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.
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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.
The log house on the right is one of the group constituting the original Hermitage residence from 1804 until the erection of the present building in 1819. The house on the left is the remains of the two-storied house which was the center of the original group.
The first Hermitage on the present site, as it appeared from the time it was built in 1819 until the wings were added in 1831.
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.
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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.
The business of the store was varied and extensive in its nature. Goods such as the settlers needed were brought on from the East, Philadelphia principally; and as the selling price in Nashville was about three times the cost in Philadelphia, there was a good margin of gross profit although the cost of transportation was high. A typical invoice from Jackson’s Philadelphia connections shows a shipment of dry goods—linen, calico, nankeen, cambrick, gingham, ribbons, buttons, thread, etc.—ivory combs, fancy silk handkerchiefs, “Spanish segars,” gloves, hats and kid shoes, as well as queensware, hand saws, screw augers, scissors, knives, etc. They also sold other such pioneer necessities as salt, sugar, coffee, grindstones, gunpowder, nails, bar iron and cow bells; not to mention rum, brandy, claret and whiskey, which latter beverage retailed at 75c per gallon and which Jackson made in his own licensed still-house.
Money was a scarce article around the Nashville settlements in those days and the store did much of its business on the primitive basis of barter, taking in the customers’ cotton, bear skins, oak staves, deer skins, feathers, beeswax, tallow or any other saleable commodity. There was a market for all these things in Natchez and New Orleans; and at intervals, whenever a boatload was accumulated, it was floated down the river to those towns and there converted into cash.
When Tennessee was made into a state in 1796 Andrew Jackson was selected to serve as its lone member of the House of Representatives, and he entered into the deliberations of Congress with such spirit and distinction that in 1797, at the age of thirty-one, he was elected to the United States Senate to take the place of William Blount who had been impeached for alleged treasonable transactions. But the Senate suited Jackson but little, and early in 1798 he resigned to accept a seat on the Superior Court of Tennessee. In February, 1802, another honor was added to his lengthening scroll when he was made major-general of the state militia, and he held this office concurrently with his judgeship.
But Jackson suffered the traditional fate of the man who has too many irons in the fire.
While he was thus engaged in the public service, his personal fortunes were not prospering; and so in 1804 he resigned his place on the bench and gave his whole attention to the task of trying to straighten out the tangle into which his business affairs had drifted, partly because of the financial panic which swept the country in 1798 and 1799, and partly as a result of misplaced confidence. The business depression carried down a supposedly wealthy man in Philadelphia whose notes Jackson had accepted and endorsed. Before he knew what was happening to him, he found himself confronted with unexpected obligations; but it was characteristic of Jackson that he met this heart-breaking situation unflinchingly and paid every cent as it came due. It was a painful process, however, for it involved selling off much of his property and practically making a new start in life.
“Our A. Jackson has made sale of his possessions,” the firm of Jackson & Hutchings on July 31st, 1804, wrote to Boggs & Davidson, their New Orleans connection. “He is to receive two-thirds of the amount on Christmas day next. This, we flatter ourselves, will enable us to meet all our debts next spring.”
This entirely imaginary and erroneous picture of the Hermitage was used extensively and for a long time despite its inaccuracy. This and similar pictures were based on a view printed in The Jackson Wreath in 1829 which was admittedly drawn “from a description furnished by a friend at Washington.”
The Hermitage as it appeared after the wings and portico were added to the original house in 1831.
Plat of the 500 acres of the Hermitage plantation as acquired by the State from Andrew Jackson, Jr.
An old print (circa 1840) showing the young cedar trees planted by General Jackson. The artist has distorted the true lines of the guitar-shaped driveway. The house in the distance, on the right, is Tulip Grove, home of Andrew Jackson Donelson.
So the creditors of Jackson & Hutchings and of “our A. Jackson” were satisfied; but so the Hunter’s Hill estate, in which he and Rachel took so much pride, passed into other hands, being sold on July 6, 1804, to Colonel Edward Ward. “Necessity (as security for Thomas Watson and John Hutchings) compelled me to sell the Hunter’s Hill tract” Jackson wrote in after years, with just a trace of bitterness. The $10,000 received for the place helped put Jackson back on his feet; but there must have been a tear in Rachel’s eye as she looked back over her shoulder at the home where she had been so happy as the bride of the coming young man.
