Part 13

One of history's shadowy figures who lived at the Hermitage for the better part of two years was Major Henry Lee of Virginia, scapegrace son of General Henry (Lighthorse Harry) Lee by his first wife. As his father's eldest son Major Lee had become the master of Stratford Hall, the seat of the Lee family in Virginia; but as the result of an amour with his wife's sister he had been forced to leave Stratford and exile himself beyond the boundaries of his native state. Attracted by the rising star of General Jackson, under whom he had served in the War of 1812, he came to Nashville to seek a connection with him; and Jackson, despite the social stigma attached to the expatriated Virginian, gave him asylum and gave him secretarial employment.

Major Lee's polished diction is to be seen in many of Jackson's formal state papers of this period, notably his first inaugural; and during the campaign of 1828 he wrote copiously in behalf of the General's candidacy. He was on Jackson's staff at the time of Mrs. Jackson's death; and tradition has it that he was the author of the gem-like epitaph inscribed on her tomb. When the Indian boy, Lyncoya, died in 1828 Lee wrote a tribute to him which appeared in one of the Nashville daily papers and was greatly admired at the time.

When President Jackson was inaugurated in 1829 Major Lee aspired to be the chief clerk in the Department of State, an office for which his talents and education eminently well fitted him; but the black sheep son of Lighthorse Harry ("Black Harry" he was sometimes called) by reasons of his indiscretion in Virginia had made some powerful enemies there. They went to Washington and waged a vigorous and successful fight against his being elevated to such a high place in the Federal government, and so his ambition in this direction was thwarted. Jackson then appointed him to a diplomatic post in Algiers, and Lee went there to take over the duties of this office; but his Virginia enemies were relentless and succeeded in preventing the Senate's confirmation of this appointment. Major Lee left Algiers and went to Paris, where he died a few years later. He planned to write a biography of Jackson and actually completed a part of the manuscript; but after his death this uncompleted manuscript could never be found.

It is of passing interest to observe that Robert E. Lee, the Confederate commander, was appointed to the Military Academy at West Point by President Jackson in 1829; and it is not improbable that this appointment was the direct result of his elder half-brother's friendship with the President.

A charming impression of the Hermitage household is recorded in the book of recollections written in 1872 by Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia who, as few people now recall, spent his honeymoon in the Jackson home. Henry Wise, a promising young barrister, in August, 1828 came to Nashville from his home in Virginia for the purpose of marrying the daughter of Dr. O. Jennings, pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Nashville attended by General Jackson and his wife when they were in the city. Dr. Jennings was not only their pastor but their close personal friend; and so, with characteristic hospitality, the Jacksons insisted that the young couple must spend their honeymoon at their country home.

"We arrived at the Hermitage to dinner," writes Governor Wise, "and were shown to a bridal chamber magnificently furnished with articles which were the rich and costly presents of the city of New Orleans to its noble defender. The first or second evening of our stay, Mr. Lee had drawn about him his usual crowd of listeners; but we were the more special guests of Mrs. Jackson. She was a descendant of Colonel Charles Stockley, of our native county, Accomack, Virginia; and we had often seen his old mansion, an old Hanoverian hip-roofed house standing on the seaside not far from Metompkin; and she had often heard her mother talk of the old Assawaman Church, not far above Colonel Stockley's house. Thus she was not only a good Presbyterian, whose pastor's daughter was the bride, and she a Presbyterian too, but the groom was from the county of her ancestors in Virginia and could tell her something about traditions she had heard of the family from which she sprung. With pious devotion to her mother's family she desired to have a talk with us particularly, and formed a cosy group of quiet chat in the northeast corner room leading to the garden. This room had a north window, diagonal from the door leading to the garden. At this door her group was formed, fronting in a semi-circle the north window of the room, the garden door on our right. First, on our right, next the window, was old Judge Overton, one of General Jackson's earliest and best friends. He was a man who had made his mark in law and politics, but was not pious and was a queer-looking little old man. Small in stature and cut into sharp angles at every salient point; a round, prominent, gourd-like, bald cranium; a peaked Roman nose; a prominent, sharp but manly chin; and he had lost his teeth and swallowed his lips. Next to him, on his left, sat General Jackson, his hair always standing straight up and out, but he in his mildest mood of social suavity. On his left the Reverend Doctor Jennings, one of the sweetest men in society, very distinguished as a lawyer first and then as a divine, with a rare sense of humor which even his religious zeal could not always repress, and yet awfully earnest and severe against all levity. On his left was Mrs. Jackson, a lady who doubtless was once a form of rotund and rubicund beauty, but now was very plethoric and obese and seemingly suffered from what was called phthisis, and talked low but quick with a short and wheezing breath, the very personification of affable kindness and of a welcome as sincere and truthful as it was simple and tender. On her left was ourself, responding to her every inquiry about things her mother had handed down concerning the Stockley family; and on our left sat Henry Baldwin, the son of Judge Baldwin of the Supreme Court of the United States, one of the groomsmen, a gentleman of fine culture, good sense and taste."

