Stockley D. Hays
Stockley Donelson Hays 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; he accompanied Aaron Burr down the Mississippi during the Burr conspiracy when he was a teenager, aided Jackson in a famous tavern brawl in 1813, and served in Jackson's army during the Creek War. Hays served as a quartermaster of the U.S. Army in the southwestern theater of the War of 1812, and then as a judge advocate of the Southern Division of the U.S. Army at the pay level of a major from 1816 to 1821. Stockley D. Hays and several of his siblings married members of the Butler family who had become wards of Andrew Jackson on their father's death; the Hays and Butler families remained close to Jackson through his military and political campaigns. In the 1820s, the Hays family and their Butler associates 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, President Jackson sought to appoint Hays to the high office of U.S. surveyor general south of Tennessee, triggering a political conflict involving U.S. Representative 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 as register for 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, possibly by Native Americans, before he 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 influence of then-Congressman Andrew Jackson. Little is known about Hays' childhood; he lived in a log-built defensive blockhouse and grew up with dozens of cousins living in the neighborhood. Hays' family owned slaves, and he would have been in danger from attacks by the Cherokee. His aunt Mary's 1848 obituary told of her arrival at the future site of Nashville:The frontier settlement was geographically and politically isolated from the rest of the United States. Hays' uncles John Donelson and John Caffery moved to the Natchez District, one temporarily and one permanently, and his uncle Jackson traveled back east to Pennsylvania and Maryland for work. An obituary of Hays' grandson said 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 "preparing to enter school in New Orleans", he was a part of 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. According to a profile of the Hays family read to Madison County Historical Society and republished in The Jackson Sun in 1944:In 1828, one article claimed Hays was sent as an "aid" to Burr. A 2017 profile of Hays in a Tennessee newspaper says Jackson used Hays "to spy on Aaron Burr during the incident in Louisiana for which Burr was later indicted for treason". Other accounts say Hays was going to be a private secretary to governor Claiborne. 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.
In April 1807, Hays sent a letter to his cousin John Coffee, Mary's husband. 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 fate—when 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." According to the editors of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume II, after the Burr party landed at Bayou Pierre, Hays connected with governor Claiborne's brother Ferdinand Leigh Claiborne, and Cowles Mead at the territorial capital, Washington. On the same day, he wrote to Coffee from Old Greenville, Hays wrote to Jackson, saying he was experiencing what would now be called depression, writing:
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. According to Knoxville mayor and local historian Samuel G. Heiskell this business sold "slaves and whiskey" to yeomen and gentry in Natchez District. Hays is named as "Stokely L. Hays Tennessee" on a May 1807 "List of Witnesses to be Summond against Aaron Burr".
In 1828, John Overton of the Nashville Central Committee, a group dedicated to the election of Andrew Jackson as U.S. president, solicited a letter from Hays about the expedition and submitted it for publication. 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 bad 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, 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:
Jackson's former business partner Andrew Erwin characterized Hays' role as an escort "by General Jackson's favorite nephew by marriage". Another dedicated anti-Jacksonian 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, argued to history in defense of his ancestor in 1935:
According to a 20th-century Jackson scholar, Burr "proposed to plant a colony of 2,000 Kentuckians and Tennesseans on a 40,000-acre tract on the Ouachita River| River, in northern Louisiana ... He tried to convince them that war was imminent" and "that the missing link in unraveling the true aims of Burr is to be found in the traitorous conduct of Wilkinson." A Mississippi federal judge, Thomas Rodney, wrote to his brother, Founding Father Caesar 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." According to historian Thomas P. Abernethy: "The whole trouble with the Burr Conspiracy is that there were too many liars mixed up in it".
