Belmont Mansion: The Wealthiest Woman and the People Who Built Her Home

The Belmont Mansion on the south side of Nashville was built in the early eighteen fifties for a woman named Adelicia Hayes Acklen, who by the time the construction finished was among the wealthiest people in the United States, not merely among the wealthiest women.

Her first husband, Isaac Franklin, had made his fortune as one of the largest slave traders in the American South. He died in eighteen forty-six and left Adelicia his Louisiana sugar and cotton plantations. When she remarried, to a man named Joseph Acklen, the plantation operations continued. The mansion in Nashville was built by enslaved labor and maintained by an enslaved workforce. The grounds, the formal gardens, the art gallery that Adelicia commissioned, all of it was sustained by the work of people who did not own themselves.

During the Civil War, Adelicia Acklen did something that almost no one else accomplished: she successfully negotiated with both Union and Confederate commanders to protect her property. Her cotton was too valuable to burn and too useful to leave in Southern hands. She managed to get it shipped to New Orleans under a kind of informal diplomatic arrangement and sold it there. The proceeds came to roughly a million dollars. She used some of the money to travel to Europe and acquire more art.

The Belmont Mansion museum has increasingly centered the lives of the people who built and maintained the property. What the architecture visible from the outside obscures is the labor system that made it possible. The mansion exists because of a supply chain of human beings whose names the museum is working to recover from estate inventories and plantation records.

The campus of Belmont University now surrounds the mansion. The mansion itself is open for tours, and the interpretation includes the history of the people who worked there in conditions they did not choose.