Early life '' (1898) showing "Talishatchie Town (Creek)" and "Old Creek Village" is indigenous to the biome where Lyncoya was born (Photo: Wesos19, 2018) Born to
Muscogee (Creek) parents who were most likely associated with the
Red Stick political faction, Lyncoya was said to be 10 or 12 months old when he was orphaned during the
Creek War in the
Battle of Tallushatchee on November 3, 1813. participated in the massacre, later "recalling that their 'situation looked dismal to see, Women & Children slaughtered with their fathers.'" According to his obituary in the
Nashville Republican, published the summer before the
1828 U.S. presidential election in which Jackson was a candidate, Lyncoya was "the son of a Chief." His name is not in the Muscogee language but an invention of the young white woman, Maria Pope (daughter of
LeRoy Pope), who was initially charged with his care. An account published in Alabama in 1983 stated that Lyncoya means "abandoned one" in Muscogee, a claim promulgated by the 1953
Susan Hayward–
Charlton Heston film ''
The President's Lady''. Lyncoya was brought to Jackson after the surviving women in the village refused to care for him because they were severely injured. Historian
Kathryn E. Holland Braund wrote in her examination of Muscogee womanhood at the time of the Creek War that, "In his account,
Richard Keith Call noted that Jackson, 'although a man of iron nerve, he was yet a girl in the softer feelings of his nature.' For Call, the 'incident...proved the woman like tenderness of [Jackson's] heart.' The image of Andrew Jackson and his officers nursing a baby with a sugar tit and puzzling over their young charge marks a sharp contrast to the horrific life-taking that produced the orphan." The actual work of sustaining Lyncoya with brown sugar and scavenged biscuit crumbs was delegated to an enslaved man named Charles. Charles was possibly the enslaved man described by the University of Tennessee's
Papers of Andrew Jackson project as "Charles (after 1855), in New Orleans with AJ in 1814, was AJ's military servant, 1817–19. He was the family carriage driver for many years and helped Dunwoody train the
thoroughbreds." In the 17th through 19th centuries, "Some Anglo-Americans, including Andrew Jackson, incorporated Indian war captives into their households, calling them kin." Lyncoya has been described as having been "adopted" by the Jacksons but there are no known documents attesting to any form of legal adoption. Lyncoya was one of two Muscogee children taken from the Tallushatchee battlefield. In 1833, during his presidency, Jackson replied to an inquiry from a Col. William Moore, writing, "Your letter of the 7th instant is just to handI hasten to reply, that Lyncoya, was the child found suckling his dead mothers breast after the battle of Tallahassee was over, & sent to me by Genl CoffeeThe wounded child which you brought into camp, was the one taken, and roused by Doctor John Shelby (doctor)|[John] Shelbyhe cured him of his wounds & adopted him as a child, and educated himhe turned out badly as I believe, & ran away from the Doctor. The Doctor can give you his history." According to one account, the child taken to Nashville by Dr. Shelby was
also named Lyncoya. Jackson's actions apparently served as a model for his troops, who "would 'steal' children, throughout the Creek War, sending them back home to serve as 'petts,' companions, slaves, following the example of their commander." 's
Life of Andrew Jackson, Red Stick leader
William Weatherford surrenders to Jackson, ending the First Creek War; the African-American man kneeling in the bottom left of the image may represent Lyncoya's caregiver Charles Lyncoya was brought to the Jackson home,
the Hermitage, in 1814. He was the third of three Indigenous babies or children who was carried to Nashville at Jackson's behest, the others being
Theodore, who died in the spring of 1814, and
Charley, whose fate is uncertain. Lyncoya would have initially lived in what is called the Log Hermitage, and then in the mansion house, built in 1821. Rachel Jackson was charged with being Lyncoya's "primary caregiver," in part because that was the traditional gender role and in part Jackson traveled extensively for his work throughout the 1810s and 1820s, such that "Jackson depended on her to oversee Lyncoya's upbringing and prepare him for his exhibition to the nation's elite. Rachel did as best she could but considered Lyncoya a nuisance, imposed by Jackson to serve a national ambition, which she did not share. His arrival signaled a growing division between the pious and local life Rachel wanted and the national stage that Jackson had begun to thrust upon her. Rachel's neglect of Lyncoya also reflected her frustration and disappointment with Jackson." Rachel Jackson had a complicated emotional relationship with Indigenous America, dating back to her days a child passenger on her father's river expedition on the
Adventure—the passengers and crew of one of the boats, left behind because of a smallpox outbreak, were made vulnerable by isolation and were slaughtered by hostile
Chickamauga Cherokee.
Lyncoya in letters The social-emotional world of the larger Hermitage community and a fleeting projection of Andrew Jackson's internal racial cosmology appears in a letter written to
Rachel Jackson on September 18, 1816, from the "
Chikesaw council house": It is not immediately self-evident who Jackson meant by "our little son," although of the 30-odd minors to whom they served as guardian, some of whom Jackson called
son in his letters,
Andrew Jackson Jr. was the only ward that he and Rachel "considered to be a child of theirs." Lyncoya was "with the negroes" because he had been left in the care of Rachel's sister Mary Donelson Caffrey (either in Nashville or in the
Natchez District of
Mississippi Territory) while the Jacksons traveled, but Caffrey would not keep Lyncoya in the big house, instead boarding him in the
slave quarter. For a time, Lyncoya was educated along with Andrew Jackson's first adopted son, Andrew Jackson Jr. The editors of
The Letters of Andrew Jackson, Volume V: 1821–1824 (published 1996) annotated this letters with the footnote that "Lyncoya wrote Jackson on December 29." , also known as Mad Wolf, sometime before 1823; this portrait is most likely the work of
Charles Bird King, and it appears in
History of the Indian Tribes of North America, which was published between 1836 and 1845 (DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University) According to the Tennessee Virtual Archive catalog, the "authenticity of this letter has come under scrutiny," Lyncoya's obituary stated that, "...he had no intercourse whatever with Indians, except on one or two occasions when a few chiefs called to visit the General; when they were observed to take but slight notice of him." In January 1824, a few days after Lyncoya sent his letter, Jackson wrote to
Andrew Jackson Jr. chiding him for not sending his own update on happenings at home: "Your papa has waited two weeks expecting to receive a letter from you informing him how your dear Mother is, and your Cousin, Andrew J. Hutchings, Lyncoya, and all the family."
Work and death Ultimately, the education of Lyncoya did not continue past his time in neighborhood schools, and he was apprenticed to be a saddler. He lived with his master, Mr. Hoover, in Nashville in 1827. He died of
tuberculosis at the Hermitage on July 1, 1828, when he was about 16 years old. His 1828 obituary, published in a Tennessee newspaper, has been characterized as the "
paternalistic devotional of a slaveholder."
Black Horse Harry Lee, who lived at the Hermitage at the time and wrote for
Jackson's 1828 presidential campaign, is said to have written an eloquent tribute to Lyncoya, which some describe as a lost document but is very possibly the obituary. There is no evident mention of Lyncoya's death in Jackson's surviving correspondence. Lyncoya's burial place is unknown, which is considered significant by historians because studying burial practices often yields insight into family systems. According to writer Stanley Horn, "At least one chronicle has stated that he was buried in the garden; but, if so, there is no sign of it. No stone there bears his name, and there is no unmarked grave in the family plot." It has also been conjectured that Lyncoya's unmarked grave was in the Hermitage's slave cemetery. The location of the Hermitage's slave cemetery was unknown until 2024 when a clue was found in a 1935 agricultural report and grant funding allowed researchers to deploy ground-penetrating radar to examine a candidate location. == Historiography ==