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Chapter 13,455 wordsPublic domain

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THE HERMITAGE _Home of Old Hickory_

By STANLEY F. HORN

_New York_ GREENBERG : PUBLISHER

TO MY WIFE WITHOUT WHOSE INTEREST AND ENCOURAGEMENT THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN

CONTENTS

PAGE I. The Pre-Hermitage Period 1 II. Original Building, Fire and Rebuilding 19 III. Rescue and Restoration 37 IV. Description of the House 58 V. The Garden and Grounds 73 VI. The Hermitage Household 97 VII. Guests at the Hermitage 137 VIII. The Tennessee Farmer 158 IX. Church and Religion, and Final Days 187

Appendices: A: Chronology 207 B: Andrew Jackson's Will 209 C: His Goings and Comings 213 D: Governing Boards 220 Index 223

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE Front View of the Hermitage, _Frontispiece_ Original Log House 2 The First Hermitage 3 Imaginary Picture of the Hermitage 10 The Hermitage in 1831 10 Plat of the Hermitage Plantation 11 Old Print Showing the Young Cedar Trees 11 Front View of the House 18 Close-up View of the Façade 19 The Front Door 26 Rear View of the House 26 General Jackson Greeting Lafayette 27 Original Slave Cabin 27 Uncle Alfred 34 Sunday Morning at the Hermitage Church 35 The Hermitage Church 42 Interior of the Old Hermitage Church 42 Epitaph on Mrs. Jackson's Tomb 43 The Tomb of General and Mrs. Jackson 43 Earl's Portrait of General Jackson 50 The Old Family Carriage 51 Passage from the Kitchen 58 The Hermitage Well 58 Front Gate and Entrance Driveway 59 The Garden 59 One of the Garden Walks 66 View of the Garden from the House 67 General Jackson's Desk 82 General Jackson's Office 83 General Jackson's Bedroom 98 Entrance Hall 99 The Stairway 114 Guest Room 115 The Back Parlor 130 The Dining Room 131 The Front Parlor 146 Upstairs Hall 147 Old Kitchen 162 Original Silverware 163 General Jackson's Liquor Chest 176 Advertisement of _Truxton_ 177

DRAWINGS

First Floor Plan 170a Second Floor Plan 184a Front Elevation, _Front end sheet_ Rear Elevation, _Back end sheet_

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

_The preservation of the Hermitage as one of America's most cherished historic shrines is due to the vision and patriotic enthusiasm of the women composing the Ladies' Hermitage Association, to whom all possible credit should be given for the work they have done._

_Acknowledgment is made to the association for their permission to use the photographs of the interior of the Hermitage, to which they have the exclusive right. Other photographs are used by permission of Marvin Wiles, photographer, of Nashville, to whom the copyright belongs. The architectural drawings were furnished by the Library of Congress, Washington, having been prepared by the Historic American Buildings Survey._

The Author.

THE HERMITAGE: HOME OF OLD HICKORY

I: THE PRE-HERMITAGE PERIOD

"Put down in your book," said one of Andrew Jackson's old neighbors to James Parton when that eminent biographer was in Tennessee gathering material for his famous life of Jackson, "that the General was the prince of hospitality; not only because he entertained a great many people but because the poor, belated peddler was as welcome at the Hermitage as the President of the United States and made so much at his ease that he felt as though he had got home."

And Parton put it down in his book, and so preserved to posterity that sincere and revealing tribute, eloquent in its simplicity, from a neighboring farmer. There spoke a man who knew Andrew Jackson not merely as the conqueror of the hostile Indians, the Hero of New Orleans or the President of the United States, but as the country gentleman who kept open house, who was known and admired by his fellow farmers and who was celebrated for his hospitality in a country where hospitality was a common virtue.

If an old house has emotions of its own, as some of the poets would have us believe, it is easy to think of the Hermitage blushing with pride at that tribute. There are many stately mansions, there are numerous great homes of famous men; but of how many of these may it be truthfully said that within its walls the poorest peddler with his pack found just as warm a welcome as the most distinguished visitor?

