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.
This third visit lasted only a few days, Colonel Burr hastening back to Kentucky; but in November Jackson, the merchant and boat-builder, received from him an order for the building of five large flatboats at his Clover Bottom boatyard and an accompanying order for enough provisions from his Clover Bottom store to stock them for their trip down the Mississippi. In the light of subsequent events it might have seemed significant that such a handsome piece of business was thrown in the lap of the frontier celebrity who happened to be major-general of the militia as well as a boat-builder and merchant, but if Burr counted on influencing Jackson’s judgment he reckoned without his man. Jackson, at the time he accepted the order, must have been convinced of the law-abiding nature of Burr’s intentions. There was no secrecy about their negotiations. But friends, not of so trusting a nature, were insistent in urging him to watch his step; and so he wrote a candid letter to Burr, telling him of the stories being circulated about his alleged nefarious schemes, and asking him for the truth. He also wrote to Governor Claiborne of the Orleans Territory, telling him of the rumors, and to President Jefferson offering the services of himself and his militia in the event of any trouble. Meanwhile the work on the boats went right along. Burr had paid for them in advance, and Jackson felt honor-bound to complete them despite his growing suspicions; but he gave his partner, John Coffee, strict instructions to accept no more business from Burr.
In December Burr came back to Nashville from Kentucky. There the suspicions against his expedition had crystallized into charges that led to his arrest; but Henry Clay defended him and he was acquitted in triumph.
When Burr arrived at the Hermitage, for the fourth time, the customary warm welcome was conspicuously lacking. Jackson himself was not at home and Mrs. Jackson, so it is recorded, was “cool and constrained.” Burr took lodgings at the tavern at Clover Bottom; and when Jackson got home he immediately called on the Colonel there, in company with General Overton, and frankly told him of the rising tide of suspicion and distrust. Burr glibly protested the innocence of his intentions; but it is significant that he continued to lodge at the tavern and was not invited to stay at the Hermitage. When General Jackson permitted a friend to stay at a public house instead of insisting that he go home with him, it is a strong indication that the General was beginning to smell a mouse.
On December 22, 1806, Colonel Burr and a handful of adventurous young men recruited in the neighborhood embarked in the boats and pushed off from Clover Bottom. The denouement came swiftly. Burr had hardly left Nashville before President Jefferson’s proclamation denouncing him and his expedition reached town; and the populace which a few weeks before had been entertaining him with balls and banquets now burnt him in effigy. Jackson, as commander of the troops in this section, was commanded by the Secretary of War to hold his forces in readiness to march; and he entered fully into the spirit of his instructions with a prompt display of energy and zeal. The militia was assembled, warnings were sent down the river against “all men engaged in any enterprise contrary to the laws or orders of our government;” but, upon receipt of news from the government forts down the river that the Burr flotilla had no warlike appearance, the near-panic subsided.
Despite his alacrity in carrying out the orders of the President and the Secretary of War, General Jackson clearly gave evidence that he did not understand clearly what was going on. He was obviously reluctant to suspect Burr of ulterior designs, and he felt strongly that there was something sinister behind all the furor. In the end, he himself was brought under suspicion and was summoned as a witness in the trial in Richmond when Burr was at length arrested and arraigned. Jackson never was put on the witness stand; but he did take occasion, while he was waiting in Richmond, to mount the courthouse steps and make a stump speech in favor of Burr who, he had finally come to believe, was being persecuted by Jefferson.
When he sat down and thought the matter over, Jackson doubtless regretted deeply the day that the hospitality of the Hermitage had been extended to the fascinating Burr.
A guest at the Hermitage whose visit demonstrated not only Jackson’s open-armed hospitality but also his winning way with children was a young boy whose name later filled a large place in history—Jefferson Davis.
