Part 12

Major Donelson ever stood high in the affections of Andrew Jackson, and when the old statesman made his will in 1843 he left to him the gorgeous gold-encrusted sword which had been presented to him on July 4, 1822, by the State of Tennessee in honor of his services in the War of 1812. This priceless heirloom is still in the possession of Mrs. Bettie M. Donelson of Nashville, widow of Major Donelson's son Alexander. There is a note of pathos in the apologetic explanatory clause embraced in the paragraph of the will in which this bequest is made: "This, from the great change in my worldly affairs of late, is, with my blessing, all I can bequeath him"; but, the dying General added: "This bequest is made as a memento of the high regard, affection and esteem I bear for him as a high-minded, honest and honorable man." And, since a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, what more precious bequest could anyone receive?

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Andrew Jackson Donelson was not by any means General Jackson's only ward. Another namesake and relative of his wife's who was bequeathed to him and who was brought up at the Hermitage was Andrew Jackson Hutchings, orphan son of his old partner in the mercantile business, John Hutchings, who died in Alabama in November, 1817. The elder Hutchings was then a widower, and when he knew that death was upon him he sent for his old partner and asked him to consent to act as guardian to the little five-year-old boy he was leaving behind him. Jackson took the boy ("little Hutchings" he generally called him in his letters about him), and carefully reared him at the Hermitage, giving him every possible attention and advantage.

When Jackson went to Florida in 1821 he did not take Hutchings with him, the reason assigned, in a letter to John Coffee, being a strange one: "I am aware if I did and an accident happen his grandfather would believe I had destroyed him that his estate should go to his father's family." So he engaged a combination nurse and tutor to take up her residence at the Hermitage during his absence and keep the boy at his studies; and in his letters home from Florida he never neglected to inquire about the lad's health and send him messages. "Say to him his cousin Andrew will bring him a pretty present when he returns, and I will buy him a pony."

Hutchings, as the years passed on, developed into a rather difficult subject. Jackson had hardly arrived at the White House in March, 1829, heart-broken over his wife's recent death and naturally worried over the tremendous burden of responsibility he was taking on his shoulders, when news reached him that the boy had been suspended from the University of Nashville. Much perturbed, he wrote to William Donelson asking him to send Hutchings to the school conducted by Mr. Otey at Franklin. "I wish him taught penmanship, arithmetic and bookkeeping, algebra and some of the other branches of mathematics, moral philosophy, belles letters and such other branches that may be profitable to him as a farmer and private gentleman. I have lost all hope of making him a classic scholar, and do not wish him to touch the languages except to review those books of Latin and Greek that he has read, but wish him to understand his grammar well." He also wrote Hutchings directly that he wished him to enter the school at Franklin, but Hutchings was having too good a time back home at the Hermitage where there was no restraining hand save that of the overseer, and he began to parley about a choice of schools, claiming that he had an aversion to Mr. Otey's school and would prefer to go to one conducted by Mr. Williford at Columbia. While all this was going on, Jackson's friend Colonel Charles J. Love visited the Hermitage and wrote: "Young Hutchings is very much in the way at the Hermitage. He rode one of the brood mares away the other day and got her eyes put out. A letter from you might be of service. Mr. Steel is anxious he should leave the place."

Hutchings finally went off to the Columbia school, but did not last long there. In July Jackson wrote General Coffee, who was helping him manage the boy's estate: "His conduct has filled me with sincere regret. I can not think of letting him be lost, and have concluded to bring him here and place him at the college at George Town under the control of the Catholics. It is an excellent university and perhaps, under my own eye, I might be able to control him and convince him of the impropriety of his ways." Accordingly he came on to Washington when Andrew, junior, returned from a visit to the Hermitage a little later; but in April Jackson sent him back to Mr. Williford's school at Columbia. "Hutchings has behaved well at college," he wrote Coffee, "but he has such a great dislike to this place and his health not good that I have consented to let him return under a promise that he will abandon his extravagance." But after he had left Washington Jackson found that he had left a lot of bills unpaid, and he instructed Coffee to "notify everyone that no accounts will be paid only those authorized by you. This will be necessary to preserve him from bankruptcy and ruin."

Instead of going back to Columbia to school, however, Hutchings simply went back to the Hermitage and began to idle his time away again. Before long Jackson had a letter from Overseer Steele complaining of "a quarrel and fight" he had had with Hutchings over the youth's desire to whip a slave who had offended him; and again the harrassed guardian had to write to Coffee asking him to use his influence to get the boy to go back to school. "At the Hermitage he is to have a home, but I expect he will aid in keeping peace rather than be its disturber," Jackson wrote.

