Andrew Jackson and his wife Rachel adopted a nephew — one of her brother’s twin boys — around 1809, naming him Andrew Jackson Jr. It’s unclear why the boy’s birth parents, Severn Donelson and his wife Elizabeth, allowed for this arrangement, according to The Hermitage site. Andrew Jackson Jr. was well educated and by the age of 20 was in charge of running the Hermitage while his adopted father was in the White House. But Junior was impecunious and required a lot of oversight by Jackson in his business dealings.
It wasn’t long after the president’s death that the younger Jackson began selling off pieces of the property to pay his mounting debts. In 1856, his bad investments led him to sell the Hermitage to the state of Tennessee. He died in 1865 from tetanus after accidentally shooting himself in the hand while hunting. President Jackson also bequeathed gifts of enslaved people to Junior’s wife and children, per the Tennessee Virtual Archive.
