Lyncoya Jackson
Lyncoya Jackson, also known as Lincoyer or Lincoya, was an Indigenous American from a family that was a part of the Upper Creek tribal-geographical grouping and more than likely affiliated with Red Stick political party. The family lived in the Muscogee tribal town at Tallasseehatchee Creek in present-day eastern Alabama. Lyncoya's parents were killed on November 3, 1813, by troops led by John Coffee at the Battle of Tallusahatchee, an engagement of the Creek War and the larger War of 1812. Lyncoya survived the massacre and the burning of the settlement and was found lying on the ground next to the body of his dead mother. He was one of two Creek children from the village who were taken in by militiamen from Nashville, Tennessee. Lyncoya was the third of three Native American war orphans who were transported to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in 1813–14. The other two, Theodore and Charley, died or disappeared shortly after their arrivals in Tennessee, but Lyncoya survived and was raised in the household of Tennessee militia commander Andrew Jackson, shortly to be commissioned a Major General in the United States Army.
Lyncoya was initially termed a "pett" for Jackson's white male wards. Jackson later included Lyncoya in the catalog of wards whom he considered to be his sons, inquiring about his health and educational progress in letters home to his wife Rachel. He was educated alongside Jackson's other wards in the local school, and at one time Jackson wanted Lyncoya to attend West Point, which he considered the most prestigious educational opportunity in the United States. Lyncoya was ultimately apprenticed to a saddler in Nashville. Lyncoya contracted a respiratory infection and returned home to the Hermitage in his sickness. Despite nursing and healthcare provided at the Hermitage, Lyncoya died of tuberculosis at approximately 16 years old. He was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere near the Hermitage within Davidson County.
As early as 1815, and certainly by 1824, Jackson's political allies framed Lyncoya's survival and presence in Jackson's household as a defense against charges that Jackson was a bloodthirsty killer of Indians. Lyncoya's obituarypublished during the bitter 1828 U.S. presidential contest between Jackson and John Quincy Adamsalso served as a form of political messaging. Jackson was presented as the hero of Lyncoya's story in 19th-century biographies of the seventh U.S. president, and his life continues to be used in the 21st century as a defense against charges that racial animus was the motive for Jackson's 25-year-long effort to ethnically cleanse the Old Southwest of Native Americans.
Biography
Early life
Born to Muscogee parents who were most likely associated with the Red Stick political faction, Lyncoya was said to be 10 or 12 months old when he was orphaned during the Creek War in the Battle of Tallushatchee on November 3, 1813. The placename Tallasseehatchee describes "the stream or creek near the old town," from the Muscogee language tȧlwa, "town," hasi, "old," and hȧchi, "creek."Jackson's long-time business partner and nephew-by-marriage John Coffee led the action of Jackson's Tennessee militia and their Indigenous and mixed-race allies in the assault on the tribal town. During the battle, fires set by the Tennesseans burned residents alive in their cabins. The Red Stick death toll was 186. Another 84 were taken prisoner. The following day, American troops scavenged and found potatoes that had roasted in the heat of the burning town, while dogs scavenged the bodies of the dead Muscogee. John Walker Jr., a U.S. Army major of Cherokee heritage who had married the granddaughter of Indian agent Return J. Meigs, participated in the massacre, later "recalling that their 'situation looked dismal to see, Women & Children slaughtered with their fathers.'"
According to his obituary in the Nashville Republican, published the summer before the 1828 U.S. presidential election in which Jackson was a candidate, Lyncoya was "the son of a Chief." His name is not in the Muscogee language but an invention of the young white woman, Maria Pope, who was initially charged with his care. An account published in Alabama in 1983 stated that Lyncoya means "abandoned one" in Muscogee, a claim promulgated by the 1953 Susan Hayward–Charlton Heston film The President's Lady. Lyncoya was brought to Jackson after the surviving women in the village refused to care for him because they were severely injured. Historian Kathryn E. Holland Braund wrote in her examination of Muscogee womanhood at the time of the Creek War that, "In his account, Richard Keith Call noted that Jackson, 'although a man of iron nerve, he was yet a girl in the softer feelings of his nature.' For Call, the 'incident...proved the woman like tenderness of heart.' The image of Andrew Jackson and his officers nursing a baby with a sugar tit and puzzling over their young charge marks a sharp contrast to the horrific life-taking that produced the orphan." The actual work of sustaining Lyncoya with brown sugar and scavenged biscuit crumbs was delegated to an enslaved man named Charles. Charles was possibly the enslaved man described by the University of Tennessee's Papers of Andrew Jackson project as "Charles, in New Orleans with AJ in 1814, was AJ's military servant, 1817–19. He was the family carriage driver for many years and helped Dunwoody train the thoroughbreds."
In the 17th through 19th centuries, "Some Anglo-Americans, including Andrew Jackson, incorporated Indian war captives into their households, calling them kin." Lyncoya has been described as having been "adopted" by the Jacksons but there are no known documents attesting to any form of legal adoption. Lyncoya was one of two Muscogee children taken from the Tallushatchee battlefield. In 1833, during his presidency, Jackson replied to an inquiry from a Col. William Moore, writing, "Your letter of the 7th instant is just to handI hasten to reply, that Lyncoya, was the child found suckling his dead mothers breast after the battle of Tallahassee was over, & sent to me by Genl CoffeeThe wounded child which you brought into camp, was the one taken, and roused by Doctor John Shelby | Shelbyhe cured him of his wounds & adopted him as a child, and educated himhe turned out badly as I believe, & ran away from the Doctor. The Doctor can give you his history." According to one account, the child taken to Nashville by Dr. Shelby was also named Lyncoya. Jackson's actions apparently served as a model for his troops, who "would 'steal' children, throughout the Creek War, sending them back home to serve as 'petts,' companions, slaves, following the example of their commander."
