Samuel J. Hays
Samuel Jackson Hays was an American militia officer, lawyer, slave owner, plantation owner, and railroad investor in west Tennessee. His father was Robert Hays and his uncle was President Andrew Jackson; Jackson's wife Rachel and his mother Jane Donelson Hays were sisters. The extended Donelson clan, with Jackson serving as patriarch, is credited with being exceptionally efficient at using kinship networks as profit centers and engaging in what has been described as vertically integrated family-business imperialism: "They fought the native peoples, negotiated the treaties to end the fighting and demanded native lands as the price of war, surveyed the newly available lands, bought those lands, litigated over disputed boundaries, adjudicated the cases, and made and kept laws within the region that had been carved out of Indian lands."
Historian Lorman Ratner described Andrew Jackson as a boy without a father, and a man without sons, which may have motivated him to accept guardianship of dozens of young people who lived with him at various times or whom he assisted legally, financially, or socially. Hays, as a nephew and ward of Andrew Jackson, was one of the several early participants in and beneficiaries of this system. Hays was one of several wards whom Jackson sent to West Point, and he brought Hays to Washington, D.C. in the first year of his presidency, and then sent him away, considering Hays and his son Andrew Jackson Jr. to be bad influences on one another. For the remainder of Jackson's life he continued a correspondence with Hays, who served as a key outpost in his social–political network across the U.S. South.
Nominally a lawyer, Hays' income seems to have come from cotton planting and slave ownership, and his power base was his authority as a local militia leader in west Tennessee, which was brought to bear during the American colonization of Texas and the subsequent Mexican-American War. He was considered the richest person in Madison County, Tennessee before the American Civil War, and was among the top one percent of slave owners nationwide. Hays died shortly after the end of the war, and his heirs were said to have been impoverished.
Early life
Hays was born at Haysboro, Tennessee; after his father Robert Hays died in 1819, his mother Jane Donelson Hays moved away from Nashville, and he became Andrew Jackson's ward, one of several nephews and nieces and children of friends who were taken in at the Hermitage. Hays was sent to the U.S. Military Academy, entering 1823. This was the same class as Pierce B. Anderson, Leonidas Polk, Abraham Van Buren, and Philip St. George Cooke. According to a letter Andrew Jackson wrote to another ward, Anthony Wayne Butler, Jackson had paid to outfit Hays for West Point, which was part of why Jackson's finances were tight and he could not lend or give Butler more money. Jackson, who was always preoccupied with the education of his male wards, and who deemed West Point the "best school" in the country, sent several of his charges to the U.S. Military Academy in the 1810s and 1820s.At West Point he was involved in an alcohol infraction in 1825, along with fellow cadets Jefferson Davis, Theophilus Mead, James Allison, and James F. Swift. They were all court-martialled but Davis and Hays were pardoned and returned to duty by John Quincy Adams. Hays may not have graduated, according to the editors of the Papers of Jefferson Davis Hays had been absent without leave and thus resigned in 1826; he later wrote that he had three years at the military academy. Hays became a lawyer at the Davidson County, Tennessee bar in 1828.
Hays moved at an unknown date with his kinship network of brothers and in-laws and were amongst the earliest settlers of what became Madison County in the Chickasaw lands opened by the Treaty of Tuscaloosa, which had been negotiated by Andrew Jackson and Isaac Shelby. Hays' widowed mother lived with him at Hays Hill in Madison County, in what was originally a double log house. The Hays family later bought a house known as Miller Hill, or Bellwood, from Hays' sister's husband, Robert I. Chester. The town was named Jackson in honor of "Old Hickory," to whom many early settlers had personal ties.
During the no-holds-barred 1828 U.S. presidential campaign, Andrew Jackson's former aide-de-camp William P. Anderson published letters written by the surgeon on hand during the Jackson–Dickinson duel of 1806; S. J. Hays wrote a public letter attacking Anderson's character, and Anderson's son Rufus K. Anderson in turn published a rebuttal, criticizing Samuel J. Hays specifically and other Jackson campaign committee members generally. The Jackson papers at Library of Congress include a draft of Hays' statement against Anderson.