In 1815 young Davis, then only seven years old, was sent from his home in southwestern Mississippi to the St. Thomas School in Washington County, Kentucky. This was at that time necessarily an overland trip, there being no steamboats, and the way lay through that part of Mississippi known as “The wilderness” before the civilized part of Tennessee was reached. Travelers through this Choctaw and Chickasaw country followed the Natchez Trace and generally went in parties for safety and companionship. Young Jefferson Davis accompanied a party headed by his father’s friend, Major Hinds who had participated in the Battle of New Orleans, and Major Hinds’s son, Howell, was also a member of the party. The two boys were about the same age and, mounted on their ponies, greatly enjoyed the long overland trip up the romantic and dangerous Natchez Trace.
When the little cavalcade reached Nashville, the first thought of Major Hinds was to visit his old commander, General Jackson, under whom he had seen such stirring service just a few months before. Accordingly, the whole party went trooping out to the Hermitage, and there they were so cordially received that instead of staying for a few days they remained several weeks.
“General Jackson’s house at that time,” wrote Mr. Davis in later years, “was a roomy log house. In front of it was a grove of fine forest trees, and behind it were his cotton and grain fields. I have never forgotten the unaffected and well-bred courtesy which caused him to be remarked by court-trained diplomats when President of the United States, by reason of his very impressive bearing and manner.
“Notwithstanding the many reports that have been made of his profanity, I remember that he always said grace at his table, and I never heard him utter an oath. In this connection although he encouraged his adopted son, Howell Hinds and myself in all contests of activity, pony-riding included, he would not allow us to wrestle; for, he said, to allow hands to be put on one another might lead to a fight. He was always very gentle and considerate.
“Mrs. Jackson’s education, like that of many excellent women of her day, was deficient; but in all the hospitable and womanly functions of wife and hostess she certainly was excelled by none. A child is a keen observer of the characteristics of those under whom he is placed, and I found Mrs. Jackson amiable, unselfish and affectionate to her family and guests and just and mild toward her servants.
“Our stay with General Jackson was enlivened by the visits of his neighbors, and we left the Hermitage with great regret and pursued our journey. In me he inspired reverence and affection that has remained with me through my whole life.”
This account of his memorable visit to the Hermitage was dictated by Mr. Davis 75 years later, during the last year of his life; and the fact that his visit as a child left on his mind such a vivid impression is an eloquent tribute to the glowing personality of Jackson and the kindly manner of his wife.
It was at the old log Hermitage that Jackson received the first visit of Thomas H. Benton, the man who later became his close friend and then his enemy and then his friend again. Young Benton had been admitted to the Tennessee bar in 1804 and was practicing in Franklin, a few miles from Nashville. In 1805 he had a land title case in which were involved some legal points upon which Andrew Jackson had ruled while he was sitting on the Superior Court. These rulings had not been published, however, and so Benton saddled his horse and rode to the Hermitage to ask the ex-justice for an official report of the cases. Upon learning his errand, Jackson courteously offered to write out the opinions for him; so, with Jackson dictating and Benton transcribing, the opinion of the Superior Court was thus tardily reduced to written form. It was typical of the hospitality of the Hermitage that Benton, who had made an instantaneously good impression on Jackson, was prevailed upon to prolong his formal call to a two-days’ visit; and there was the beginning of a friendship which had a lasting and far-reaching effect upon the careers of both of them. For many years Benton was a frequenter of the Hermitage to such an extent as almost to be regarded as a member of the family; and, despite an intervening period of enmity growing out of a bloody, knock-down-and-drag-out fight, Benton’s eulogy of Jackson when he died showed the depth of his affection for the older man.
A visitor of world-wide distinction who was a guest at the Hermitage was the celebrated Marquis de Lafayette. General Jackson had long been an admirer of the patriotic Marquis. Mrs. Jackson herself is authority for the statement that Jackson first saw him at Charleston “on the battlefield” when he was a boy of twelve and the Marquis was at the zenith of his great Revolutionary popularity. When Jackson was in Washington in the latter part of 1824 as a Senator he met Lafayette, in fact lived at the same tavern with him while he was there, and it was probably at that time that the Marquis was invited to visit Nashville and the Hermitage. He had previously written Jackson, soon after his arrival in this country, saying “I will not leave the United States before I have seeked and found the opportunity to express in person my high regard and sincere friendship.”