File:Weatherford surrendering himself to obtain peace for his people.jpg|thumb|right|In this 1844 engraving from Amos Kendall's Life of Andrew Jackson, Red Stick leader William Weatherford surrenders to Jackson, ending the First Creek War; the African-American man kneeling in the bottom left of the image may represent Lyncoya's caregiver Charles
Lyncoya was brought to the Jackson home, the Hermitage, in 1814. He was the third of three Indigenous babies or children who was carried to Nashville at Jackson's behest, the others being Theodore, who died in the spring of 1814, and Charley, whose fate is uncertain. Lyncoya would have initially lived in what is called the Log Hermitage, and then in the mansion house, built in 1821. Rachel Jackson was charged with being Lyncoya's "primary caregiver," in part because that was the traditional gender role and in part Jackson traveled extensively for his work throughout the 1810s and 1820s, such that "Jackson depended on her to oversee Lyncoya's upbringing and prepare him for his exhibition to the nation's elite. Rachel did as best she could but considered Lyncoya a nuisance, imposed by Jackson to serve a national ambition, which she did not share. His arrival signaled a growing division between the pious and local life Rachel wanted and the national stage that Jackson had begun to thrust upon her. Rachel's neglect of Lyncoya also reflected her frustration and disappointment with Jackson." Rachel Jackson had a complicated emotional relationship with Indigenous America, dating back to her days a child passenger on her father's river expedition on the Adventure—the passengers and crew of one of the boats, left behind because of a smallpox outbreak, were made vulnerable by isolation and were slaughtered by hostile Chickamauga Cherokee.
Lyncoya in letters
The social-emotional world of the larger Hermitage community and a fleeting projection of Andrew Jackson's internal racial cosmology appears in a letter written to Rachel Jackson on September 18, 1816, from the "Chikesaw council house":It is not immediately self-evident who Jackson meant by "our little son," although of the 30-odd minors to whom they served as guardian, some of whom Jackson called son in his letters, Andrew Jackson Jr. was the only ward that he and Rachel "considered to be a child of theirs." Lyncoya was "with the negroes" because he had been left in the care of Rachel's sister Mary Donelson Caffrey while the Jacksons traveled, but Caffrey would not keep Lyncoya in the big house, instead boarding him in the slave quarter.
For a time, Lyncoya was educated along with Andrew Jackson's first adopted son, Andrew Jackson Jr. Jackson wrote Rachel from Washington, D.C. in 1823, "I would be delighted to receive a letter from our son, little Hutchings, & even Lyncoyathe latter I would like to exhibit to Mr Monroe & the Secretary of War, as I mean to try to have him recd. at the military school..." The editors of The Letters of Andrew Jackson, Volume V: 1821–1824 annotated this letters with the footnote that "Lyncoya wrote Jackson on December 29." The original appears to have been lost but what is said to be a "true copy" that was made at some point reads as follows:
File:Yaha-Hadjo.jpg|thumb|Lyncoya encountered Ya-ha Hadjo, also known as Mad Wolf, sometime before 1823; this portrait is most likely the work of Charles Bird King, and it appears in History of the Indian Tribes of North America, which was published between 1836 and 1845
According to the Tennessee Virtual Archive catalog, the "authenticity of this letter has come under scrutiny," but the Tennessee state archivist and Jackson biographer Robert V. Remini at least agreed that it was authentic to the period of the 1820s–30s. "This house" is possibly a reference to the District of Columbia boarding house of the wife of William O'Neal, "former owner of the well-known Franklin House, now took Jackson, John H. Eaton, and Richard K. Call as boarders...across from the West Market near John Gadsby's Hotel." "Mad Wolfe" is Ya-ha Hadjo. The Muscogee name that is variously transliterated Harjo, Hajo, Hadjo, or Hadcho means, roughly, so crazy as to seem brave, or crazy levels of brave. Lyncoya's obituary stated that, "...he had no intercourse whatever with Indians, except on one or two occasions when a few chiefs called to visit the General; when they were observed to take but slight notice of him." Historian Melissa Jean Gismondi argues that the letter was written under the supervision of Lyncoya's tutor William Chandler, and was intended as an exhibit to be shared with Jackson's fellow politicians, as much or more than it was meant to be a personal missive from a 10-year-old child to his father. The letter was likely solicited because Jackson had aspirations to send Lyncoya to the United States Military Academy at West Point, which was his ambition for several of his male wards, including Edward G. W. Butler and Andrew Jackson Donelson, both of whom graduated class of 1820. Andrew Jackson Jr. and A. J. Hutchings were both sent to the University of Nashville. In January 1824, a few days after Lyncoya sent his letter, Jackson wrote to Andrew Jackson Jr. chiding him for not sending his own update on happenings at home: "Your papa has waited two weeks expecting to receive a letter from you informing him how your dear Mother is, and your Cousin, Andrew J. Hutchings, Lyncoya, and all the family."