Legal career, tavern brawl, Creek War
In 1810, Stockley Hays and Thomas Hart Benton served as junior counsel to Jenkin Whiteside at the trial of the Magnesses for killing Patton Anderson. Hays married Lydia Butler, in Davidson County, Tennessee, in early 1811. Lydia Butler was a daughter of Thomas Butler, one of the five "battlin' Butler brothers" of the American Revolutionary War. She was educated at the Moravian Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. When Lydia Butler's father died, Andrew Jackson became her guardian. Three of the Hays siblings married three of the Butler siblings, who became wards of Andrew Jackson: 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. Hays was admitted to the bar of Davidson County in 1812.Hays was commissioned as a quartermaster in the Tennessee militia from October 1, 1812, to April 1, 1814, serving as paymaster of Tennessee Volunteers, and quartermaster general of Jackson's army during the Creek War in 1813–1814.
During a lull in hostilities between the Natchez Expedition and the Fort Mims massacre, on September 4, 1813, Hays participated in a fight in a downtown Nashville tavern; Thomas Hart Benton's brother Jesse Benton shot Andrew Jackson, and Hays "nearly killed" Jesse Benton.
According to the footnotes of Tom Kanon's history of Tennessee military in the War of 1812: "Four other pistols were fired in quick succession—one by Jackson at Benton, two by Benton at Jackson, and one by John Coffee at Thomas Benton—but Jackson was the only one hit. Then daggers were drawn." John Coffee and cousin Alexander "Sandy" Donelson jumped in and stabbed the future Senator five times. Stockley Hays stabbed Jesse Benton with a knife concealed within a cane, while Captain Eli Hammond beat J. Benton about the head, but "a large and strong button which broke Hays' blade saved Jesse from being perforated. Jesse placed the muzzle of his remaining pistol against Hays' chest and pulled the trigger, but in a fair exchange of mishaps the charge failed to explode."
On November 22, 1813, Jackson ordered quartermaster Hays to procure more pack horses. Cousin Sandy who had fought the Bentons alongside Stockley Hays was killed by warriors of the Red Stick faction of the Muscogee Nation in January 1814, shot in the head at the battle of Emuckfau. Hays drew $1,000 for contingent expenses on June 20, 1814, the same day Jackson drew $2,000. Hays served as lieutenant and brigade inspector to Coffee's mounted gunmen from September 11 to November 17, 1814. Hays makes no appearance in standard histories of the conflictsuch Old Hickory's War by the Heidlers and Kanon's Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815beyond accounts of the brawl at Talbot's Tavern, so it is impossible to describe his combat experience or lack thereof.
Slave ownership
In November 1815, Hays placed a runaway slave advertisement offering a reward of $20 each for the recovery of Sam, Nuncanna, and Luck, African-born enslaved men ranging in age from 25 to 40 who had been taken to Nashville mid-year from Augusta, Georgia, by Richard Tullus and Sam. S. Starns. Two of the three men were recaptured near Knoxville in February 1816 but then escaped again; Hays renewed the reward offer in June 1816.Hays' partner Francis Sanders was killed in 1826 by an employee who confessed and was hanged for the crime.
U.S. Army Judge Advocate
On September 10, 1816, or 1818, Stockley Hays was appointed to the rank of judge advocate of the U.S. Army, with "brevet rank, pay, &c. of a major of cavalry". These were the "pay and emoluments of a topographical engineer". Hays and his brother-in-law Robert E. Butler are believed to have made a "prospecting journey" to the lands ceded under the 1818 Chickasaw treaty in 1819. Also in 1819, Hays endorsed the racing ability of a horse named Oscar. Stockley Hays' father Robert Hays died in 1819, leaving a widow and six surviving offspring who ranged in age from 31 to 19. All of Stockley's siblings would marry and have families except for Narcissa Hays, who in her youth sometimes served as a traveling companion for her Aunt Jackson, and in later life, as Aunt Nar, raised her grandnephew and taught him how to fish.Hays continued to serve as a judge advocate in the U.S. Army's Division of the South until at least 1820, during which time Jackson was Major General of the same division. Hays was judge advocate for the court martial of William King at Montpelier, Alabama in November 1819. The Congress reduced funding for the military and made no appropriation for Army lawyers, so Hays was the "last judge advocate of the Southern Division ... honorably discharged on June 1, 1821, and the Army did not have a full-time statutory judge advocate again until 1849".
