The Hermitage: Jackson's Democracy and Jackson's Enslaved

Andrew Jackson called himself the people's president. He championed an expanded franchise for white working men at a time when property qualifications locked most of them out of voting. He cultivated an image as a rough-hewn frontiersman who had earned his position rather than inherited it. He was genuinely popular, and the political tradition that his presidency established, a populist Democratic Party rooted in the working-class white voter, shaped American politics for generations.

At his death in eighteen forty-five, he owned about one hundred ten people at the Hermitage, according to the probate inventory, his plantation outside Nashville. Across his lifetime, estimates put the total at several hundred enslaved people who lived and worked under his authority over his lifetime. They grew cotton. They maintained the house and grounds. They were bought and sold according to the pressures of his finances and his political career. The records that survive allow some of their names to be recovered.

Jackson also signed the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty, the legal framework that allowed the United States Army to force the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations off their ancestral lands in the Southeast. An estimated four thousand Cherokee people died in the removal and the march westward that followed. Tennessee's name comes from a Cherokee village called Tanasi.

The Hermitage museum undertook a significant interpretive shift in two thousand five. The people Jackson enslaved and the nations he expelled became central to the public history of the site, not footnotes after the portrait gallery. The museum began documenting enslaved community members by name where records permitted, identifying their quarters, their work assignments, and in some cases their family connections.

The Hermitage is unusual among presidential historic sites for having made this shift. Jackson's political legacy remains contested. The museum now holds both truths at once, the man who expanded democracy for some, and the man whose democracy rested on the exclusion, removal, and enslavement of others.