Touring the Cemetery of Those Andrew Jackson Enslaved

They found the cemetery used by the people who were enslaved at The Hermitage! (I know that sentence is a little clunky, but stick with me.) On Wednesday, the Andrew Jackson Foundation announced it had found the cemetery. On Thursday, Dr. Learotha Williams, Scene photographer Matt Masters and I were standing in it. 

Three years ago, I made my guess as to where the long-lost cemetery was. I was wrong. I thought it would turn out to be the cemetery at Scott’s Hollow. But no! It is a cemetery right on Jackson’s farm.

On the Hunt for More Historical Black Burial Spaces

Whether or not this is where people from The Hermitage and Tulip Grove who died in slavery were buried, it's a spot that is historically significant

I am going to give myself partial credit, however, because I said:

This means we know quite a bit about where to expect to find slave cemeteries in Davidson County, based on what we know about Benevolent cemeteries. They are usually very close to a main path through the old plantation, but out of eyeline of the big house, often at the back of the property. They are often on hillsides. The oldest graves are usually at the top of the hill with newer graves closer to the bottom. We should expect trees and vinca. And we can expect the families of the people in those cemeteries to be nearby or to have been nearby until the last generation or two.

This cemetery is very close to Hermitage Road, out of eyeline of The Hermitage itself. I don’t think you could fairly say that it is at the back of the property, but it is at the outside edge of where people lived. It’s on a hill, and there are trees, and there was (and likely will be again) vinca. And descendants are still nearby. Even though I was wrong, it’s a gratifying kind of wrong, because my ideas about the characteristics it would have were correct.

The story of how the cemetery was discovered is also gratifying. Hermitage employees found an old map from 1935 that had an area marked “graves and large trees” near a creek and a cornfield, just northeast of the pump house. For years, people had been walking that area, looking for the cemetery, but the area was full of scrub trees and privet and brambles and stuff that made getting to the exact spot of the cemetery impossible. 

Thanks to an anonymous donor, they were able to get the underbrush cleared away, and voilà, the graveyard was found. There’s more to it than that, but The New York Times and the Associated Press have you covered on the facts. 

I’m here to bring you feelings and informed speculation. My impression upon visiting was that the people at The Hermitage are being very, very careful with this site. They’ve got a huge fence up, and the gate is locked. When we entered the cemetery, we were told a couple of times to step carefully. And everyone stressed, repeatedly, that the graves had not been disturbed. The top layer of grass and soil was taken off in one spot to visually confirm the presence of a grave shaft, but no one dug into the graves.

It had the feeling of, say, if your plumber found your great-grandmother’s long-lost ring, and he put it in a toolbox that he locked with a padlock and left in your bathroom until you and the rest of your family could come and decide what to do with it. That feeling of, “Oh, this is important,” and, “I do not want to be responsible for messing this up.”

And I don’t blame them. The situation at The Hermitage is complicated. God, sometimes I think Andrew Jackson is Nashville’s crazy uncle. When you’re young and it’s all stories about shooting people in the streets and stealing women out of windows so they can get married against their fathers’ wishes and a potty-mouthed parrot, ol’ Andy is the best. Quite a character, as they say. Then you’re going through that box of old stuff he told you to stay out of and you find a necklace made of human ears and suddenly it dawns on you that your uncle might be a serial killer. Or in Jackson’s case, a genocidal maniac, which is just “serial killer” translated into the vernacular of political power. Crazy uncle is fun. A field full of his victims is a heartache and a headache.

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So here’s complication No. 1. The Hermitage knows of 26 enslaved people who died on the farm. However, the death rate in the early 1800s for children was nightmarish. More than 46 percent of children didn’t live to see their fifth birthdays. This means, if you want to have a family with six kids older than 5, you should be prepared for that family to also have four kids who didn’t make it that far. I couldn’t find the child mortality rate for enslaved people, but it’s not better than that. The Hermitage knows of only four children under 5 who died at the farm, but it is certainly more. But children’s graves are very hard to find through noninvasive measures. 

Complication No. 2: Jackson had at least three Native American children he had stolen — Lincoya, Theodore and Charley — living at The Hermitage as companions for his own kids. We don’t know what happened to Charley, but the other two died at The Hermitage before reaching adulthood. And they died before there was a family cemetery on the property (though it’s hard to know whether they would have gone in the family cemetery even if it had existed). The most likely place for them to be buried is in this newly rediscovered cemetery. Now The Hermitage has a big open question about whether they’ve found the burial spot for three stolen Creek children and what that means for relations with the Creek Nation, who already aren’t great fans of Jackson. 

Complication No. 3: People who were enslaved by Jackson stayed at The Hermitage for years after emancipation, and a number of them are not on Find a Grave or in Tennessee death records. They could have been post-war burials in this cemetery. 

This and the complication above it are why I’m hesitant to call this solely a slave cemetery. We don’t know who all is in here, and The Hermitage — rightly so — doesn’t want to disturb any remains without the affected communities deciding that’s the right course of action. So as of right now, we can’t know. Hermitage representatives told me they are trying to figure out how to bring those communities together to ensure the best choices are made about the future of the cemetery. They also told me that, if any family members of people who could be in the cemetery want to access the cemetery without paying admission, The Hermitage will make that happen, and they are considering ways of making the cemetery accessible in the long term.

It’s not my place to say, “Oh, The Hermitage knows what they’re doing here and all is well.” But to me, their willingness to admit that they don’t know what needs to happen next, except that they need to keep the place safe, comes across as deeply sincere.

And if that remains their attitude, this is a very sad but wonderful turn of events. Some who were lost are now found.