Clearly the Jackson household was an attractive one and a pleasant one to visit. No wonder the Hermitage was always full of guests!

Henry Wise and his wife recalled with sadness that happy scene in the northeast room when they were back there from Nashville just a few months later to attend the funeral of Mrs. Jackson, held in that same room where they had all been so merry but a short time before.

The death of General Jackson's deeply beloved wife was doubly tragic, coming as it did so closely in the wake of his triumphant campaign for the Presidency in 1828, and hastened as it unquestionably was by the heartless and slanderous attacks that were made on her character by Jackson's political enemies in their desperate attempt to defeat his candidacy.

Her health had been increasingly bad for four or five years. She suffered from asthma and from palpitation of the heart, and the excitement and humiliation of the savage political campaign had aggravated her trouble, although she was not bedridden. Her final and fatal seizure came suddenly on December 17th while she was standing in her sitting room talking with Aunt Hannah concerning some of the household affairs. The General, who was in the fields, was hastily summoned, doctors were called, relatives and friends hurried in. For sixty hours she suffered intensely, and during all this time her adoring husband never left her bedside. At length she grew better; and her first thought was to reassure the General as to her improved condition and to urge him to get some sleep so that he would be in proper condition for the great banquet of triumph that was scheduled to be held in Nashville by his political admirers in honor of his election to the Presidency. The General at first refused to leave her side, but on the evening of the 22nd she seemed so greatly improved and she begged him so earnestly to get some rest that he reluctantly relaxed his vigil and retired to the room across the hall. Hardly had he left the sick room when the end came suddenly and without warning. With only one spasmodic cry she died in the arms of the faithful Aunt Hannah who was close by her side.

General Jackson was almost paralyzed with grief. He refused to believe her dead, and persistently urged the doctors to try every known restorative. But the doctors knew that life had left her body and ordered her laid out on a table in the old-fashioned way. "Spread four blankets on the table," the General thoughtfully admonished the servants, tears streaming down his face. "Then if she does come to, she won't lie so hard on it." All through the night he sat there by her side. At intervals he would feel of her heart and pulse and look hopefully into her face for some sign of life. And all through the next day he sat there, utterly inconsolable.

The death of Mrs. Jackson, of course, put an end to the gala preparations in Nashville for the banquet of triumph. Handbills announcing her passing were hastily printed and distributed throughout the town; resolutions of regret and sympathy were adopted by the city officials, and the committee on arrangements for the banquet recommended a cessation of all business activities in Nashville in deference to the bereaved President-elect. Army officers in the city arrayed in their dress uniforms to participate in the celebration laid aside their regalia of festivity and donned the badges of mourning.

On the day of the funeral, it is recorded, every vehicle in Nashville was pressed into service in conveying the residents of the city to the Hermitage. Church bells in the city tolled steadily from 1:00 to 2:00 o'clock P.M., the hour of the services. Parton quotes an attendant at the funeral as saying: "Such a scene I never wish to witness again. The poor old gentleman was supported to the grave by General Coffee and Major Rutledge. I never pitied any person more in my life. The road to the Hermitage was almost impassable, and an immense number of persons attended the funeral. I never before saw so much affliction among servants on the death of a mistress. Some seemed completely stupefied by the event; others wrung their hands and shrieked aloud. The woman who waited on Mrs. Jackson had to be carried off the ground." This was old Aunt Hannah who, between her sobs, said: "She was more than a mistis to us all; she was a mother."

The day of the funeral was cold and damp and drizzly and the ground was muddy. The walkway leading from the house to the new grave in the garden was covered with cotton from the plantation gin-house to afford a firm footing to the pall-bearers and the funeral cortege. But in spite of the mud and the rain, the garden and yard were crowded with friends and neighbors. One of those at the funeral says: "More sincere homage was done to her dead than was ever done to any woman in our day and country living."

