In the 1810s and 1820s, future president of the United States Andrew Jackson owned three plantations in the Muscle Shoals region of northern Alabama, along the Tennessee River, at Melton's Bluff in Lawrence County, at Evans' Spring near Florence in Lauderdale County, and at Big Spring in Franklin County (later Tuscumbia in Colbert County).
Jackson knew about the "potential of North Alabama for settlement" because of "repeated travels" through the country, due to his trading business, and warring with the Creeks and the Seminoles as a major general of Tennessee militia and the United States Army. In the words of one historian, "It is striking to see how Jackson's ventures in plantation building in Alabama between 1816 through 1821, like [Halycon plantation] in Mississippi 15 years later, followed closely the surrender of these lands by the Indian tribes he had subdued." Jackson was rarely, if ever, resident at any of these plantations, which were investment properties, or remote forced-labor camps. His enslaved farm laborers and overseers grew, or attempted to grow, cotton in the vicinity of Muscle Shoals for six years, from 1817 to 1822. One historian wrote of his agricultural investments: "...being a planter was of the highest importance to Jackson. It does not mean that he made his greatest success in this field...' 'He did not make as brilliant a success in farming as some of his neighbors. He lived in too high a manner for that.'" The neighbors in question were in many cases his long-time associates and kinsmen; Jackson communicated orders about his land and slaves to them by mail. Jackson and Donelson family in-laws who lived in the area contributed to the development and marketing of four towns along the shoals, Florence, Marathon, York's Bluff, and Bainbridge; only Florence lasted much past the trading post and plat map stage, the other three were phantom settlements.
These plantations were located on land he had personally negotiated be ceded to the United States in his capacity as U.S. Indian commissioner plenipotentiary. Many of his fellow treaty commissioners, aides-de-camp, War of 1812 compatriots, and in-laws bought in the same vicinity at the same time. In the words of biographer Mark R. Cheathem, he "used his knowledge of the lands that he seized from the southeastern Indians to benefit himself and his friends." He encouraged others to buy in the region as well, writing Francis Smith, for instance, "Should you be inclined to invest funds in those lands, it will afford me pleasure to give you any aid in my power...This section of country present[s] to the capitalist greater prospects of advantage—than any other[.] what little I can command will be invested in land in that quarter." Jackson's fascination with the prospects of the Tennessee River valley in Alabama was widely shared: In 1810 the sole organized jurisdiction (Madison County, encompassing Huntsville and environs) had 4,700 residents. At the time of the next diennial census, in 1820, the river ran through seven counties with "a combined population of 59,969, representing over 40 percent of the state's population of 144,317."
A large number of his friends and relations, including James C. Bronaugh, John Coffee, James Gadsden, and James Jackson, settled in the Tennessee River valley, imported droves of slaves from all quarters to labor on the newly accessible land, and operated real estate companies that surveyed and marketed potential town sites. None of Jackson's plantation investments or attempts at land speculation were particularly lucrative for him personallyhe seemingly struggled as a mostly absentee owner, since most of his time was consumed with illegally invading and occupying Florida and whatnot. He was forever hiring and firing overseers and dictating to "sons, wards, and neighbors" about the land and attached slaves, but he failed to engage as ferociously with the land and labor of farming as he did with military expeditions and political battles. The Panic of 1819 also did him no favors, but many of his more staid and fiscally prudent friends operating in the same milieu became wildly wealthy planter-barons of Alabama. The conservative agrarianism of Jacksonian democracy was theoretically predicated on "economy, self-sufficiency, and freedom from debt" but Jackson himself was "was often unable to make practicable [this philosophy] when confronted with plantation problems." Jackson sold off his last piece of Tennessee River real estate shortly before he ran for president the second time, in 1828.
Melton's Bluff plantation
Jackson's first plantation along the Muscle Shoals of the Tennessee River in what is now Alabama, United States was at a location called Melton's Bluff in what is today Lawrence County. Located across from confluence of Elk River and the Tennessee, Melton's Bluff is today "a few miles upstream from Rogersville and north of Wheeler Station." A portion of it lies within what is now known as the General Joe Wheeler Estate, and "its high bluffs are a part of the Tennessee Valley Authority's Wheeler Lake Reservoir properties."
