Hutchings was a son of
Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson's older sister Catherine Donelson and her husband Thomas Hutchings. He married a woman named Polly Smith, who was the niece of
William Smith, who attended school with Andrew Jackson in the Carolinas and later became a U.S. Senator. Claiborne wrote to Jackson in 1801, "I can assure you, with great truth, that Mr. Hutchings is a prudent, amiable young man, & is very attentive to your Interest." On Christmas Day 1801 Hutchings wrote Jackson with his own update, "I shall meet with no dificulty to sell the negres." In 1811, Jackson wrote his wife
Rachel from Natchez about his work with a
coffle of slaves that, "My trusty friend John Hutchings, on the recpt of my letter had come down to this place recd. all the negroes on hand and had carried them up to his farm..." During the fiercely contested
1828 presidential election, an opponent of Jackson editorialized about Hutchings possibly receiving preferential treatment and an unearned officer's commission during the War of 1812, asking, "Was not your nephew Capt. John Hutchings mustered into service (as Captain) the 1st October, 1814, and did he not immediately leave the service, and return home to attend your race horses, or his own, and never again joined the Army until after the battle of N. Orleans, of about that time, and all this with your knowledge and consent?" According to a finding aid to historic letters held at the University of Michigan libraries, in 1816, Jackson wrote to William C. Crawford "regarding supplies for the treaty to be held with the Chickasaw Nation. Appointing John Hutchings as an agent to acquire the supplies to avoid 'the evil that May arise from assembling the Indians without being prepared to administer to their wants.'" John Hutchings & Co. was thus then the official government purveyor of "Two boxes of Claret" and "One barrel of Good Whiskey" for the convention of the southern tribes at the house of George Colbert in September 1816 that yielded the Treaty of Turkeytown with the Cherokee and the Treaty of the Chickasaw Council House with the Cherokee.
Alabama According to the Tennessee State Library and Archives, which holds a collection of Hutchings family papers, "Jackson and Hutchings acquired large tracts of land near Milton's Bluff and in northern Alabama near
Florence. Sometime after the
Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814), Hutchings moved to
Huntsville where he maintained a large plantation." John Hutchings married Mary Smith, who was the niece of
William Smith, a U.S. Senator from South Carolina. William Smith built a house in Huntsville in 1833. Hutchings fell ill in 1817. In June 1817 Andrew Jackson wrote to his wife
Rachel Jackson from
Huntsville, "I was at the Bluff Two days & nights, Major Hutchings deserves a Meddlehe has the finest Prospect of a good crop I ever saw, his
cotton far excells any crop I have seen, & I think we may calculate, on, from Eighty, to Ninety Baleshe will be in, perhaps before I return he has a bad cough, I have urged him to come in & apply proper remedies for it". On October 22, 1817, Andrew and Rachel Jackson arrived in Huntsville to attend his sickbed. A. J. Hutchings was already with them—he had been staying at the Hermitage—and Andrew Jackson became his legal guardian. Hutchings is buried about 20 miles northeast of
Athens, Alabama, under a marker commissioned by Jackson that reads: In 1818, the firm of
Brahan & Hutchings of Huntsville, Alabama was cited as a reference in an advertisement for a commission merchant in
Lexington, Kentucky. == A. J. Hutchings ==