The Marquis and his party steamed up to the wharf in Nashville on May 4, 1825, and were there greeted tumultuously by the Nashville populace, General Jackson foremost among them. The enthusiastic Nashvillians had prepared a rather elaborate entertainment for the celebrated French nobleman, including a big parade and a formal call on Governor Carroll. The next morning the Marquis reviewed the Tennessee militia (which had been encamped at Nashville a week patiently awaiting his belated arrival) and after the review the party boarded the steamboat again and proceeded up the river to the Hermitage to have dinner with General Jackson. Dinner in those days was a big meal served at about three o’clock in the afternoon.
Fortunately, a record of this visit is preserved in a book written by M. LeVasseur, Lafayette’s secretary, who, after telling of the entertainment in Nashville, says: “At one o’clock we embarked, with a numerous company, to proceed to dine with General Jackson, whose residence is a few miles up the river. We there found numbers of ladies and farmers from the neighborhood whom Mrs. Jackson had invited to partake of the entertainment she had prepared for General Lafayette. The first thing that struck me on arriving at the General’s was the extreme simplicity of his house. Still somewhat influenced by my European habits, I asked myself if this could really be the dwelling of the most popular man in the United States, of him whom the country proclaimed one of her most illustrious defenders; of him, finally, who by the will of the people was on the point of becoming her Chief Magistrate. One of our fellow-passengers, a citizen of Nashville, witnessing my astonishment, asked me whether in France our public men, that is to say the servants of the people, lived very differently from other citizens. ‘Certainly,’ said I, ‘thus, for example, the majority of our generals, all our ministers, and even the greater part of our subaltern administrators, would think themselves dishonored and would not dare to receive anyone at their houses if they possessed such a residence as this of Jackson’s; and the modest dwellings of your illustrious chiefs of the Revolution—Washington, John Adams, Jefferson—would only inspire them with contempt and disgust.’”
Having thus tactfully ingratiated himself with the party, M. LeVasseur accompanied the other guests on a visit of inspection to the farm and garden, and then:
“On returning to the house, some friends of General Jackson who probably had not seen him for some time, begged him to show them the arms presented to him in honor of his achievements during the last war; he acceded to their request with great politeness and placed on a table a sword, a saber and a pair of pistols. The sword was presented to him by Congress; the saber, I believe, by the army which fought under his command at New Orleans. These two weapons, of American manufacture, were remarkable for their finish and still more so for the honorable inscriptions with which they were covered. But it was to the pistols that General Jackson wished more particularly to call our attention. He handed them to General Lafayette and asked him if he recognized them. The latter, after examining them attentively for a few minutes, replied that he fully recollected them to be a pair he had presented in 1778 to his paternal friend, Washington, and that he experienced a real satisfaction in finding them in the hands of one so worthy of possessing them. At these words the face of ‘Old Hickory’ was covered with a modest blush, and his eye sparkled as in a day of victory. ‘Yes, I believe myself worthy of them,’ exclaimed he, in pressing the pistols on Lafayette’s hands to his breast, ‘if not from what I have done, at least for what I wished to do for my country.’ All of the bystanders applauded this noble confidence of the patriot hero, and were convinced that the weapons of Washington could not be in better hands than those of Jackson.” (These pistols, it should be here interpolated, were presented to General Jackson by General George Washington’s nephew, Bushrod Washington; and were a part of the valued collection of trophies in the Hermitage until they were lost in the fire in 1834.)
The front parlor, with original furniture, carpet and damask silk hangings.
Front of upstairs hall, showing the linen closets flanking the wide doorway leading onto the upper front gallery.
Lafayette’s stay at the Hermitage was short. In the late afternoon his steamboat returned to Nashville where a grand banquet was given in his honor that evening, with General Jackson presiding. The Marquis left the next morning by steamboat for Louisville, and had a narrow escape from death when the boat struck a snag in the Ohio and sank within a few minutes. Fortunately, however, he escaped without injury.