General Jackson was heart-broken and stunned by his bereavement. Friends observed a complete change in his demeanor from that day forward. "He aged twenty years in a night," said one observer; and all agreed that he was not only marked by a visible sadness but was from that time notably less violent in his nature and in his conversation. But, despite his feeling of desolation, the demands of the high office to which he had been elected did not permit him to sit at home and nurse his grief; and so in January, 1829, he left the Hermitage for Washington to be inaugurated President, accompanied by Andrew Jackson Donelson and Emily, Henry Lee, and Major W. B. Lewis.

After the trunks had been packed and the coach brought around to the front door, the heart-broken old General paid one last visit alone to the little mound in the corner of the garden. From a willow by the springhouse he cut four shoots and planted them at the four corners of the grave plot; then, after standing a moment with bared and bowed head, he turned and walked slowly to the waiting coach. Before stepping up into the carriage, so old Alfred used to tell, he turned for a farewell look at the Hermitage. With tears in his eyes he took off his hat and made a courtly bow of farewell to the old house, "same as if it was a lady," said Alfred; and then he entered the coach, coachman Charles cracked his whip over the four grays, and they were off to the Hermitage landing on the river where the steamboat _Fairy_ awaited them. A stop was made at the wharf at Nashville for other passengers, and then the _Fairy_ swung out in the current of the Cumberland and they were started on their way to Louisville, the first leg of their journey to the capital.

A lady then resident in Nashville wrote of the departure: "When the old man finally started for Washington, a crowd of ladies were assembled on the back piazza of the City Hotel, overlooking the Cumberland River, to 'see the conquering hero _go_.' I mingled with them, and distinctly remember hearing one lady say she had a good-bye kiss from the General and she would not wash it off for a month. Oh! what a noise there was! A parrot, which had been brought up a Democrat, was crying 'Hurrah for Jackson;' and the clapping, shouting and waving of handkerchiefs have seldom been equaled. When the steamboat passed out of sight and they realized that he was really gone, the city seemed to subside and settle down as if the object of its being was accomplished."

So Andrew Jackson went away to accept America's highest honor. But no President-elect ever approached his inauguration with less enthusiasm or with a heavier heart. Without his darling Rachel by his side, it was an empty honor. Writing to John Coffee a few weeks later he said: "My days have been days of labor and my nights have been nights of sorrow; but I look forward with hope once more to return to the Hermitage and spend some days near the tomb of my dear departed wife." And throughout the eight years he spent in the White House, eight stormy years, his memory kept stealing back to that spot in the Hermitage garden where his heart lay buried by her side.

Thus closed one distinct era in the history of the Hermitage. Without Rachel's presence the old house was never quite the same again. When Jackson came back there to live in 1837 it was to a new Hermitage, erected on the ruins of the one he had built for Rachel in 1819; and although it was a larger and a finer house, although he still entertained lavishly and took delight in the presence in the house of his little grandchildren, he was merely paying out the numbered days of his life, waiting to be laid at rest beside that lonesome grave in the corner of the garden.

VII: GUESTS AT THE HERMITAGE

Almost from the time it was built, the Hermitage held an attraction for visitors from all over the country; and since the death of General Jackson it has been a veritable Mecca. To enumerate all of its distinguished visitors would be to build up a bulky roster of the noted men of the past century; but mention may be made in passing of some of the more prominent people who have crossed the threshold of the Hermitage, either to be greeted by its famous master during his lifetime or to honor his memory since his old home has been established as a national shrine.

Despite its relatively isolated location and its inaccessibility during the early days, no less than eight Presidents of the United States have been formally entertained there, not to mention those who have visited it as an incident of a trip to Nashville. The first Presidential guest was James Monroe, who visited Nashville in June, 1819. This was before the present brick Hermitage was built--probably just about the time it was started--and President Monroe was perhaps the last famous guest to be entertained at the old log Hermitage. Mr. Monroe's visit marked the first time that a President of the United States had ever been entertained in Nashville, and the proceedings were correspondingly elaborate. The President had proceeded from Washington to Charleston, South Carolina, and thence to Augusta, Georgia, and it was to the latter city that General Jackson went to meet him and escort him to the Hermitage. After spending two days there the party went on to Nashville. A few miles out from the city they were met by a committee of prominent citizens, with a company of soldiers, by whom they were accompanied into town with no little flourish and fanfare of trumpets. Upon arrival in Nashville a further formal welcome was officially extended; there was a big dinner at the old Nashville Inn, with a long list of patriotic toasts to be drunk by the diners, and the next evening there was a great ball in honor of the distinguished guest.