And even the financial relief did not come immediately, for Colonel Ward made the purchase on long and involved terms. He delivered to Jackson the bond of a Mr. Lew Jones for £1670, Virginia currency, (equivalent to $5,566.67 in Tennessee money), due on December 15, 1804. He paid $1,794.91 in cash in January, 1805; $463.71 in cash in February; and in March $666.67 in cash and 6,899 pounds of cotton, worth $1,000.35 at the then price of 14½ cents per pound. Payments then ceased, and on May 7th Jackson wrote Ward a strongly worded dunning letter insisting on the payment of the balance of $1,721.88 still due. “When you recollect,” he wrote to Colonel Ward, “that I turned myself out of house and home, by the sale of my possessions to you, purely to meet my engagements, you must know that the anxiety must be great in my mind to meet them, with the sacrifice of ease and comfort that I made upon that occasion. I need only to add that my creditors are growing clamorous and I must have money from some source.”
Ward, in response to this appeal, paid $278.22 on account, and then instituted a quibble on the ground that he should be permitted to pay the balance in negroes rather than in cash. Jackson vigorously refuted this suggestion, saying: “I can not believe that you are seriously impressed with the belief that you are now authorized to discharge a part of the debt in negroes. Had negroes been offered before Mr. Hutchings descended the river with negroes for sale they would have been received, notwithstanding the lapse of time. Of his departure you were informed by me, with the express design that you might discharge part of the debt in negroes if you thought proper, which if you had I would have been in cash for them before this. As you did not have negroes then, and the time elapsed, I did (and with propriety) conclude that you had provided other means to meet your engagement; and negroes would not have been named after we had sent on to market and the time so far elapsed.” Jackson also refused Ward’s proffer of real estate in settlement of the balance due, pointing out that if his own creditors would accept real estate in payment of their claims he could dispose of all his debts “in four hours.” He then went on to say that he must have cash the following week and that if he did not receive it he would be obliged to offer Ward’s bond for sale (an extreme step to take in those days). “But,” said Jackson, “my engagements I must meet. This was the object of the sale of my possessions, and from that sale I must realize that object.”
Poor General Jackson! It is hard to imagine a worse plight than to sacrifice a dearly beloved house and home in order to get money to pay one’s debts—and then not get the money without a year’s unpleasant squabbling.
The Hunter’s Hill place was repurchased by Jackson, perhaps for sentimental reasons, during the more prosperous later days when he was President; but it was on the market again in 1840 when financial embarassment again made it necessary for the General to dispose of some of his property. The price at which it was then offered was $15,000, which he considered a very low price for it; “but,” he said, “a little imprudence (on the part of Andrew, junior,) has caused this necessity, and I would always rather sacrifice property than the credit of my adopted son or myself.” Fifteen thousand dollars may have been a bargain price, as the General said; but he was able to find no buyer at that figure and late in 1840 he sold it to Mrs. Elizabeth E. Donelson, widow of his wife’s brother John, for $12,000; and it is still in the hands of descendants of this branch of the family.
In 1804, after paying off his debts, practically all of Jackson’s remaining assets were embraced in his reduced land holdings, including the tract of 420 acres adjoining Hunter’s Hill which he bought from Nathaniel Harp when forced to sell his home place. It was to this plantation, the future Hermitage estate, that he repaired when forced to give up Hunter’s Hill.
Just when the removal was made is not accurately revealed by the records. In a letter written in 1844 he stated that he bought the Hermitage land “on the 5th of July, 1804.” His last recorded letter from Hunter’s Hill is dated August 25, 1804, and the first one from the Hermitage April 7, 1805. It seems probable, however, that the removal to the Hermitage plantation had been in contemplation even before adversity forced it; for in the Jackson papers is a receipt dated March 2, 1803, for 500 apple trees and 500 peach trees “for the Hermitage orchard;” and in a letter written to Rachel on March 22, 1803, while he was attending court in East Tennessee he inquires solicitously about the planting and care of these young trees. Apparently thus early he was getting the Hermitage tract ready for occupancy; although the county records show that the land was not transferred to him until July, 1804.
The sale of the Hunter’s Hill property necessarily forced the removal of the store, and led to the establishment of a much more pretentious business enterprise at Clover Bottom. Here he set up not only a store but a tavern and boatyard as well, and he encouraged the establishment of a race track and stables in which he took an interest. This made Clover Bottom a center of interest for the whole countryside and a favorite place for the assembling of the people. Clover Bottom is located on the Nashville-Lebanon Road, where it crosses Stone’s River, just above that stream’s confluence with the Cumberland, and it was therefore an unexcelled location for a man who operated a boatyard as well as a store and who also had blooded horses and liked to see them run.