Another distinguished visitor from France in the early days was the elder Michaux, the great naturalist, who tells in his journal how he “spent the night twelve miles from Nashville at the home of a Mr. Jackson.” Michaux, however, with his naturalist’s heart, was much less impressed by the reputation, then hardly more than local, of General Jackson than he was by the beauty of the yellow-wood trees he found “on land belonging to a Mr. Overton south of Nashville” in greater abundance than he had ever noticed the trees elsewhere. He sent home some seeds from these trees found on Judge Overton’s hills, and in two of the parks of Paris today may be seen specimens of this rather rare tree grown from the seeds sent from Nashville by this early visitor.
Still another celebrated Frenchman visited the Hermitage in 1843 and paid his respects to the old hero—Marshall Bertrand, one of Napoleon’s famous marshals, who came to Nashville in the course of his travels in America and, as a matter of course, was entertained at dinner by Jackson, despite his debilitated health.
Perhaps the greatest strain ever placed upon the hospitality of the old house was when it was visited in August, 1830, by Major John H. Eaton and his bride, the erstwhile Peggy O’Neal, the storm center of the early days of the Jackson administration. This was a visit that required no little stage managing and window dressing; for the vivid Mrs. Eaton had not only disrupted the President’s Cabinet, she had brought discord into his own family; and it was in the midst of the strained relations existing between Jackson and the Donelsons that the Eatons made their visit to Tennessee.
Jackson was spending the summer of 1830 at home, and he was determined that the Eatons should be formally entertained at the Hermitage and that his connections, as he called Major Donelson and his wife, should assist in the reception. Here was a situation that called for all the keenest diplomacy of the most astute members of the Kitchen Cabinet; but the old reliable John Coffee, himself one of the “connections,” exercised his powers of persuasion on the Donelsons and at length it was arranged that they would help Old Hickory entertain his celebrated but slightly tarnished guests. Gleefully Jackson wrote to Eaton in August when Coffee had finished with his wire-pulling:
Private and for your own eye.
My dear Major: I send my son to meet you at Judge Overton’s and to conduct you and your lady with our other friends to the Hermitage, where you will receive that heartfelt welcome that you were ever wont to receive when my dear departed wife was living. Her absence makes everything here wear to me a gloomy and melancholy aspect, but the presence of her old and sincere friend will cheer me amidst the melancholy gloom with which I am surrounded.
My neighbors and connections will receive you and your lady with that good feeling that is due to you, and I request you and your lady will meet them with your usual courtesy, which is so well calculated to gain universal applause even from enemies and the united approbation of all friends. Our enemies calculate much upon injuring me by raising the cry that I forced Mr. A. J. Donelson from me and compelled him to retire because he would not yield to my views, which they call improper. I mean to be able to shew that I only claimed to rule my household, that it should extend justice and common politeness to all and no more, and thus put my enemies in the wrong; and if any friends desert me, then it is theirs not my fault.
General Coffee has, since here, produced a visible and sensible change in my connections and they will all be here to receive you and your lady who I trust will receive them with her usual courtesy and if a perfect reconciliation can not take place that harmony may prevail and a link broken in the Nashville conspiracy. I trust you are aware that I will never abandon you or separate from you so long as you continue to practice those virtues that have always accompanied you, nor would I ask you or your friend to pursue a course to compromise or be degrading to themselves or feelings; but I am anxious that we pursue such a course as will break down the Nashville combination, which I view as the sprouts of the Washington conspiracy.
Under these more or less auspicious circumstances the Eatons came to the Hermitage, where nothing was left undone to make them feel that they were just as welcome as any other guest that ever crossed the threshold of the old house. The Donelsons were there, taking part in the reception of the guests, Mrs. Donelson the very essence of punctilious and cordial hospitality—although she probably had her enthusiasm well under control. Pretty Peggy Eaton was no fool; she must have known of the cajoling it had required to prepare the way for her reception at the Hermitage; and, although she was spiteful enough to relish the concealed discomfiture of the Donelsons, it was probably a relief to her and to everybody else (except perhaps Old Hickory himself) when the party was over and the Eatons had to go.
