Andrew Jackson and the Hermitage

Andrew Jackson arrived in Nashville in seventeen eighty-eight, twenty-one years old, carrying his law license and not much else. Within a decade he was a congressman, then a senator, then a judge. He built a plantation east of Nashville on a sweeping curve of the Cumberland River and called it the Hermitage.

He filled it with enslaved people, at its peak the property held more than one hundred and fifty, and grew cotton that made him wealthy and famous. Jackson is one of the most consequential and contested figures in American history. He transformed the presidency, shifting power from Eastern elites toward something he called the common man, by which he meant white male voters, whose political loyalty he cultivated with fierce effectiveness.

He destroyed the Bank of the United States. He created the Democratic Party as a modern political organization. He defeated the British at New Orleans in January of eighteen fifteen in a battle so lopsided, two thousand British casualties against roughly seventy American, that it made him a national hero.

He also signed the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty and prosecuted removal with the full weight of executive authority. He had fought the Creek and the Seminole and the Cherokee across his entire career. He held opinions about Indigenous sovereignty that put him directly at odds with the Supreme Court's own rulings.

The dispossession he enabled reshaped the American South. Jackson died at the Hermitage in eighteen forty-five. The plantation is open to visitors today, and the National Park Service and the Ladies Hermitage Association have in recent years worked to more fully document the lives of the enslaved people who built and maintained everything you see there.