West Tennessee
As of January 1822, Stockley Hays was living on a Tennessee farm called Greenvale that was formerly owned by merchant banker James Jackson. Greenvale was located "on the main road from Nashville to Haysboro and two miles from the former place". In the first week of May 1822, six weeks after the birth of his son, Hays was one of the co-founders of Jackson, Tennessee, originally named Alexandria. He and Thomas Taylor, Austin Miller, William Stoddert, William Arnold, Archibald Hall, and James Wilson, were authorized to practice law in Madison County, Tennessee, on June 17, 1822. Hays was on the board of the Jackson Male Academy, and the Madison County board of commissioners. Hays worked as a lawyer, and was remembered "as the finest looking man in Jackson in the early days of the town". He suffered financially, possibly struggling to pay debts after the Panic of 1819, due to him being "land poor". In January 1823, a newspaper notice announced the dissolution of the business partnership of S. D. Hays and James F. Theobald. In May 1824, Hays and Robert Hughes announced the establishment of a legal partnership in Jackson, Tennessee.During the 1828 U.S. presidential election, opponents of Jackson restated the fact his nephew, Stockley Hays, had accompanied Burr to the lower country in 1806. Hays released a statement explaining himself.
Jackson administration
In September 1830 Samuel J. Hays, the youngest sibling of Stockley Hays, wrote President Jackson a letter reporting his own firstborn son had been born healthy and "with very black hair", that a drought would diminish the cotton crop, and: "We have neither seen nor received the scrape of a pen from brother since he went to see you at Nashville—begin to fear he must be sick, tho' I suspect he must be detained by the Federal court where he was summonsed as a witness—he might have written however." A week later, Stockley Hays advised Jackson: "... many of our good orderly, but enterprising citizens intend forthwith, to move over on to the Chickisaw lands to procure occupant claims—There is a treaty stipulation to prevent this procedure—Untill the U States troops can arrive, Would it not be well to issue your proclamation on the subject—to prevent the great mischief which may otherwise ensue."The Chickasaw treaty had a clause preventing sale of land prior to removal but there was no clause prohibiting settlers from squatting on the land prior to the tribe's expulsion. Jackson wrote in the letter: "The acting Sec. of war will instruct the chikisaw agent to forwarn all person from moving to, or intruding on the chikisaw lands assuring them that they all trespassers will be removed from it and their houses burnt & every thing destroyed." Chickasaw subagent John L. Allen reported to Secretary of War John Eaton the threat had been duly transmitted, and that some "Obstinate Intruders" were removed, and that military intervention would not be necessary. In October 1830, Jackson wrote to Samuel J. Hays: "Colo Stockely travelled a few miles with me the morning I set out, I intend to something for him as soon as it can be with propriety, but you know, under such a pressure for office, how hard it is to get a connection in, without great censure—I am astonished that he had not returned before the date of your letter, as he told me he would go directly home—he was in fine health."
When Jackson became president of the United States following the 1828 election, he removed James Turner from the United States General Land Office job of Surveyor General South of Tennessee, responsible at that time for the surveys of Louisiana and Mississippi, and wanted to appoint Stockley Hays to the post. On November 7, 1830, Jackson wrote to Hays' brother-in-law Robert I. Chester offering to sell him an enslaved mother named Charlotte and her children, Aggy, Jane, and Maria, for, and described a possible patronage position for Hays:
Brief letters of recommendation were sent from the vicinity of Nashville; Jackson stressed Hays' "scientific qualifications and self-sacrificing Army service in and after the War of 1812", and were signed by Thomas Claiborne, Robert Armstrong, John Overton, William Carroll, Robert Whyte, Parry W. Humphreys, Ephraim H. Foster, Robert Purdy, James Collinsworth, Thomas H. Fletcher, Samuel Hogg, John C. McLemore, Adam Huntsman, and others.
