BETTY JACKSON, 1867

Formerly Enslaved U.S. Citizen

Betty Jackson lived much of her life as an enslaved person owned by U.S. President Andrew Jackson. Photographed with two of her great grand children in 1867, she had been emancipated only two years earlier in 1865, when slavery was abolished by passage of the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment.

Andrew Jackson served as the seventh president of the United States from 1829 to 1837, and like most prior U.S. Presidents, was a slave owner. In January 1829, two months before becoming President, documents name ninety-five enslaved individuals who lived and worked at The Hermitage, his Tennessee plantation. He took some of those persons to the White House as servants, with the 1830 census listing fourteen enslaved individuals in Jackson’s presidential household.