On September 20, 1816, Jackson concluded the Treaty of the Chickasaw Council House, in which the Chickasaw people () ceded large sections of middle Tennessee and northern Alabama to the U.S. government. The land was at that time considered part of the Mississippi Territory; Alabama Territory would be separated in 1817. Andrew Jackson bought a plantation there "situated at the head of Elk River Shoals on the south bank of the Tennessee". It was "exactly one month and eight days after General Andrew Jackson signed" the treaty that Jackson and his longtime business partner John Hutchings bought Melton's Bluff on November 22, 1816. Jackson called it the Muscle Shoals plantation. The transaction paperwork is preserved in the Jackson papers at the Library of Congress and includes the deed to Melton's Bluff from David Melton, as well as bills of sale from Eliza Melton to Andrew Jackson and his business partner John Hutchings for an enslaved woman named, Jenny, and a bill of sale from Nancy Melton for her farm and an enslaved man named Jame. David Melton is believed have been of at least five children of a Cherokee (, ) woman and Irishman, John Melton, who settled at the bluff and established a plantation and tavern there. The language of the deed reads:
Per the editors of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Jackson "never obtained more than an Indian title to the Melton's Bluff plantation". (This was illegal although the chances of prosecution were nil; no one was supposed to buy land directly from Indigenous people; it was supposed to be a function of the federal government negotiating with the tribes as sovereign nations, and then the government had the authority to resell it to individuals.)
In June 1817 Andrew Jackson wrote to his wife Rachel Jackson from Huntsville, "I was at the Bluff Two days & nights, Major Hutchings deserves a Meddlehe has the finest Prospect of a good crop I ever saw, his cotton far excells any crop I have seen, & I think we may calculate, on, from Eighty, to Ninety Baleshe will be in, perhaps before I return he has a bad cough, I have urged him to come in & apply proper remedies for it".
Jackson wrote to Coffee from Melton's Bluff in September 1816 reporting much sickness in the vicinity, expressing concern over the health of Hutchings, and asking him to tell Stockley D. Hutchings to send a new overseer. According to travel writer Anne Royall, who spent several days at Melton's Bluff two years later, Jackson "had heard of the sickness of which his overseer had died, and of several of his slaves being confined at the same time.—Mrs. Mitchell, and her husband, (the merchant before mentioned) were lying, not able to rise, one in one bed, and the other opposite in another. She related to me, that the General and his suite would take the water buckets and go to the river for water; heat it over the fire, and take the sick in their arms, and placing their feet in the warm water, would thus support them, until they were sufficiently bathed, and then bear them back to their bed again. After this the General would administer medicine with his own hands. Thus he went the whole night, and never ceased till he had administered the necessary wants to all, both black and white, and consoling them with the most soothing language." Simultaneously Jackson was commanding that the surveyor general for the area bring him specific township and range maps for the region, specifically the ones for the land near Coldwater Creek and Spring Creek.
Hutchings, who was one of dozens of cousins on Jackson's wife's side of the family, and was called "Jackey" by the family, died on November 20, 1817. It is unknown if Hutchings died of the plague that killed the slaves and the overseer, or from a distinct, preexisting illness. An extravagant grave marker was commissioned for Hutchings, which was rediscovered in the 1920s in an overgrown thicket about northeast of Athens, Alabama.
The travel writer Royall, a devoted admirer of Jackson, spent a few days at Melton's Bluff in January 1818 and described it in letters:
In November 1818 he wrote to President James Monroe, "On my return from the Chickasaw treaty I found it necessary to pass by Melton's Bluff, where I had established some hands for the culture of cotton, hearing it had been laid out for a town and the lots sold, to have as much of my crop preserved as existing circumstances would permit." (The rest of the letter is consumed with rationalizing Jackson's actions in the First Seminole War of March and April 1818, a dispute that would devolve over time into the long-running "Rhea letter" fraud/controversy.)
In 1819 Jackson recorded payments made by travelers for the use of the boat to navigate from Melton's Bluff "to mouth of Cypress".
Jackson sold the remaining fragments of Melton's Bluff land in 1827.
Evans Spring plantation
In March 1818 Jackson purchased land near Evans' Spring in Lauderdale County, on a site located slightly to the southwest of his friend James Jackson's Forks of Cypress plantation. James Jackson's famous mansion was said to have been built on the spot where Doublehead had once had his home. Jackson then moved "his operation" (presumably his stock of enslaved laborers) from Melton's Bluff to the Evans Spring property. In January 1819 he wrote John Coffee asking him to "Can I ask you when you reach Florence & a leisure day will permit, to lay out my plantation near Florence for mebring it as near the site for the dwelling house as you think right...Shew him the place where to make little Andrew J. Hutchings plantation &c &c &c" Jackson had hired William White Crawford, son of his cousin James Crawford Jr., to oversee both of the Muscle Shoals properties. Crawford was the overseer at Evans Spring in both 1819 and 1820.
The Evans Spring property was located near land owned by his ward A. J. Hutchings, the orphaned son of John Hutchings. It was the Evans Springs property "that James G. Birney proposed to work jointly with Jackson in 1821. This estate proved to be a burden to Jackson. His Negroes ran away; he was unable to secure good overseers; and the land was unproductive. In 1822 he sold that part of the farm that had improvements and not long afterward sold the remainder of the lands."
Jackson's longtime friend, James Jackson, wrote to the Old Hero on May 28, 1821, that: