Pastor John, recently you have been thinking about Andrew Jackson and giving some fresh

thought to slavery in American history.

What would you like to share with us here?

We visited the hermitage, it's called, outside Nashville, the estate of Andrew Jackson,

the 7th president of the United States, he was president from 1829 to 1837.

The reason this is troubling to me and I wanted to talk about it is because I was confronted

their head on again with the bothersome foundations of our country, the troubling ones.

I watched this 20 minute video of Jackson's life and presidency and then I read the

plaques in the museum and then I strolled through all the grounds and gardens of the mansion

and the slave quarters and the heavy realization came again that our country is built in

a significant part on the soil of stolen land and the backs of stolen men.

That's the phrase I came away with.

Land taken from Native Americans and cultivated with African American slaves.

Andrew Jackson was a great war hero in his battles against the Creek Indians in 1814 and

the British, especially at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, he was incredibly popular

among southern whites and he was a wealthy slave owner and the whole slave system of how

his estate was profitable is evident from the archaeological work that's preserved there

at the hermitage you can walk and they have the outlines of the slave quarters and the buildings

where the overseer lived and one or two places are actually preserved, the little cottages

where the slaves lived are preserved and you can see the way they lived.

Jackson was in addition the main force behind the Indian removal act of 1830 and that meant

the forcible removal of the Cherokee, the Chicksaw, the Choctaw, the Creek, the Seminole Indians

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