Mrs. Eaton in her old age sat down and wrote a rambling sort of autobiography, in the course of which she told of this visit to the Hermitage—although nowhere in her reminiscences does she mention the Donelsons, whom she so cordially hated. The dinner at the Hermitage in her honor, she relates, was a splendid occasion, with the General doing the honors with great gusto and making jokes with the guests over the carving of a barbecued pig which was one of the features of the dinner. The General also distinguished himself as a host by passing the bread himself, which was his way of making everybody feel at home. After dinner, however, the master of the Hermitage disappeared; and then it was that Mrs. Eaton, sent by her husband to look for him, found him kneeling by Rachel’s grave in the garden with the tears streaming down his face. Recalling to him his duties as a host she persuaded him to return to the house, where he again donned his mask of gaiety and entered into the hilarity of the guests assembled there.
Writing of the Presidential campaign of 1824, Parton says: “The Hermitage was more like a hotel than a home during the summer, so numerous were the guests whom curiosity, friendship or political business brought to it.” And an old lady in Nashville told Parton that she had often been at the Hermitage in those simple old times when there was in each of the four available rooms not merely a guest but a family, while the young men and solitary travelers who chanced to drop in disposed of themselves on the piazza or any other half-shelter about the house.
“Never was the Hermitage without a guest,” says Buell in his Jackson biography, “and most of the time it was crowded. Jackson and his wife carried the old-fashioned Southern hospitality to an extreme. They did not wish their guests to be simply visitors, but made them temporary members of the family.”
It seems to be the unanimous and unchallenged opinion that a visitor at the Hermitage was always made to feel at home and led to believe that his visit conferred an especial pleasure on his hosts. All comers were welcome.
But Andrew Jackson did not wait for guests to come to the Hermitage. Nor were its broad doors open only to the distinguished and prosperous. A characteristic incident is told by one of his early acquaintances relative to the son of the famous Daniel Boone: “The young man had come to Nashville on his father’s business, to be detained some weeks, and had his lodgings at a small tavern towards the lower part of town. General Jackson heard of it; sought him out; found him; took him home to remain as long as his business detained him in the country, saying: ‘Your father’s dog should not stay in a tavern while I have a house.’”
The hospitality of the Hermitage not only knew no limitation on the grounds of a visitor’s prosperity or prominence, it was extended alike to friend and foe.
A son of the notorious William G. (Parson) Brownlow, a rabid Whig and bitter anti-Jackson man, relates that on one occasion in 1845 a party of East Tennessee Whigs who had been attending a convention in Nashville and were on their way home decided to stop at the Hermitage and pay their respects to the ex-President. Parson Brownlow was one of the party, and when they reached the gate he expressed some doubt as to the propriety of his entering the home of the man whom he had so vigorously and consistently denounced, but he was prevailed upon to go along with his friends. He insisted, however, that when they got inside the house he would remain in the background so as to avoid the necessity of having his name called in the general introductions. But Jackson always knew what was going on about him, and he immediately noticed that there was one of the party who had not been introduced, whereupon Brownlow was presented. “I have heard of you before,” the old General said with dry wit; but he shook his hand cordially and treated him with particular courtesy during the remainder of the call, never giving any sign that one of his guests was a man who had waged bitter warfare on him during his days of political activity.
Another similar example was afforded by the visit of Mr. Leslie Combs, a former member of Congress from Kentucky, who came to the Hermitage as a messenger from one of the sons of General Isaac Shelby, bearing a letter relating to a controversy that had sprung up between the Shelbys and Jackson. Mr. Combs arrived at the Hermitage just before dinner time, was received with the greatest courtesy, invited into the dining room to join the family at dinner, and urged to stay at the house as a guest. When he left Old Hickory himself put some apples in his saddle-bags—but, at the same time, he made an appointment with him to meet him at a certain hotel in Nashville, the next day, and when the appointment was kept General Jackson proceeded to denounce Mr. Combs for acting as his enemies’ messenger, and wound up by indulging himself in his favorite pastime of denouncing Henry Clay. As long as Mr. Combs was a guest at the Hermitage, Old Hickory’s code demanded that he be treated with punctilious politeness; but, on neutral ground, he wanted Mr. Combs to know exactly how he felt.
