Career
After college, Harding settled at his father's McSpadden's Bend (now known as Pennington Bend) property, River Farm, which his father had bought for him. It was located between the Stones and Cumberland rivers in Nashville. He had married Mary Selena McNairy in 1829. They had a son together, John Harding II, before she died of yellow fever in the epidemic of 1837. It caused many deaths in towns along the waterways of the South.
In 1839 at the age of 31, Harding took over management of the Belle Meade Plantation, which then consisted of 1300 acres. His father was working with some of the enslaved from Belle Meade in Mississippi County, Arkansas, where at the age of 60 he was developing a 10,000-acre cotton plantation near Plum Point Bend along the Mississippi River.
In 1840 the widower Harding married Elizabeth McGavock, daughter of Randal McGavock, a former mayor of Nashville. They had daughters Selene and Mary Elizabeth Harding together.
Harding acquired additional property around Belle Meade, enlarging the plantation to 5300 acres by 1850. In the census that year his father was recorded as the third-largest enslaver in Davidson County, Tennessee, holding 93 enslaved persons at Belle Meade and 34 at McSpadden's Bend plantation, named Bellevue.
At the age of forty-five, from 1853 to 1854, Harding began construction of a larger Greek Revival mansion on the Belle Meade Plantation that incorporated some of his father's brick house. It later became known as the Belle Meade Mansion (listed on the National Register of Historic Places since December 30, 1969).
While Harding raced some of his horses, he was most interested in the practice of breeding high-quality blood stock. He also raised purebred cattle, sheep, and cashmere goats. In 1856, he served as the President of the Nashville Jockey Club. He enslaved 136 people at Belle Meade in 1860. He began a practice of holding yearling sales at Belle Meade, which attracted attention to the quality of his horses.
Harding was a staunch supporter of the Confederate States of America and donated US$500,000 to the Confederate States Army to support the war. Prior to the American Civil War of 1861–1865, he had attained the rank of Brigadier General in the Tennessee State Militia. He headed the Military and Financial Board of Tennessee at the beginning of the Civil War, until his arrest by Union authorities in 1862 after Union forces took over the state and occupied it. Harding was imprisoned by Federal authorities in Fort Mackinac on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron, Michigan for six months.
While he was imprisoned, Elizabeth Harding worried about supporting all the people at Belle Meade. In addition to her own family of three, her sister Mary McGavock Southall; stock manager William Hague; farm manager James Beasley and his family of seven; Rachael Noris, a free mulatto woman; and 137 enslaved were all living at Belle Meade. Harding was released on $20,000 bond and returned to Nashville.
After the Civil War, Harding inherited the plantation after his father died in 1867. He adapted to the emancipation of the enslaved and paying them for work. While some 72 freedmen chose to continue to work for him, only 15 were living on the plantation in 1870. Some moved to a nearby African-American community that formed and was known as Tolbert. It still exists.
Harding agreed to the marriage of his daughter Selene to the widower William Hicks Jackson, a Confederate general, if the couple lived at Belle Meade Plantation. After that, he co-managed the property with his son-in-law. The Harding-Jackson men became world-renowned Thoroughbred horse breeders, later purchasing a top stallion named Iroquois (1878–1899); in 1881 he had been the first American horse to win the prestigious English Epsom Derby.
