Stockley Donelson Hays (December 1788 – September 8, 1831) was a 19th-century American lawyer, military officer, and nephew of U.S. president Andrew Jackson. Hays was involved in historically significant events from an early age. As a teenager he accompanied Aaron Burr down the Mississippi River during the Burr conspiracy of 1806–1807. He aided Jackson in a famous tavern brawl in Nashville, Tennessee in 1813. He served in Jackson's volunteer army as a quartermaster during the Creek War and in the larger southwestern theater of the War of 1812, and then he was made a judge advocate of the regular United States Army at the pay level of a major from 1816 to 1821.
Stockley D. Hays and several of his siblings intermarried with daughters and sons of Thomas Butler (of the so-called Fighting Butlers), who had become wards of Andrew Jackson after their father's death. The Hays and Butler families remained close to Jackson throughout his military and political campaigns. In the 1820s, the Hays and Butler families were founding settlers of Jackson, Tennessee, which was established shortly after the land was ceded under a Jackson-negotiated treaty with the Chickasaw people.
In 1831, following the ratification of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek between the Choctaw people and the United States government, U.S. president Jackson sought to appoint Hays to the high office of U.S. surveyor general south of Tennessee, which triggered a political conflict with Congressman Davy Crockett and U.S. Senator George Poindexter. Crockett, a fellow early settler of West Tennessee, described Hays as an ill-equipped alcoholic, but as a compromise between Poindexter and Jackson, Hays was appointed to be register of the land office at Clinton, Mississippi. Hays died of bilious fever shortly after being granted the post and never carried out any of the duties of the office.
Early life
Stockley D. Hays was born in December 1788, the oldest of Robert Hays and Jane Donelson Hays's eight children. Jane Donelson Hays was a daughter of Nashville pioneer John Donelson and his wife Rachel Stockley. Hays' grandfather, Donelson, was shot and killed by persons unknown, possibly by Native Americans, in 1785, before Hays was born. Stockley D. Hays grew up at Haysborough, Tennessee, a frontier settlement founded by his father on what was called the McSpadden Bend of the Cumberland River, in the Mero District of North Carolina, which is now called Middle Tennessee. Robert Hays was a well-liked American Revolutionary War veteran, originally from North Carolina, who worked as a land surveyor and a plantation owner. In his capacity as a justice of the peace and a brother-in-law, the older Hays officiated Andrew Jackson's marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards in 1794. In 1797, Robert Hays was appointed to the government office of U.S. marshal of Tennessee by George Washington by the influence of then-Congressman Andrew Jackson. His aunt Mary Purnell Donelson's 1848 obituary told of her arrival at the future site of Nashville:
An obituary for Hays' grandson stated that Hays worked as a private secretary to Jackson when Jackson lived at the Hunter's Hill property, between 1798 and 1804. In June 1806, when Hays was 17, the Davidson County sheriff listed for sale two properties for unpaid taxes; owned by Robert Hays, and owned by Stokely D. Hays, both on the Caney Fork of the Cumberland River.
Burr conspiracy
Later in 1806, when Stockley Hays was 18 years old, he was a part of former U.S. vice president Aaron Burr's 1806 Mississippi River expedition, known as the Burr conspiracy. Hays was recruited to the expedition by Patton Anderson, brother of Jackson's aide-de-camp W. P. Anderson. Andrew Jackson built and sold the flatboats that Burr used to navigate to the lower country. Per Mississippi judge Joseph Dunbar Shields, "If they were but flatboats, they were three deckers and had layers of muskets between decks." (for attribution to Shields see ) Weapons enough to outfit an army were never found, but as recounted in 1880 by Jacksonian Democrat, Claiborne family scion, and historian J. F. H. Claiborne, "At Burr's trial, Jacob Dunbaugh, a sergeant in the United States Army, who had obtained a furlough from his commanding officer at Fort Massac, and come down with Colonel Burr, swore that on the night the boats left Petit Gulf, he saw a man named Wylie pass into the stern of Colonel Burr's own boat with an augur and hand-axe, and that shortly afterwards he saw several bundles of muskets lowered into the river by cords, through a hole made in the gunwale of the boat".
According to a profile of the Hays family read to the Madison County Historical Society and republished in The Jackson Sun in 1944:
One article claimed Hays was sent as an "aid" to Burr. Other accounts say Hays was going to be a private secretary to governor Claiborne. A third account says Hays went along because he was "preparing to enter school in New Orleans". Whatever the pretext, if the boatmen intended to make their way to the Neutral Ground, or Spanish Texas, American freebooters "who crossed international boundaries without passports were committing an act tantamount to invasion, illegal under national law and international custom". In December 1806, Burr used Hays to deliver a message for Harman Blennerhassett, informing him they should meet at the confluence of the Cumberland and Ohio Rivers on December 28, 1806. The boats arrived at judge Peter Bryan Bruin's landing on Bayou Pierre on January 10, 1807; Burr surrendered himself to the governor of Mississippi Territory on January 17. According to the editors of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume II, after the Burr party landed, Hays connected with governor Claiborne's brother Ferdinand Leigh Claiborne, and territorial secretary of state Cowles Mead, at the territorial capital, Washington. The ambitious plan had already stumbled and buckled at the knees by the time Hays was welcomed by his kinsmen and his uncle's business friends in Mississippi Territory, but in full flower the plan might have involved "an invasion force from St. Louis to capture Santa Fé and open the way for a possible further advance overland into Mexico; a rallying of the Louisiana French who were none too pleased with their colonial status with respect to the United States; and a volunteer army to go down the Ohio, collecting recruits as it went and then, at New Orleans, reforming an amphibious expedition against Vera Cruz."
