Stockley D. Hays

Stockley Donelson Hays (December 1788 – September 8, 1831) was a 19th-century American lawyer, military officer, and nephew of U.S. president Andrew Jackson. Hays was involved in historically significant events from an early age. As a teenager he accompanied Aaron Burr down the Mississippi River during the Burr conspiracy of 1806–1807. He aided Jackson in a famous tavern brawl in Nashville, Tennessee in 1813. He served in Jackson's volunteer army as a quartermaster during the Creek War and in the larger southwestern theater of the War of 1812, and then he was made a judge advocate of the regular United States Army at the pay level of a major from 1816 to 1821.

Stockley D. Hays and several of his siblings intermarried with daughters and sons of Thomas Butler (of the so-called Fighting Butlers), who had become wards of Andrew Jackson after their father's death. The Hays and Butler families remained close to Jackson throughout his military and political campaigns. In the 1820s, the Hays and Butler families were founding settlers of Jackson, Tennessee, which was established shortly after the land was ceded under a Jackson-negotiated treaty with the Chickasaw people.

In 1831, following the ratification of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek between the Choctaw people and the United States government, U.S. president Jackson sought to appoint Hays to the high office of U.S. surveyor general south of Tennessee, which triggered a political conflict with Congressman Davy Crockett and U.S. Senator George Poindexter. Crockett, a fellow early settler of West Tennessee, described Hays as an ill-equipped alcoholic, but as a compromise between Poindexter and Jackson, Hays was appointed to be register of the land office at Clinton, Mississippi. Hays died of bilious fever shortly after being granted the post and never carried out any of the duties of the office.