Hutchings apparently never did go back to school at Columbia, but in September turned up in Washington again and wheedled Jackson into sending him to the University of Virginia. "He says he is now determined to become a learned man," the hopeful Jackson wrote Coffee; and for a brief time it appeared that there might be something to this hope, for the boy's professors reported his good conduct early in October. In November Jackson wrote him reproving him for not fulfilling his promise to write to him every week, but inviting him to come and spend the Christmas holidays with him at the White House. Hutchings accordingly came, and the President rounded off the holidays by permitting him to go to Philadelphia to visit his cousin, Miss Mary McLemore of Nashville, who was in school there and with whom he thought he had fallen in love.

By February, 1832, the boy's determination to become a learned man had faded away. By absenting himself from his classes he laid himself liable to dismissal, and to escape this ignominy he withdrew from the school. Jackson was much chagrined and humiliated when notified of this state of affairs, but derived such consolation as he could from the fact that his ward was accused of no moral delinquency. He urged Hutchings to come to Washington; but the young man was evidently ashamed to face his guardian, and so wrote to General Coffee asking him to send him enough money to return to his farm in Alabama which had been left him by his father. Coffee sent the money, but instead of going to Alabama to take up the life of a farmer, Hutchings was back at the Hermitage again in April--and again causing trouble, this time in connection with the handling of some colts.

It was no doubt with a distinct feeling of relief that the harassed President was at last able to relinquish his guardianship in March, 1833, when Hutchings came of age. In writing to General Coffee, instructing him about turning over the young man's patrimony to him, Jackson said: "I know I have performed my pledges to his father on his dying bed"; and in a letter to Hutchings he gave him some kindly and wholesome advice about the manner in which he should conduct himself.

Despite all the trouble he had had with him, however, Jackson seemed to have a real feeling of high regard for the orphan boy, son of his old partner and grandson of his wife's sister Catherine; and he kept up a fatherly correspondence with him all the rest of his life. A significant sidelight on Jackson's high principles in such matters is revealed by his response when Hutchings, checking over the accounting of his estate noticed that there was no charge made for administration and wrote Jackson notifying him of the supposed oversight. "I have no charge against your estate," Jackson wrote him, "I never charged an orphan one cent for either time or expense, and I shall not now begin with you."

Jackson took a particular interest in the progress of his ex-ward's love affairs. His affection for his cousin Mary McLemore having cooled, Hutchings upon settling down on his farm in Alabama fell in love with another cousin, General Coffee's daughter Mary; and Jackson, obviously in favor of the match, helped it along with encouragement to the swain and an occasional adroit word of commendation for Hutchings when he was writing to Mary. They were married on November 14, 1833. Jackson wrote warm letters of congratulation to both of them; and, as early as June, 1834, he was writing Hutchings: "You have not even hinted whether a cradle will be necessary to compleat the furniture of your house. Do inform me."

Andrew Jackson Hutchings, his harum-scarum young days behind him, developed into a responsible and respected citizen and planter. Jackson kept in touch with him through correspondence and occasional visits, and he enjoyed great gratification at Hutchings's success in establishing himself as a substantial and respected man. When Hutchings, following the death of his wife in 1840, went to Cuba in an effort to restore his own health, Jackson wrote a letter of introduction in which he described him as "a gentleman of the highest principles of honor and honesty." The trip to Cuba, however, was ineffectual, and Hutchings returned to Alabama to die in January, 1841.

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Donelson and Hutchings were but two of the numerous children Jackson took into the Hermitage and brought up as his own. A complete roster of them would be a long list. Apparently Jackson's friends had a habit of dying and leaving their orphans to his care. His old friend Edward Butler, for instance, appointed the General guardian of his two sons and two daughters when he died in 1804, and there were other odd children left under his wing from time to time. But Rachel had a heart big enough to find room for them all; and Jackson, despite his engrossing responsibilities and his excruciating headaches, never objected to their noisy play as they tumbled about in the Hermitage while he was talking business and politics with his numerous visitors.

An exotic and pitiful member of the Hermitage household for a few years was Lyncoya, the young Indian whom General Jackson rescued from the Creek battlefield of Tallushatches in November, 1813. When this bloody battle was over, this year-old infant boy was found at the breast of his dead mother, lying on the field. The baby was brought by John Coffee to the tent of General Jackson who sought to have some of the surviving Indian women take it and nurse it. With savage indifference they refused to make any effort to save the baby's life; indeed, they sullenly suggested that the baby might as well be killed since its parents had already been slaughtered by the whites. General Jackson, however, determined to take it upon himself to see that the little waif survived. Accordingly he had it fed regularly on brown sugar and water and bread crumbs, and on this rude fare it survived until it could be sent back to civilization and given proper diet and attention. First the baby was sent to Huntsville, to be cared for there by Colonel LeRoy Pope; and it was his daughter, so tradition says, who conferred the name Lyncoya on the child. At last the little Indian reached the Hermitage, and under the kindly Rachel's care soon bloomed with health again. General Jackson had written home that he was sending the little Indian as a present to little Andrew--much as one would speak of sending a puppy or lamb or some other form of pet. "I wish to know if little Andrew got his little Lyncoya and what he thinks of him," the General wrote later to Rachel; and in all of his subsequent letters home he had something to say about the derelict Indian baby. "How is Lyncoya?" he wrote to Rachel from Mobile late in 1814. "Although he is a heathen he is an orphan, and I know you will extend a motherly care over him." And Rachel did.