Hays met his future wife, Frances Pinckney Middleton, at Jackson's 1829 inaugural ball; her uncle was Arthur Middleton, one of the signers of the United States Declaration of Independence. Jackson brought Samuel Jackson Hays with him to the White House and then sent him away for misbehavior. On March 19, 1829, President Jackson wrote John Coffee describing the troubles of two of his wards and his adopted son, now all three young adults:
Shortly thereafter Jackson wrote Coffee that he was sending Hays to "Judge Tuckers law school in few days," meaning the private school run by Henry St. George Tucker at Winchester, Virginia. Toward the end of the summer Jackson wrote to Andrew Jackson Jr. that "Saml Hays has been absent a month, with young Mr Van Buren; I have expected him for a fortnight, but I find his mind too unstable to profit here by reading, he cannot nor will not confine himself to his Book, his mind wandering on other & trivial subjects, unprofitable to improvementHe will permit the year to pass without benefit to his mind, & with an purse." Hays proposed to Frances Middleton in August 1829. Andrew Jackson wrote to Middleton's guardian, Congressman James Hamilton Jr., about the planned marriage. Hamilton mentioned his approval in a separate letter to Martin Van Buren, mentioning his appreciation of the message from the president. Hays and Middleton were married in Charleston, South Carolina on November 24, 1829. He eventually became "owner of one thousand slaves, three hundred of whom had been a marriage dower" to his wife, Frances Pinckney Middleton. The couple had 13 children but only four survived long into adulthood. The Hays newlyweds may have set up housekeeping in Madison County in 1830.
West Tennessee commerce, politics, and patronage jobs
A letter from Jackson to Hays, written in April 1830 and rediscovered in an old trunk in the 1950s, suggests that the President partially relied on Hays to maintain the Hermitage in his absence. Jackson requested that Hays provide him with an index of all his mares and colts, and asked Hays to make sure that the family slaves Betty and Hannah maintained the plantings around Rachel Jackson's tomb and garden the way he wanted them to be. Jackson also wrote to Hays at the height of the Nullification crisis, enclosing a newspaper that reprinted his presidential message on that question:An 1830 letter from Jackson to Hays complained about Congressman Davy Crockett's votes in favor of appropriations for internal improvements and against the Indian Removal Act, and urged Hays to inform Crockett's constituents that he had been seen walking in company with New Englander Daniel Webster. Jackson also chided Hays for talking with his cousins about the so-called Petticoat Affair, with Jackson writing, "Major Eaton was so enraged at the treatment of Emily to his wife that it was with some difficulty that I prevented Major Eaton from making it a serious matter with Andrew. My dear Samuel you ought to have had more prudence than to communicate anything that would have giren any pain to that amiable old lady."
In 1831 Jackson wrote Hays with orders to electioneer hard against the Congressional candidacy of Crockett, who was both an anti-Jacksonian generally and who specifically opposed the nomination of Hays' brother Stockley D. Hays to a government land office job. Samuel J. Hays was 14 years younger than his brother Stockley D. Hays and has this been mistakenly described as his son. In the first two decades of the 19th century Stockley D. Hays had been a crucial satellite in Jackson's orbit, but Davy Crockett suggested in 1831 that S.D. Hays had been debilitated for many years with alcoholism and thus he may have fallen out of rotation. As part of a larger controversy over Jackson's use of the so-called spoils system, it was at this time that "A Corn Planter of Madison County" called out the political appointments and government-funded salaries of Hays' brother Stockley and brothers-in-law R. I. Chester and Robert Butler, as well as those of John Coffee, John C. McLemore, and A. J. Donelson, asking, "Have we, sir, no high minded and honorable men amongst is, who are qualified to offices of honor, profit, and trust, but the nephews of President Jackson?" As one history of public administration explained, "By the time Andrew Jackson came into power, merit was only secondary in executive department appointments. During Jackson's administration the policy of political patronage and nepotism in federal employment was intensified, partly because of his belief that rotation of government jobs was an essentially democratic process. What this actually implies is that political nepotism is not corruption, but one of the principles of sound democracy. This is, of course, ridiculous!" As another history framed the "nephews of Andrew Jackson" problem: "With Jackson...many were filled with individuals who were ill-equipped for the responsibilities demanded of them. Jackson did not regard this as a problem, but instead believed that an individual needed no particular training or education to succeed in politics or government."
An 1832 letter from Jackson mentioning that Samuel J. Hays was going to transport a dog and a "gator" from Washington back to Tennessee is considered evidence that Sarah Yorke Jackson owned a guitar, which is possibly the reason the Hermitage driveway is shaped like a guitar. In 1833 Hays wrote a public letter to the militia electorate of Madison County stating that he had no ties to the South Carolina Nullifier movement even though his wife hailed from that state. Hays was one of three candidates for the Tennessee House of Representatives from Madison County in 1835. In 1839, Jackson wrote Hays, "You must not permit that...scamp Crockett to be electedhe is the mere tool of Bell & J. Q. Adams, without principle or talents & has become a good Whig by learning of Lying & Slandering good & honest men." This enmity was apparently a carryover from Jackson's pre-existing fury toward the late Davy Crockett, who had opposed both Indian Removal and the appointment of Hays' late brother S. D. Hays to high office. In 1843, by act of state legislature, Hays was named trustee from Madison County for the Memphis Conference Female Institute.