HERMITAGE, Tenn. (WTVF) — It's a site that attracts thousands of visitors each year, but people who visited The Hermitage on Saturday didn't go to learn about President Andrew Jackson. They honored the slaves who also lived on the property.
"Of the first 7 presidents, Jackson among them, 5 were slaveholders. Washington, Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. It was the norm in the presidency. This human bondage was commonplace in American History," Vanderbilt University Professor Dennis Dickerson said.
Dickerson said Jackson owned 300 slaves in his lifetime. Slavery is a tough subject that the Andrew Jackson Foundation approaches head-on.
"They were accomplishing work. They enabled Jackson to run for office and be president. They had lives and had a sense of their own dignity," Andrew Jackson Foundation's President and CEO Howard Kittell said.
In 2010, the foundation started an annual commemoration of those once enslaved at The Hermitage.
They do so by holding a service inside the church in which the enslaved once worshiped and having a procession to the slavery memorial behind the church. This is where several men, women, and children who were enslaved are buried.
"We don’t know their names, and they came from the two nearby plantations," Kittell said.
They do know the names of the enslaved who worked the plantation but don't know where they're buried on the property. There's an ongoing effort to try and locate them.
As part of the service, the names of those enslaved were attached to 150 flowers and placed on the memorial by those in attendance.
"If they had not been present, [neither] this place — nor that president — would have obtained the kind of station that was achieved in the early 19th century," Dickerson said.
The foundation wants to keep sharing the stories of the enslaved to make sure they're not forgotten.
The Andrew Jackson's Hermitage Foundation offers tours built around those who were enslaved on the property. Learn more here.