The exact status of Lyncoya in the Hermitage menage is now not entirely clear. General Jackson probably shared the frontier sentiment that an Indian was just barely a human being, and at first he seems to have looked upon him as little more than a novel sort of pet for little Andrew. But the young redskin must have grown in Old Hickory's affections, for in subsequent letters he refers to "my little sons, including Lyncoya," and as soon as he was old enough he went to school along with the white boys. Lyncoya, according to tradition, soon showed signs of his racial origin: He decorated his head with turkey feathers, and with a bow and arrow that he made for himself he kept the chicken yard in an uproar. As he grew older, General Jackson's plans for him grew more ambitious. In 1823 he wrote from Washington to Mrs. Jackson: "I would be delighted to receive a letter from our son, little Hutchings and even Lyncoya. The latter I would like to exhibit to Mr. Monroe and the Secretary of War, as I mean to have him received at the Military School as early as I can." But by the time Lyncoya was old enough to enter the Military Academy the national administration had changed and Jackson's enemies were in power. Accordingly, the General decided to have the young Indian learn a trade, and so took him to Nashville and carried him around town so that he could see with his own eyes men working in the various shops, and then let him decide which one was most attractive to him. Lyncoya for some reason (and by a strange coincidence, since Jackson himself had worked in his boyhood at the same trade) chose the shop of a saddler as the scene of his future labors. So he was apprenticed to a Nashville saddle maker in 1827; but it was his custom to spend his Sundays at the Hermitage, riding one of the General's fine saddle horses to and from Nashville. The confinement of the shop, however, did not agree with him and within a year he fell ill with a heavy cold that settled on his lungs. He was given permission to go home to the Hermitage, where he was carefully nursed by Mrs. Jackson, but he grew gradually worse and died June 1, 1828--his being the first death to occur in the Hermitage. Just where he was buried nobody seems to know. At least one chronicle has stated that he was buried in the garden; but, if so, there is no sign of it. No stone there bears his name, and there is no unmarked grave in the family plot. It has also been suggested that he was probably buried in the slaves' graveyard down in the thicket, back of the carriage house. But all this is mere conjecture.

Lyncoya must have been a problem to General Jackson who, in common with other pioneers, hated the Indians as a race, although he apparently had nothing but affection and pity for the forlorn individual he had brought to live under his own roof. That he trusted him implicity is shown by a brief note in Jackson's handwriting now in the possession of a Nashville connection: "Mr. John Summerville will please send me by Lyncoya, who will hand him this, fifty dollars in small notes. Please enclose it under cover to me and oblige your friend Andrew Jackson." Mr. Summerville lived in Nashville, and if Jackson had not had the greatest confidence in him he would never have sent a thirteen-year-old boy on that long, lonesome horseback ride to Nashville and back to get that money.

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An almost lifelong resident of the Hermitage, described by General Jackson as "my friend and companion" was Ralph E. W. Earl, the artist who married Mrs. Jackson's niece. He was born in 1788, the son of Ralph Earl, an artist of distinction; and, following his father's example, took up the profession of artist himself. He came to Nashville in 1816, and through painting Jackson's portrait established an acquaintance with the General which ripened into lifelong friendship. One of his friends in a contemporaneous letter described him as "the very soul of goodness and honor"; and that seems to have been the general opinion of him.

While in Natchez exhibiting a portrait of Jackson which he had painted, Earl met Miss Jane Caffery, a daughter of Mrs. Jackson's sister Mary, whom he married after a short courtship. Upon their return to Nashville they were invited to live at the Hermitage, and when Mrs. Earl died a few months afterwards, Jackson insisted that Earl continue his residence there. From then until his death he was the intimate friend of General Jackson, going to Washington with him when he was elected President, and accompanying him as a companion on most of his travels.