Soon after the establishment of the store at Hunter’s Hill the mercantile business had grown to such proportions that Jackson could not handle it by himself, and he had taken in a partner named Thomas Watson. This partnership did not work out satisfactorily, however, and was dissolved, after which he took in John Hutchings, whose father had married Mrs. Jackson’s sister. The firm of Jackson and Hutchings thrived and even showed itself an early disciple of the chain-store idea by establishing branch stores at Gallatin and Lebanon. When the business was moved to Clover Bottom, John Coffee, who was a brother-in-law of Mrs. Jackson’s was also taken into the partnership.
By dint of hard work and close application, Jackson at length managed to clear himself of his financial troubles; but it was a long, hard pull, and for several years he felt the pinch of reduced circumstances. In fact, so difficult was his situation that in 1810 the whole course of his life was near to being changed, and a slight turn of the balance in the other direction then would have found him selling out in Tennessee and removing elsewhere to begin life over again in a new field. At this time the Hermitage plantation was definitely on the market, and Jackson was actively seeking some appointment that would take him elsewhere.
It will be recalled that Jackson fought his duel with Charles Dickinson in 1806, and the death of Dickinson in this tragic affair shocked the sensibilities of even the hardy pioneer citizens of Nashville who were accustomed to duelling. A few days after the duel Jackson’s old friend and former law partner, John Overton, wrote him the following comforting, friendly letter:
Dear Genl:
Until yesterday evening, I must confess, my mind was not at ease. I was then relieved. To-day I have seen my brother who tells me of a little circumstance I did not know, that you were a little touched, but not to do any great damage. Pope in his Essay on Man says: “Whatever is, is right.” To this small inconvenience we must submit, which is not much more than the stumping of a toe, or the like.
It too frequently happens that the honest, unsuspecting part of society will be infested with reptiles, the heads of which must be sought after and bruised so as to be secure from their poison. God has so ordained it. You have been the instrument of doing so. Fear nothing. As soon as possible I will see you. Our mutual friend, Wm. P. Anderson, will come to see you, who makes my best wishes for you.
Apropos, aside, there is a few long faces in town, though but few, for it seems that this new-fangled Ajax had even went so far as to bet in town, before he went over, that he would kill Genl. Jackson. Yr friend, Jno. Overton Gen’l Jackson. Nashville, June 1806.
This consoling letter from his old friend must have laid unction to Jackson’s soul; but not all of the Nashville citizens accepted Dickinson’s tragic death with Judge Overton’s complacency. The unfortunate victim of the duel had some warm and influential friends in Nashville; and they spent their days and nights industriously giving circulation to an account of the duel which placed Jackson in the worst possible light. His popularity suffered accordingly. Then close on the heels of this tragedy came the embroglio with Aaron Burr into which he had permitted himself to become innocently entangled. Jackson’s popularity in Tennessee was never at a lower ebb—and he was not a man to regard such a state of affairs with resignation. On top of all this, he was worried about his financial affairs, and it is easy to understand how he might have been attracted by the idea of starting life over again in a new location—and with a government job carrying a comfortable salary.
Mississippi was a new country, the government of which was just being organized, and Jackson wrote to Jenkyn Whitesides, United States Senator from Tennessee, regarding the possibility of receiving a federal appointment as judge in the new territory. “From my pursuits for several years past,” he wrote in February, 1810, “from many unpleasant occurrences that took place during that time, it has given my mind such a turn of thought that I have labored to get clear of. I have found this impossible, and unless some new pursuit to employ my mind and thoughts, I find it impossible to divest myself of those habits of gloomy and peevish reflections that the wanton and flagitious conduct and unmerited reflections of base calumny heaped upon me has given rise to.” It had occurred to him, he said, that new scenes might serve to relieve him from this unpleasant tone of thought, and he was therefore serving notice that he would accept the judgeship if it were offered him. As a further reason for his dissatisfaction he cited the “lethargy and temporizing conduct” of the government, and he expressed the fear that “as a military man I shall have no amusement or business, and indolence and inaction would shortly destroy me.”
One of Mrs. Jackson’s nephews in Natchez, Donelson Caffery, heard of his uncle’s plan to sell the Hermitage home place and remove to Mississippi, and he hastily wrote to dissuade him. “You have nearly got through all your embarrassments,” wrote young Caffery, “You have a delightful farm, from the products of which you will at least be able to live comfortably; by the respectable and well-informed part of the country you are highly esteemed; you are able to select a good society from your neighborhood.” And, concluding in a burst of eloquence: “You have been able there to read the characters of men in their actions; here another volume will be presented to your view in which human baseness will take up a considerable part.”
