This 1756 advertisement in a British paper is revealing. Slavery concepts held by the English show that those providing education and presumably other material needs believed they were owed loyalty, completely missing the fundamental human desire for freedom.
Masters were sometimes baffled at their slave’s flight.
Take Squire Walker’s 14-year-old “black Negro boy” who escaped in London on May 31, 1756.
He had fled “without the least provocation,” the squire’s ad in the Public Advertiser read the next day. “Born in his house . . . handsome, strong, and well built . . . christen’d by the Name of Thomas Walk, kept at School to learn to read, write and Cypher, at great expense,” the ad continued. He had even made off with the “Gold-laced Hat that I used to wear.”
Nearly 50 years later, after abolition of slavery was obvious to most of the world (e.g. ending by 1833 for England), a completely tone-deaf advertisement by Andrew Jackson in 1804 America shows notable differences….
Looking at the barbarity of Jackson’s “Stop the Steal” campaign, we can see stark differences from Squire Walker’s 1756 notice. While Walker emphasized the education and care supposedly given to Thomas Walk, Jackson’s advertisement shows no such pretense of benevolence.
As I said before, abolition was writing on the wall by this time. It was ending everywhere. In 1807, America passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, a federal law that would take effect almost immediately. This, instead of ending slavery (as Lincoln famously later pointed out it should have, using his debates with Douglas) led to an industry surrounding rape of American Black women to produce humans as property.
The contrasting approaches in the ads reveal how enslavers in America thus were so incredibly different in the history of slavery, pushing a regression from human relationship with those enslaved towards a rapidly worsening mechanized, industrialized system of human trafficking replete with ethnic cleansing and genocide:
- While Walker seemed baffled by ingratitude from someone he’d “invested in” through education, Jackson takes a coin-operated transactional approach with rewards for capture without any confusion about why someone would flee being treated so poorly.
- Jackson’s broader treatment of enslaved people demonstrates this brutal pragmatism. He exploited Black freedmen by falsely promising pay and respect when he needed their military service. After they delivered victory, he denied these promises, stripped them of weapons and rights, and claimed their achievements as his own. This pattern of using American Blacks when convenient and then actively working to diminish their freedoms characterizes Jackson’s approach.
- Jackson’s declaration of martial law in New Orleans, jailing of critics (including a US District Court Judge), and attempts at press censorship suggest an authoritarian approach that is consistent with his later political tactics.
- The juxtaposition is particularly telling: Walker’s advertisement reflects a paternalistic delusion where enslavers believed providing education created an obligation of loyalty. Jackson’s advertisement, however, shows no such pretense – just the raw exercise of power and ownership without the veneer of “benefits provided.”
- While Walker boasted about Thomas Walk’s abilities to read, write and “cypher,” Jackson’s advertisement focuses on physical descriptions and monetary rewards, showing a shift from pretending slavery had mutual benefits to deliberate, unmasked coercion.
Notably, Jackson’s claims of military success in New Orleans were in fact stolen from free Black men who comprised over 50% of the force, in order to build political power that he would then use to strip all American Black rights and horrifically corrupt and expand slavery.
After the 1815 victory at New Orleans, Jackson ordered the valorous American Black troops banned from their own city and commanded enslaved soldiers return to slavery immediately rather than granting the freedom he had promised them if they would do his fighting for him. After riding his stolen valor of false military glory to the presidency, Jackson implemented policies that intensified and expanded American slavery to unprecedented levels of cruelty in human history.
His economic policy to rapidly juice wealth for slave owners at the expense of actual working men was predictably disastrous. Removal of federal deposits from the Bank of the United States and subsequent placement in unregulated state banks fueled rampant speculation, particularly in slave-backed securities and land for cotton plantations. This deliberate financial deregulation, combined with his aggressive expansion of slave territories through militant deportations of ethnic cleansing (forced Native American removal), created the perfect conditions for the market Panic of 1837.
What followed from his ideas of elite wealth generation instead was one of the worst economic depressions in American history to that point. He created a five-year disaster born directly from the intertwined forces of financial recklessness and his commitment to white supremacist fever dreams of unregulated exploitation of Americans (expanding the slave economy).
The catastrophic economic collapse revealed the fundamental instability of Jackson’s whole vision: an America built on territorial conquest, extraction of wealth through human trafficking in the state-sanctioned rape of Black women, and unchecked “coin” speculation using humans as bits of property.
This evolution of a dangerous and deceitful regression in an American President illustrates how, despite abolition movements gaining ground worldwide for the century prior, American slavery became even more cruelly and nakedly exploitative due to men like Andrew Jackson, dropping even an Old-World paternalistic facade of any care at all for humanity.