Other Presidents who have come to visit at the Jackson shrine have been Martin Van Buren, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, Rutherford B. Hayes, William H. Taft, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The visit of the earlier Roosevelt is particularly notable in the annals of the Hermitage, because it was he who obtained from Congress an appropriation of $5,000 to be devoted to the repair of the old house.

When Mr. Hayes visited the old home of his distinguished forerunner in the President's chair the ladies who accompanied him were particularly careful to introduce him to old Uncle Alfred. After the introduction was over, and Alfred had shaken hands with Mr. Hayes, the ladies explained to the old servitor that the white gentleman had held the same high office as General Jackson. "Well, if you'd a been as great a man as he was," said the candid old negro, "I'd a shuck your hand pretty near off!" President Taft on his subsequent visit to the Hermitage was told this anecdote, and the old halls reëchoed with his characteristic booming laughter.

Another man who bore the title of President and who was a close friend of Jackson and a constant visitor at his home was not, indeed, a President of the United States but the President of the Republic of Texas--Sam Houston, the distinguished and eccentric Tennesseean who mysteriously and suddenly resigned the governorship and went to live with the Indians and then ended his self-imposed exile and went to Texas to become that state's most famous citizen.

Jackson was intensely interested in the annexation of Texas, and when that was finally accomplished and Houston was elected as the new state's first Senator, Old Hickory looked forward with the keenest delight to the visit which Houston was planning to pay him on his way from Texas to Washington. But when the Texas hero reached Nashville he learned to his dismay that the old statesman, long in precarious health, was that day literally on his death bed; and although he hastened to the Hermitage with all speed, he was just a few minutes too late to give a farewell clasp of the hand to his old friend. Just before reaching the house he met the carriage of Doctor Esselman on his way back to Nashville, and the doctor conveyed to him the sad intelligence of the General's death; so Houston, instead of going on to the Hermitage, stopped by at Tulip Grove, but after the funeral he stayed over at the Hermitage for a brief visit with the family. In her reminiscences Mrs. Rachel Jackson Lawrence recalls this visit and how to her childish mind the sober black clothing he then wore contrasted so strongly with the brilliant military uniform in which he was arrayed when he had visited the Hermitage a few years before, soon after his history making victory over Santa Anna at San Jacinto. Mrs. Lawrence also told of a visit Houston paid to the Hermitage in 1836, when the work of rebuilding the house had not quite been completed. At that time the flagstones of the front portico had not yet been laid, and General Houston to the great amusement of the children got down in the sand and loose dirt and played "Doodle bug, doodle bug, come out of your hole." There was no pose of false dignity about Sam Houston--maybe that was why so many people loved him.

The earliest distinguished visitor to the Hermitage--and the one whose visit had the most far-reaching implications--was Aaron Burr, the spectacular figure of the early nineteenth century whose strange adventures almost embroiled General Jackson in serious trouble.

Burr's first visit to the Nashville settlements, and to the Hermitage, was in May, 1805. He had just stepped down from the vice-presidency and his farewell speech to the Senate had been greatly admired. His fatal duel with Alexander Hamilton, which had stigmatized him in the East, did not detract any from his popularity on the Tennessee frontier where killing a man in a duel was not regarded as a matter involving any serious moral turpitude. Upon his arrival in Nashville he was given a reception that amounted to an ovation, culminating in a sumptuous dinner with the usual round of toasts and speeches. Jackson rode in from the Hermitage to take part in the festivities, attended by a servant leading a milk-white horse; and when the dinner was over Colonel Burr went back with him to the Hermitage as his guest. "I have been received with much hospitality and kindness, and could stay a month with pleasure," Burr wrote his daughter, Theodosia. From Nashville Colonel Burr went to New Orleans; but on his return trip in August stopped at the Hermitage again for a visit of eight days. To Theodosia he wrote: "For a week I have been lounging at the house of General Jackson--once a lawyer, after a judge, now a planter; a man of intelligence, and one of those prompt, frank, ardent souls whom I love to meet."

In September, 1806, Burr was back at the Hermitage, this time with his mind apparently fully made up as to his contemplated expedition to the Southwest. Theodosia he had brought along with him as far as Blennerhassett Island on the Ohio where he had left her; and in his frequent talks with the prominent citizens of Nashville during his stay there he discussed freely his plans to establish colonies "on the western waters." There were not lacking even then suspicious persons who wanted to know more about the exact nature of the mysterious Colonel's mysterious plans; but Jackson, at first at least, seemed to give full credence to Burr's declarations of pacific intentions, and at the fete given in the visitor's honor in Nashville he entered the ballroom accompanied by Jackson attired in his full uniform as a major general.