Stephen A. Douglas is now remembered in history principally on account of the series of political debates preceding his victorious contest with Abraham Lincoln for a seat in the United States Senate; but he also is recalled by Jacksonian students as the man who delivered the leading speech in the House of Representatives in 1834 on the resolution to refund the fine paid by General Jackson under the order of Judge Hall in New Orleans following his declaration of martial law there after his victory over Pakenham. Some time after the passage of this resolution there was a political convention in Nashville and the delegates visited the Hermitage to pay their respects to the venerable ex-President. When Judge Douglas was presented to Jackson, according to an account of the episode in Harper’s Weekly in 1857, the old General exclaimed:
“Are you the Mr. Douglas who delivered a speech in Congress showing that I did not violate the Constitution at New Orleans?”
“I did deliver a speech on that subject,” modestly replied Mr. Douglas.
“Then sit down here beside me,” said General Jackson with enthusiasm, “I desire to return you my thanks for that speech. You are the first man I know who has done me justice. You have relieved my mind from a weight that has lain upon it for thirty years. Let me thank you, sir.”
The account concludes: “Senator Douglas’s heart was too full to speak. He pressed the veteran’s hand, and withdrew from the room to conceal his emotions.”
In a diary kept by an old resident of Nashville, Mr. James M. Hamilton, there is displayed an evidence of the cordiality of the master of the Hermitage in receiving the kind of a visitor who generally is not a very welcome guest to the most hospitable of hosts.
Mr. Hamilton was a youth, working in a store in Nashville, and after General Jackson’s return from Washington in 1837 he was sent out to the Hermitage to collect an account amounting to more than $3,000 which Andrew, junior, had run up while the General was President. Mr. Hamilton had been brought up a Clay Whig, and he was admittedly terrified at the prospect of bearding the fire-eating General Jackson in his den and trying to collect a bill. But he swallowed his fears, mounted his horse and rode out to the Hermitage, entered the General’s office and proffered the bill to him. Colonel A. S. Colyar, in his Life and Times of Andrew Jackson quotes from the Hamilton diary:
“‘Let me see it, my son,’ said the General; and he reached forth his long slender hand. As his eyes rested on item after item, I eagerly watched the expression of his countenance. No frown of displeasure was there, but simply attention. Folding the paper, he slowly said: ‘This is a large bill. My son Andrew is a good man, but a very extravagant one. I see many things here he could have done without. But, my son, I will pay this bill on one condition. It is that your employers will correct mistakes, should there be any.’ I assured him that they would certainly do so, and he requested me to write a check on the Planters’ Bank, adding: ‘My son, I came home from Washington with but 75 cents of my salary left, and had it not been for the kindness of my friend, Francis Blair, in lending me money, I would not be able to meet these obligations.’ I had never written a check and had no form with me, but I did the best I could and he signed it. He then requested me to write a receipt. Again I was puzzled, but I did the best I could and he accepted it.
“I arose to go. He invited me most cordially to remain to dinner. I was too much delighted, too happy, too much relieved to think of such a thing. I longed to get back to the store and show them my check and tell them of my success. I felt a wild, boyish admiration for the great man before me, and I wondered how anyone could be so wicked as to say aught disagreeable of him.
“‘If you will not stay, then you must see something of the Hermitage,’ he said, leading the way. I walked beside him about the grounds, the feeling of admiration and enthusiasm all the while in my heart for the great, tender-souled man whose guest I was. As we neared the tomb he raised his hand and, pointing, said: ‘My son, there lies the best woman that ever lived.’ A cloud of sadness spread over his face, and the expression was in keeping with the crepe on his hat—that crepe was worn the rest of his life.
