Samuel J. Hays

Samuel Jackson Hays (c. 1802–November 3, 1866) was an American militia officer, lawyer, slave owner, plantation owner, and railroad investor in west Tennessee. His father was Robert Hays and his uncle was President Andrew Jackson; Jackson's wife Rachel and his mother Jane Donelson Hays were sisters. The extended Donelson clan, with Jackson serving as patriarch (founder John Donelson was killed in 1785), is credited with being exceptionally efficient at using kinship networks as profit centers and engaging in what has been described as vertically integrated family-business imperialism: "They fought the native peoples, negotiated the treaties to end the fighting and demanded native lands as the price of war, surveyed the newly available lands, bought those lands, litigated over disputed boundaries, adjudicated the cases, and made and kept laws within the region that had been carved out of Indian lands."

Historian Lorman Ratner described Andrew Jackson as a boy without a father, and a man without sons, which may have motivated him to accept guardianship of dozens of young people who lived with him at various times or whom he assisted legally, financially, or socially. Hays, as a nephew and ward of Andrew Jackson, was one of the several early participants in and beneficiaries of this system. Hays was one of several wards whom Jackson sent to West Point, and he brought Hays to Washington, D.C. in the first year of his presidency, and then sent him away, considering Hays and his son Andrew Jackson Jr. to be bad influences on one another. For the remainder of Jackson's life he continued a correspondence with Hays, who served as a key outpost in his social–political network across the U.S. South.

Nominally a lawyer, Hays' income seems to have come from cotton planting and slave ownership, and his power base was his authority as a local militia leader in west Tennessee, which was brought to bear during the American colonization of Texas and the subsequent Mexican-American War. He was considered the richest person in Madison County, Tennessee before the American Civil War, and was among the top one percent of slave owners nationwide. Hays died shortly after the end of the war, and his heirs were said to have been impoverished.