In January 1831, David Barton, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Land Surveys, inquired with the Tennessee delegation about their constituent and neighbor's fitness for federal appointment. According to the editors of The Papers of Andrew Jackson: "All the replies but Crockett's were noncommittal". Crockett said Hays had lived in his Congressional district for about eight years, since approximately 1823, but he could not fairly estimate his "mathematical ability" and skill at land surveying. Crockett said Hays had "succeeded badly in finding employment" as an attorney, was bankrupt, and "his want of Sobriety is So great that on the other hand he is notorious for intemperance—bordering on Sottishness." Crockett concluded his reply with: "You fourthly and Conclusively enquire whether from my knowledge of Hays taking all together I think him qualified and a Suitable person for the office? I answer emphaticaly I do not"
Jacksonian newspapers attacked Crockett for his opposition to Hays. In response, in June 1831, an anti-Jacksonian who signed himself Corn Planter wrote a letter to the newspaper describing Hays as unqualified based on his "intemperate, idle, and wholly disqualifying habits", and protested the political appointments and government-funded salaries of Jackson's kinsmen, including Hays, Chester, Coffee, McLemore, and A. J. Donelson, and asking: "Have we, sir, no high minded and honorable men amongst us, who are qualified to offices of honor, profit, and trust, but the nephews of President Jackson?" Crockett wrote to the Southern Statesman newspaper of Jackson, Tennessee:
U.S. Senator from Mississippi George Poindexter objected to the Hays appointment on the basis the land to be surveyed was in Mississippi and Hays was a Tennessean. In the first round, the Senate rejected Hays, backed Poindexter's objection, and passed a motion affirming Poindexter's position. Eventually, "a temporary truce was reached on this issue, when Hays was appointed to the lesser office of register" at the Clinton land office, about due west of the state capital, Jackson. The surveyorship went to Poindexter's candidate, Gideon Fitz, thus "party unity was preserved...patronage was divided to the satisfaction of the contending parties. Only the land business suffered." This incident was the beginning of a deeper rift between Jackson and Poindexter. Hays' appointment to the register job was confirmed on February 21, 1831, but he was dead by the autumn of that year. Jackson sought to replace him at the Clinton office with Samuel Gwin, "son of an old comrade", Rev. James Gwin, and brother of future U.S. Senator William McKendree Gwin. Poindexter objected and blocked this nomination as well, and the feud exploded.
Samuel Gwin was appointed to the newly created land office at Chocchuma, Mississippi, and then died from wounds received in a duel with Mississippi judge Isaac Caldwell over the matter. Samuel's brother W. M. Gwin gained political power during the Martin Van Buren administration, and Crockett broke with Jackson, lost his Congressional seat, moved to Texas, and was killed at the Alamo by the Mexican Army, in part because he "chose to join Col. William B. Travis, who had deliberately disregarded Sam Houston's orders to withdraw from the Alamo, rather than support Houston, a Jackson sympathizer". The sale of public land at the Chocchuma land office was ultimately investigated by the U.S. Congress:
Death and legacy
Stockley D. Hays fell ill and died on September 8, 1831. According to his obituary in the Jackson newspaper Southern Statesman:Hays' widow, Lydia Butler Hays, died in Shelby County, Tennessee, on November 22, 1865, at age 77. J. G. Cisco wrote of Stockley Hays in a 1903 history of Madison County, Tennessee, describing him as "a lawyer of ability and a genial gentleman. He was said to have been the finest looking man in Jackson, being over six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds ... Mr. S. D. Hays, a prominent lawyer of Jackson, is a grandson of Colonel Hays." In 1904, Hays' grandson was featured as a notable attorney in an advertorial insert about the commerce and industry of Jackson. In 2017, descendants and researchers had grave markers placed at Jackson's Riverside Cemetery for Stockley Hays, his sister Narcissa Hays, and his mother Jane Donelson Hays.
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 both assisted and used for his own benefit. Hays, as a nephew of Andrew Jackson, was one of the several early participants in and beneficiaries of this system. Jackson's marriage to Rachel Donelson came with an "army of brothers" and nephews, and together they engaged in what has been described as vertically integrated family-business imperialism—according to Inman : "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".