Book F
Page 70—10,000 acres for $182. On April 19, 1802, “at the Court House in the Town of Nashville 85,000 acres of land contained in grants for 5,000 acres each ... lying and being on Duck River in the Middle District and within the District of West (now Middle) Tennessee aforesaid which sixteen tracts were granted to John Gray Blount and Thomas Blount by them conveyed to David Allison deceased and by said David Allison in his lifetime mortgaged to Norton Pryor and ordered and decreed by said court to be sold to pay the mortgage money and Interest with Costs, and whereas Andrew Jackson Esquire at said sale became purchaser of two of said tracts for five thousand acres each ... for the sum of $182 ... he being the highest and last bidder ... and whereas the said Andrew Jackson has sold and transferred all his right in and to one of said tracts of 5,000 acres ... to John Overton and Jenkin Whiteside for the Consideration of $1,666.66 to him paid and secured ... upon the condition that the said Andrew is not to be answerable in any way or manner for Damages or the Consideration Money in case the Land should be Lost or Taken away by any Claim or Title whatever....” April 25, 1802.
Page 188—Sold to Edward Ward 640 acres for $10,000, July 6, 1804. (This was the Hunter’s Hill tract bought from John Shannon on March 7, 1796, for $700.)
Page 241—425 acres for $3,400, bought of Nathaniel Hays (ancestor of the late John Hays Hammond), August 23, 1804. (The Hermitage tract, which sold to the State of Tennessee in 1856 for the sum of $48,000.)
Book E records the purchase of 1,000 acres for $500, and this with the deals mentioned in Book F adds 11,425 acres to the total of 27,825 acres mentioned in deeds between 1793 and 1797, making a grand total of 39,250 acres. These eighteen transactions show that for most of the land Jackson paid a reasonably good price for the period, and that sometimes he made a fabulous profit. This study by no means gives a complete picture of his land deals, but it gives an idea of his major deals at the period of his greatest activity in this field. There never was a time in his life when records of his personal business would not show some activity in the purchase or sale of land.
His mercantile business, which is quite as interesting, was confined to the earlier period of his life in Tennessee. It began about 1795 and ended, tradition says, in 1809, when as a wedding gift to General John Coffee, his former partner, he tore up the notes which he held on the Clover Bottom store.
As early as 1795 we find Andrew Jackson in partnership with David Allison in a shipment of goods from Philadelphia to Nashville. Five years earlier Allison, Jackson, Overton, and others were licensed to practice law in the new territory by Governor William Blount, and various records show Allison’s activities in Davidson County, as well as in Philadelphia, where he was a well-known merchant. From this connection and subsequent associations in both land and mercantile deals developed a relationship which was finally to force Jackson to sell his handsome Hunter’s Hill tract in order to meet his obligations. It is a long and complicated story, and its chief importance in the present connection is that responsibility for Jackson’s loss of Hunter’s Hill and his removal to more humble quarters on the Hermitage estate is usually attributed to the Allison deal. It is a significant fact, however, that Allison’s failure, which occurred about 1795, did not result in the sale of Hunter’s Hill until July 6, 1804. It is reasonable, then, to suppose that it by no means crippled Jackson, as most writers contend; although it undoubtedly marked the beginning of a long struggle through a period of financial unrest and depression which resulted finally in a plan of retrenchment and reorganization.
The Log Hermitage—1805
The building in the foreground was once a two-story block-house.