What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

by Daniel Walker Howe

Slaves Jackson bought and sold in substantial numbers; in 1817, he disposed of forty at one time for $24,000 (an economy of scale for the purchaser, his friend Edward Livingston). Jackson is said to have wagered his slaves on horse races. However, he indignantly denied ever having been a professional slave trader.4 Old Hickory was capable of patriarchal generosity to dependents; he even adopted a Creek Indian boy whose parents Jackson’s soldiers had massacred. “He is a savage, but one that fortune has thrown in my hands,” Jackson explained to his wife. (Adoption of captives was common in frontier warfare. The boy, who never renounced his tribal heritage, died of tuberculosis at sixteen.)5 But if someone challenged Jackson’s authority or he felt his honor questioned, he became implacable. After one of his slaves dared run away, Jackson offered a fifty-dollar reward for his recapture, “and ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes a person will give to the amount of three hundred.”6 Three hundred lashes risked beating the man to death, but perhaps revenge outweighed financial interest.