Fortunately for succeeding generations the Hermitage, that paragon of hospitality, is preserved just as it was in those early days when Old Hickory himself was there to greet the way-worn traveler--peddler or President--and make him feel at home. Serene and stately in its grove of trees, flanked by its formal garden and surrounded by its broad acres, it stands there a few miles out from Nashville in all its classic and simple beauty. Here is the home he built for himself and his beloved wife; the same old house to which he returned in 1837 after eight turbulent years in the White House; the place where he planted his cotton and raced his horses, where he spent his last years, where he died and where he is buried.

The visitor's first glimpse of the house is down through the same old winding driveway, shaded with the native cedar trees planted under Jackson's personal direction; and its broad façade is seen through the trees, its graceful Corinthian columns gleaming in the sunlight, just as it looked to the old General when he drove up in his lumbering carriage drawn by his famous team of greys. Off to the right is seen the formal flower garden he had laid out for Mrs. Jackson in 1819; the garden where he laid her to rest when she died in 1828, and along whose paths he found pleasure and repose during the last year of his life. Inside the house are found things just as he left them when he died--the hand-painted wall paper, the massive mahogany furniture, the gleaming silver, the books in their shelves in the library.

* * * *

As a persisting result of the astonishingly violent politics of his day, the image of Andrew Jackson in the public mind today is often blurred and distorted. In his campaign for the Presidency he was the victim of such a torrent of cruel, personal vilification as never before nor since has blackened the annals of American politics. In newspapers, broadsides, and public addresses he was persistently and vigorously denounced as an uncouth, ignorant backwoods ruffian, a tipsy tavern brawler, a military despot, an adulterer and an assassin. The voters of these United States were urged to believe that, despite his spectacular achievements as a militia general and Indian fighter, he was morally, mentally and temperamentally unfit to sit in the President's chair.

This barrage of malignant partisan propaganda did not succeed in barring Jackson's way to the White House; but it did have the effect of indelibly impressing on the minds of many thousands of American citizens of those days the honest conviction that Andrew Jackson was what we today tersely style a "roughneck;" and that impression has persisted to a surprising extent through succeeding generations even down to the present time.

But the Hermitage remains as an enduring and impressive challenge to that erroneous characterization of this many-sided and little understood statesman. This, it is plain to see, was the home of no mere backwoodsman or ruffian. A mansion when it was built more than a hundred years ago, it was obviously the seat of a man of genteel characteristics, of refined, though simple taste.

It is no uncommon thing today for visitors to the Hermitage to express surprise that such a house should have been built by Andrew Jackson; but such surprise grows out of a misconception of the man's true nature and characteristics.

The usually accepted picture of Jackson in the public mind is largely the result of our American admiration of the primitive, a love for the so-called manly and rugged qualities which sometimes leads us into overdoing our humanizing of some of our early heroes. As a matter of fact, Jackson, though not a college graduate, was by no means a typical example of the popular conception of an illiterate frontiersman. He had had formal schooling, had studied law and had been admitted to the North Carolina bar when at the age of twenty-one years he crossed the mountains and came to the Cumberland settlements in what is now Tennessee. His standard of education was notably higher than the average of that day and locality. He came to the Cumberland country as the state's attorney for the newly created Mero District, and we may be sure that an uneducated, uncouth man would never have been selected by the governor of North Carolina for this important post.

Furthermore, although he was born in comparative poverty--a posthumous child--his widowed mother, soon to die of yellow fever while nursing wounded Revolutionary soldiers, had relatives with whom to leave him. These relatives were people of substance, ranking sufficiently high to entertain George Washington on his visit to South Carolina in 1791, and they gave the orphan Andrew the benefit of a boyhood spent amid the surroundings of a prosperous and cultured Southern family.

So, while the youthful Andrew Jackson engaged in cock-fighting, horse-racing and dueling, these were by no means unusual pastimes for the high-spirited youths of that time. He had the innate qualities of a gentleman; and those qualities find their truest manifestation in the home he built for the declining years of his wife and himself.