Jackson persisted, however, in his effort to sell the Hermitage, offering it among others to Colonel Wade Hampton of South Carolina, who later served on his staff at New Orleans. Colonel Hampton made a trip to Tennessee and looked the property over but did not buy it, although he wrote: “I am vastly partial to your elegant seat and fine tract of land.”
Perhaps the advice of young Caffery and his other friends persuaded him not to make the prospective changes; perhaps he was not able to get the desired appointment. At any rate, fortunately for Tennessee and for the country, Jackson remained at the Hermitage and was soon thereafter relieved of his melancholic frame of mind by the declaration of war against Great Britain in 1812. From then on until 1821 he found plenty of “amusement and business” in fighting the Indians and the British and the Spaniards in Florida; and for eight years he had no further cause for complaint on the score of indolence and inaction. He returned to the Hermitage the nation’s idol, and all thoughts of moving to Mississippi or anywhere else were permanently dismissed.
When Jackson moved to the Hermitage tract from Hunter’s Hill his financial condition did not permit of his building immediately another such home as he had left. But Jackson had the primitive virtue of cutting his suit to fit his cloth; and so he set himself up in a comfortable but crude establishment made up of a group of log houses—a large central building, two stories high, which constituted the principal living quarters, with three adjacent log houses which were used as sleeping quarters for guests or members of the family. The main building, which, according to tradition, had in earlier days been used as a block house for defense against the Indians, was 24 by 26 feet and on the first floor had only one large room, with a huge fireplace. At the back was a lean-to containing two rooms, a pantry and a bed-room. This big room on the first floor was a combination of parlor, living room, dining room and kitchen, with all the meals cooked at the big open fireplace. Here Jackson lived for fifteen years—fifteen of the most active years of his life, years when he was carving his name as one of the really big men of the young United States.
Here in this log house he entertained some of the most distinguished visitors who ever came to the Nashville settlements—President James Monroe and Aaron Burr, among others; here it was they brought him, well-nigh fatally wounded, from his duel with Charles Dickinson; and it was to this rude abode that he returned in 1815, following the Battle of New Orleans, with the plaudits of the world ringing in his ears. Also, it was while he was living here in the log Hermitage that he conducted his famous campaigns against the Indians, including his celebrated invasion of Florida which so nearly involved us in war with Spain.
Today there is still standing only one of the small log cabins of the original group. Alongside it is a larger log house, with a steeply sloping roof, built at a later date out of the logs taken from the original two-storied log house which had been permitted to fall into decay. These are located in the meadow a few hundred yards to the rear of the present Hermitage, on the original site, and are in a fair state of preservation. Although the original two-storied house no longer stands, the remains of its stone foundation are still faintly to be seen.
But by 1819 Andrew Jackson—in personal taste, in fame and in social position—had outgrown the log-house mode of living. He had become a man of national, even international, distinction; he had been to Washington, to Philadelphia, New York and New Orleans. He knew how distinguished men were supposed to live. And so there gradually grew in his mind the determination to build a new home, one that would befit his present station in life and one that would permit Rachel to entertain with pride the grandest ladies of the land. Fortunately for his plans, there was a boom market in cotton from 1815 to 1818, following the treaty of peace with England, and the cotton planters of the South had three fat years. With cotton at 34c a pound, many of them waxed wealthy; and although there was a slump in 1819, it appears that Jackson must have been making financial hay while the sun was shining, for it was at this time that he started work on his new house.
The source from which Jackson got the name “The Hermitage” remains more or less of a mystery. The plantation was known by this name before he built a house on it; but nothing in his letters or papers reveals the reason why it was so-called. There is a tradition in the Donelson family that it was named in honor of the old Donelson home-place in Virginia; but this theory has no firmer foundation than tradition—it may be true, but there is no authentic substantiation of it. There is a theory (although it is nothing more than a theory) that he borrowed the name from Jeremy Bentham’s estate in England. Students of Jackson’s political beliefs feel that he was strongly influenced by the great English philosopher and jurist, whose home was called the Hermitage. He read Bentham’s works and corresponded with him; it is not unlikely that when it came to selecting a name for his new plantation he thought of Bentham’s home, the Hermitage, and adopted the name for his own use.
Front view of the house from dividing point in the entrance driveway.
Close-up view of the façade.