In April 1807, Hays sent a letter to Jackson's business partner John Coffee referencing December 1806: "Four months have now, with the setting of this days sun, elapsed since I parted with you at Clover Bottom. When you and all friends were doubtfull of my impending fatewhen all was doubt, the question whether to go or not to go, you on whom I called as a friend and whose advise as such I received." On the same day he wrote to Coffee, Hays wrote to Jackson from Old Greenville:
Hays' uncle, John Caffrey, was married to another Donelson sister, Mary; according to descendants, Caffrey worked for Jackson in the "mercantile business" in the lower Mississippi River valley. Along with his 20-year-old future brother-in-law Thomas Butler, Hays was named on a May 1807 "List of Witnesses to be Summond against Aaron Burr," as "Thomas Butler the Son of the late Colonel" and "Stokely L. Hays Tennessee," respectively.
Hays and Jackson's involvement in the conspiracy was relitigated when Jackson ran for U.S. president against incumbent John Quincy Adams. In 1828, Judge John Overton, of Jackson's Nashville campaign committee, solicited a letter from Hays about the expedition. Hays claimed at that time Burr was an "intimate friend and brother officer" of his father from the American Revolutionary War, and that Burr had told Hays to consider him as another father. Hays wrote: "I observed to him that I must see and consult my friends before I gave my final consent. On advising with them some doubt of Mr. Burr's object was suggested, but he with having pledged his word of honor, that he had nothing in view hostile to the best interests of the United States, I determined to go with him." Hays said he parted ways with Burr when he turned himself in at Bruinsburg and "saw him no more except at a ball in Washington, Miss., and on his trial there before the court".
Around the same time and through the same venue (Overton to the newspapers in 1828), Felix Robertson, who was a founding member of the Nashville Central Committee to elect Jackson and whose father had pioneered the Cumberland with the Donelsons in the 1780s, wrote that Hays' local reputation had not been tarnished by his connection to Burr, that Burr had become "peevish" prior to his departure, and Burr had been complaining, before he left, of ill treatment by the people of Nashville. Robertson attested:
Jackson's business partner turned enemy Andrew Erwin characterized Hays' role as an escort "by General Jackson's favorite nephew by marriage". Another longtime Jackson hater said in 1828: "in 1823, John J. Bell Esquire lawyer from Pennsylvania, now of Franklin county Alabama, informed me that at the time Stokely D. Hays was in Natchez 1807, he told Bell that Jackson was to have had the command of 2000 men under Burr." James Wilkinson's great-grandson, New Orleans lawyer James Wilkinson, mentioned Hays when he argued to history in defense of his ancestor in 1935:
Preliminary investigation by U.S. attorney for the District of Kentucky Joseph Hamilton Daveiss concluded that "Mexico was Burr's first object, the Mississippi territories second, and the Ohio country third" and that "Burr's allies did not seem to think that the [Jefferson administration] opposed their plans." A Mississippi federal judge, Thomas Rodney, wrote to his son Caesar Augustus Rodney: "... the existence of a plot was universally credited by all sorts of people ...The Design of the Conspiracy is said to be to unite Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, The Floridas, and part at least of Mexico into an Independent Empire." William Duane of the Philadelphia Aurora, described by historian Thomas P. Abernethy as "the best-informed editor on the conspiracy", wrote that "such a spirit of speculating rapacity throughout the nation has formed a mass of corruption in every state of the Union, which menaces the safety of the nation". Abernethy endorsed Duane's belief that Hays, Burr, and the rest were party to a poorly conceived continent-spanning land-speculation scheme backed by hopeful Yazoo land investors, which would have increased the value of Burr's Bastrop claim and forced open other lands for settlement. Historians remain frustrated by the opacity of the plot; in the words of Abernethy: "The whole trouble with the Burr Conspiracy is that there were too many liars mixed up in it". United States Military Academy history professor Samuel J. Watson wrote in 2012 that "many senior army officers, including the commanding general himself, James Wilkinson, were closely linked to leading intriguers and filibusters like Aaron Burr...the tumultuous first decade of the 19th century set the stage for Andrew Jackson's usurpation of civilian authority" during the period 1810 to 1821.
Tavern brawl, Creek War Hays married Lydia Butler in Davidson County, Tennessee, in early 1811. Lydia Butler was a daughter of Thomas Butler, one of the five "Fighting Butlers" of the American Revolutionary War and Northwest Indian War. She was educated at the Moravian Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. When Lydia Butler's father died in 1805, Andrew Jackson became her guardian. Three of the Hays siblings married three of the Butler siblings: Stockley married Lydia, Robert Butler married Rachel Hays, and Dr. William E. Butler married Martha Hays. Lydia's brother and Stockley Hays' brother-in-law Robert Butler became one of Jackson's closest associates during the push into Florida in the 1810s and 1820s.