* * * *

The Hermitage, though it has gained world-wide fame as Andrew Jackson's home, was not his dwelling place when he first settled in the Nashville community in 1788. At that time the danger of attacks by Indians had not yet entirely disappeared, and residents of the outlying districts still frequently lived in "stations"--groups of houses gathered about a central habitation, thus offering the opportunity for protection against attack. At such a station near Nashville lived the widow of John Donelson, who had been one of the founders of the original Nashborough, and it was in one of the cabins adjacent to her home that Andrew Jackson lived when he settled in the new country. With him lived his friend, John Overton, later his law partner and his lifelong confidant and advisor. The two young lawyers hung out their shingle together, with their office in the cabin where they lived, taking their meals with the widow Donelson.

Living with Mrs. Donelson at this time was her daughter Rachel, the estranged bride of a high-spirited and jealous Kentuckian named Lewis Robards. The young couple had gone to Kentucky to live when they married, but the jealous husband made life with him intolerable and Rachel soon returned to her mother's house, where Jackson found her when he went there to live. Largely through the pacific efforts of John Overton, an old friend of the Robards family, and at the instigation of Lewis Robards's mother whose sympathies were with Rachel in the affair, a reconciliation was patched up and Captain Robards came to the widow Donelson's home late in 1788 to live again with his wife. Soon, however, Robards created a new crisis by charging Jackson with undue attentions to his wife. The fiery young lawyer challenged Robards to a duel, but the challenge was declined and in the spring of 1790 Robards returned to Kentucky with the avowed intention of getting a divorce. In the fall of that year the news drifted down to Nashville that the divorce had been granted, and about a year later, in the latter part of 1791, Jackson married Rachel.

The wedding ceremony took place in Natchez, Mississippi, whither she had fled to escape from her husband's threats. "I'm going to haunt you!" Robards told her when he left her; and she, not knowing exactly what that threat implied but well knowing her moody husband's erratic disposition, feared bodily harm and thought it safest to get as far away from him as possible. The home of relatives in Natchez provided a pleasing asylum in this emergency; and so it was there that the marriage ceremony was performed.

But, alas, it developed that the news of the divorce was premature--the marriage with Jackson was consummated before the attenuated Kentucky divorce proceedings had been actually completed. Legally, therefore, Mrs. Robards-Jackson was technically guilty of bigamy; but the incensed Robards used a harsher term in discussing the young Tennessee lawyer's relations with his erstwhile wife. Jackson patched the thing up as best he could by having another wedding ceremony promptly performed in January, 1794, after the Kentucky divorce was actually granted; but the irregularities attending his marriage rose to plague him again and again throughout his life, with his political enemies gleefully making capital of the unfortunate episode to the fullest possible extent.

Jackson at the time of his marriage, though still a young man, was in prosperous circumstances. His success as a lawyer in the new community had been almost instantaneous, due largely to an unusual state of affairs existing in the Cumberland settlements when he arrived there. Nashville was still a young and undeveloped frontier town and up until the time of Jackson's arrival boasted only one lawyer. This representative of the legal fraternity had been retained as counsel for a sort of combination of habitual debtors; and the result was that the merchants, as well as other creditors, found it well-nigh impossible to collect what was owing to them. When Jackson appeared on the scene and let it be known that he was a lawyer looking for clients, he was immediately offered these claims; and it was characteristic of him that he accepted with avidity a difficult class of litigation from which many other young lawyers might have shrunk. But Jackson's physical and moral courage made him enjoy the kind of a fight against odds that most people would avoid; and he prosecuted his clients' claims with such boldness and vim that he soon drove an irresistible wedge into the debt-paying strike. Naturally this immediately popularized him with the responsible elements in Nashville, and his law practice quickly flourished. Within seven years of his arrival in 1788 he had more cases on the docket in Davidson County than all the other Nashville lawyers combined. In the four terms of court in the county in 1794 there were 397 cases; Andrew Jackson appeared as counsel in 288 of them.

Although he had accepted his official appointment with a mental reservation and had really come out to Nashville on a sort of prospecting trip, he soon decided to stay and grow up with the new settlement. His position as attorney-general or public prosecutor of the Mero District gave him distinction and naturally strengthened his legal prestige, and his private law practice had quickly developed to such an extent that at the time of his marriage he enjoyed a comfortable income.