During the latter part of his life Earl spent most of his time painting portraits of Jackson, and came to be known in a jesting way as the "court painter." It was intimated around political circles in Washington that Earl's influence on the President was such that his friendship was a good thing to have; and it was hinted that Earl received many commissions to paint Jackson's picture from practical men who were less interested in having a hand-painted portrait of the President than they were in currying favor with him. Be that as it may, Earl enjoyed painting the picture of his old friend and benefactor and Jackson enjoyed Earl's companionship; so everybody was happy. Earl is described by his contemporaries as a man of quiet and gentle ways, and he must have been an excellent foil for the fiery old General.

That he was not without a streak of humor is shown by his skylarking when President Jackson left him in Washington when he returned to the Hermitage in the summer of 1836. He was entrusted with the duty, during Jackson's absence, of opening the President's mail and distributing the letters to the proper departments. Earl, with dry wit, remarked to Francis P. Blair that this would place on the Cabinet members the unusual responsibility of attending to their own duties; and there was a good deal of chaffing and carrying-on in the official family while the well-liked pseudo-President was occupying the chair in the White House office with mock gravity. Earl would joke the Cabinet members by seriously referring to them all of the incoherent letters of rattle-brained cranks, including an inventor of a perpetual motion machine who wrote him from the Philadelphia lunatic asylum; and when one of them jokingly objected to being so annoyed, Earl remarked that while he was sitting in the President's chair he was tempted to go ahead and make some needed changes in the government and thus save Mr. Van Buren (the heir apparent) the trouble. Blair thought all of this great sport and wrote to Jackson back at the Hermitage telling him all about it. "He is thus playing the part of Sancho Panzo," chuckled Blair, "with those whom he ventures to joke with, making some pretty good hits." Jackson was never much of a hand for horse play and buffoonery; but if he had any objection to all this pranking of Colonel Earl's he never voiced it.

Upon the expiration of Jackson's term as President Earl returned to the Hermitage with him, but did not live long. In addition to being an artist he was also a dabbler in the art of landscape gardening. He had designed the concentric flower beds in the middle of the garden; and when Jackson in the summer of 1837 started to build the guitar-shaped driveway from the gate to the front door of the Hermitage it was Earl who drew the plans and helped supervise the work. The sun shines fiercely in Tennessee in early September, and while engaged in this work Earl suffered a heat stroke which passed into a congestive chill from which he never recovered. He died on September 16, 1838, leaving uncompleted a portrait on which he was working of Jackson in his major-general's uniform. In writing to his former secretary, Nicholas P. Trist, notifying him of Earl's death Jackson said: "His death is a severe bereavement to me. He was my sincere friend and constant companion, and when I was able to travel always accompanied me. He was an invaluable friend, a most upright and honest man; but he is gone to happier climes than these 'where the wicked cease to trouble and the weary are at rest.'" Earl was buried in the family plot in the corner of the garden, and Jackson made his little niche in history secure by directing that there be engraved on his headstone the words: "Friend and companion of General Andrew Jackson."

In the journal of a Nashville citizen of that era, Mr. Matthew Delamere Cooper, the funeral of Colonel Earl is commemorated in a quaint and touching poem which he has entitled "The Burial," in introducing which he says: "That the following lines may be understood it is necessary to mention that they were written on the occasion of the burial of Colonel Earl, a portrait painter of considerable eminence, for many years the intimate friend of General Jackson and long an inmate of the General's house. He was followed to the grave by a few friends, amongst them the venerable hero, who did honor to his memory and consecrated the accumulating heap over his remains by a few tears that would not be represt. The man of iron soul, the hero of a hundred battles, wept over his departed friend! He was buried near a weeping willow and within a few feet of the cenotaph destined to receive the mortal remains of Andrew Jackson. (May it long be an empty tomb!!)"

The Burial

There was no gloomy pomp to strike the eye; There fell no toll of bell upon the ear. To where a new made grave was opened nigh, In silence slowly followed we the bier.

And was he little valued, little known, Who reached obscurity thus life's journey's end? No, Art had made a brilliant name his own And him the hero honored as his friend.

Yet in the latest office due the dead, To him without parade thus sadly done, Was he not honored much for whom was shed That old man's tears, by veteran friendship won?

How touching is such grief; who does not sigh To see the sorrow-stricken hero bend; The tear that mocks restraint, big in his eye, Falls on the gathering heap above his friend.

Not the deep tolling of the solemn bell Or martial funeral pomp for fallen chief, Pall, long procession, pageant, all that tell The magnitude of a paraded grief;

Not all were worth that solitary tear. One drop from such a fount would nerve the brave To court the deadliest danger without fear, So might such honor wait him at the grave.

Hidden forever now, calm be thy sleep. The ground is hallowed where thy place is made. A spot all aftertimes shall sacred keep Sharer with it the weeping willow's shade.

And when to see where he, the great man, lies Hither hereafter pilgrim patriots come, Remembered shalt thou be, and tearful eyes Shall mark thy grave beside the hero's tomb.

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