its representatives in Philadelphia, New York, &c! These men are always in the market, giving the highest price for slaves. During the summer and fall they buy them up at low prices, trim, shave, wash them, fatten them so that they may look sleek, and sell them to great profit. It might not be unprofitable to inquire how much Northern capital, and what firms in some of the Northern cities, are connected with this detestable business.”29
But a regionally bounded business like slaves wasn’t Henry Lehman’s interest, nor was tying up cash in long-term physical assets. He was into cotton and credit—which was inseparably bound up with the slavery industry, of course, but which was not the same thing. Slave property may have anchored Southern plantation mortgages, but it was the marketing of the cotton that consumed the credit from New York, which in turn consumed credit from London. It was the cotton, and not the slaves, that was shipped to Lancashire and sold by the pound, and in doing so, produced a hot cash flow. Handling that cash flow put Lehman in the fastest-rushing part of the global marketplace.
“In the years before 1845,” writes Richard Holcombe Kilbourne, “the credit market was in many respects localized.”30 But with the regrouping of the economy after the prolonged post-Jackson depression and the annexation of Texas, the old institution of factorage became a principal provider of credit, and H. Lehman & Brother, as it was called at first, became a cotton factorage. Providing credit to cotton planters put the Lehmans in constant contact with New York banks—and, presumably, meant accepting slaves as collateral from planters. The firm in 1854 purchased a fourteen-year-old girl named Martha for $900, and Mayer Lehman ultimately owned seven slaves.31 But he did not invest his profits in growing large holdings of enslaved people, the way planters did; he was a more modern kind of businessman. After Henry died of yellow fever in 1855, Emanuel moved to New York and established an office at 119 Liberty Street, while Mayer remained in Montgomery. The two became major financiers of the cotton trade in time for the boom years before secession. The Lehman brothers connected the slave-labor agriculture of the South with the financial world of New York in a direct way.
Lazarus Straus, a friend of the Lehmans from Bavaria, came over in 1848. Beginning as a peddler based out of Oglethorpe, Georgia, he moved to the small town of Talbotton, where he opened a store stocked with goods he managed to get on credit in Philadelphia, then in 1854 sent for his family.
Sam Houston arrived at the Hermitage a few hours too late on June 8, 1845: Andrew Jackson had died. As Houston’s son watched, he lay his head on the dead Jackson’s chest and mourned.
Jackson left his thousand-acre plantation and the approximately 150 slaves who worked it to his wastrel adopted son. As an anecdotal account of how he was remembered by one local African American, we turn to the memory of an elderly, formerly enslaved woman from the Nashville area, a former washerwoman whose name apparently went unrecorded when she was interviewed in 1929 or 1930 by a team from Fisk University:
Did anybody ever tell you about old General Jackson? He was mean … In General Jackson’s old place they had a whipping room, and they say now you can hear strange noises out there in that old house. I used to wash out there, after the War, but I never would go to the room to try to hear anything.32