There is a persistent legend that Jackson quickly accumulated vast holdings of land by reason of his practice of taking land grants and acreage tracts in lieu of legal fees, and that when he married he had so much land he hardly knew the extent of his property. It is true that after he had been in Nashville several years he did begin to trade and traffic in land, and gradually blossomed into a land speculator on a grand scale whose holdings ran into the thousands of acres. Contrary to tradition, however, at the time of his marriage he did not own an acre of ground anywhere; and he did not have a home to which to take his new bride.

The records are rather vague as to the first two or three years of the married life of Andrew and Rachel; but, from all the available facts, it appears that they spent at least a part of their honeymoon living at or near Natchez and then returned to Nashville and probably lived temporarily with Mrs. Donelson. But in February, 1792, the land transfer records show that Andrew Jackson bought from John Donelson (Rachel's brother) a farm of 330 acres located in the foot of Jones Bend of the Cumberland River, just across the river from the home of old Mrs. Donelson on the Gallatin Road.

Here on this 330-acre river farm Jackson established his first home of his own. He called the place Poplar Grove--at least a letter written to John McKee on May 16, 1794, is so headed. Apparently, however, this name did not exactly suit him, for a letter to John Coffee written the next year is dated from Poplar Flat. All trace of his habitation on this farm has now disappeared, although there is a faint reminiscence of his tenancy in a "Jackson's well" still to be found in that neighborhood.

It is interesting to note, that this Jones Bend (now called Hadley's Bend) was the site chosen by the United States government for the location of its gigantic smokeless powder manufacturing plant in 1917, and the acreage of Poplar Flat was swallowed up in the consolidation of the farms that went to make up the great powder plant tract. In honor of the old hero who once tilled these acres, the operation was officially known as the Old Hickory Powder Plant; and the little industrial town that has grown up out of that development is now called Old Hickory.

Jackson's personal affairs flourished while he was living at Poplar Flat, and the land records of Davidson County in 1793 begin to show the first evidences of his land trading. As he prospered he, as was natural, wanted a better and bigger place to live; and so on March 16, 1796, he bought from one John Shannon a tract of 640 acres further up in the bend of the river, and here he set up his new home which he called Hunter's Hill.

There was a strange element of romance connected with this selection of a place to live--perhaps by design, perhaps through coincidence. It appears that when young Captain Robards effected his reconciliation with Rachel in 1788 it was part of the agreement that they would set up a home in Tennessee. At any rate, Robards entered 640 acres, "on the south side of Cumberland River, beginning at an ash, thence south 234 poles, etc." for which he paid the state of North Carolina at the rate of ten pounds for each hundred acres. After his divorce in 1794 Captain Robards--a little sadly, no doubt--sold his tract of land to John Shannon of Logan County, Kentucky, and it was this self-same piece of ground that Jackson bought from Shannon in 1796 and on which he established his new home.

It seems unlikely that it was a mere coincidence that led Jackson to take up his residence on the land originally selected for home-making purposes by his predecessor in Rachel's affections. Did she herself guide Captain Robards' selection of the location in the first place, and did she have some lingering sentimental attachment for it which caused her to influence Jackson to buy it for her after they were married? Who knows what was going on in Rachel's head as her brilliant young husband began to clear the way for their new home on the site where a few years ago she had expected to live with her first mate?

The Hunter's Hill house no longer exists, having been destroyed by fire long ago; but, from all accounts, it was a notable home for its day and time. For one thing, it was of frame construction when most of the frontier houses were built of logs; and it was looked upon then as one of the fine houses of the community. It had an elevated location and commanded an inspiring view of the winding river and the fertile bend. Few if any young married men in the Cumberland country had a better estate.

Andrew Jackson, the energetic young lawyer from the civilized side of the mountains, was now established as a man of affairs in the new settlements. His legal attainments had attracted such attention outside of Nashville that in 1790 when the federal government established "The Territory South of the River Ohio" George Washington had appointed Jackson district attorney, an office he held until 1796 when he was elected to serve in the convention which in that year framed the constitution for the new state of Tennessee.

But Jackson's great energy and great ambition made it impossible for him to be satisfied with the activities incident to the practice of law, holding public office and cultivating a farm. And so it was not long before he established a store at Hunter's Hill, a store at which, according to tradition, both he and Rachel waited on the trade.