The Hermitage

The Hermitage was the home of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States and one of the most consequential and controversial figures in American history. From this Tennessee plantation Jackson rose to national fame as a general and president, and here he returned to live out his final years. A columned mansion set amid gardens where Jackson is buried, the estate was also a cotton plantation worked by enslaved people — a history the site now confronts alongside its presidential story.

Andrew Jackson bought the Hermitage property outside Nashville in 1804 and, after years in a log farmhouse, built a brick mansion between 1819 and 1821. By then Jackson was a national hero for his victory at the Battle of New Orleans, and he would go on to win the presidency in 1828. The estate was a working cotton plantation, and its prosperity depended entirely on the labor of enslaved African Americans.

Jackson expanded and remodeled the house over the years; after a fire in 1834 it was rebuilt into the columned Greek Revival mansion seen today, completed in 1836 while Jackson was still president. When his beloved wife Rachel died in 1828, just before he took office, he buried her in the Hermitage garden and later joined her there himself.

Jackson retired to the Hermitage after leaving office in 1837 and lived there until his death in 1845. At the time roughly 150 enslaved people lived and worked on the estate. In 1889 the Ladies' Hermitage Association took over the property to preserve it — one of the earliest historic-preservation efforts in the country led by women — and today the site tells the full story of the plantation, including the lives of the enslaved.