“‘George,’ he called, ‘show Mr. Hamilton around and I will await him here.’ I was shown the old gray warhorse, well cared for in his stable—the steed hero of the battle of New Orleans—and also the carriage which was made from the timbers of the ship Constitution, and in which General Jackson rode at the side of Mr. Van Buren from the White House to the east wing of the Capitol on the occasion of the inauguration of the latter.
“Returning, I found the ex-President awaiting me at the door. As I took leave he warmly pressed my hand and invited me to visit him, saying that my short stay under his roof had given him a great deal of pleasure, that when he came to the city he would be very much gratified if I would seek him out and speak to him.”
In Jackson’s circumstances then a visitor seeking payment of a $3,000 account must have been about as unwelcome a guest as could well be imagined; but the affable manner in which he received that timid youth, shrinking from an unpleasant duty, showed the manner of man he was—and perhaps gives us a clue to the reason for the ardent admiration of his friends.
Long before the Hermitage was formally opened to the public as a national shrine, visitors to Nashville, despite the difficulties involved, were in the habit of making the pilgrimage to Jackson’s old home to see the house where he had lived and to stand by his tomb.
An interesting bit of human interest material is to be found in the visit, on the last day of March in 1851, of none other than the celebrated Mr. Phineas T. Barnum, accompanied by his current protégé, Jenny Lind. This was while Mr. Barnum was conducting the Swedish Nightingale on her history-making tour through the United States, during the course of which two concerts were given in Nashville. While there the immortal songstress, accompanied by Mr. Barnum, and his daughter, engaged a carriage and drove out the dusty road to the Hermitage.
“On that occasion,” relates Mr. Barnum in his reminiscences, “for the first time that season, we heard the wild mocking-bird singing in the trees. This gave Jenny Lind great delight, as she had never before heard them sing except in their wire-bound cages.”
That is all that Mr. Barnum says in his book about this incident, pregnant with beauty and romance. The Nightingale’s first encounter with her only rival, the Southern mocking-bird! What a subject there for a man with a poet’s imagination! But Mr. Barnum hurries on in his book to tell in great detail of an elaborate series of practical jokes he staged the next day—April Fool’s Day. But it is fascinating to let the mind play with the idea of the great Swedish singer standing there entranced that spring day beneath the hollies and cedars and magnolias of Old Hickory’s lawn, listening to the sad, sweet music of the native songbird. What wouldn’t history give for a motion picture, with sound effects, of that dramatic little episode on the Hermitage lawn touched on so briefly in his book by the voluble Mr. Barnum?
This, by the way, was not Barnum’s first visit to the Hermitage. Early in 1838, while touring the South with a tented theatrical company, he relates that “We exhibited at Nashville (where I visited General Jackson at the Hermitage).” How tantalizingly economical with words is the old showman! How entertaining and enlightening it would be to know more about the visit of Barnum to Jackson! Barnum admitted that he was a master of humbuggery; some of Old Hickory’s opponents charged that he was a skilled practitioner of the same art. Did they admire each other? Why didn’t Barnum tell us more about his visits to the Hermitage?
On a hot July day in 1862 there clattered up the driveway of the Hermitage a distinguished and unexpected group of visitors—General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his men. This was before the guard of Federal troops was stationed at the old house; in fact, Nashville had only recently been surrendered by the Confederates and Forrest was making it his business to harass the city’s outposts to such an extent that the army of occupation was not yet entirely sure that it could hold the city.
On this occasion Forrest had just made a foray into Lebanon and was moving with his men down the Lebanon Road towards Nashville with the idea of seeing how close he could get to the city before stirring up a nest of bluecoats. But the Hermitage could not be passed by by any native Tennesseean, even General Forrest, without a visit; and so the famous “Wizard of the Saddle” and his lusty young troopers turned aside from the dusty road for a brief respite from their business of making war and to pay a tribute to Tennessee’s noblest warrior of all.
The day of Forrest’s visit happened to be the first anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas, the famous defeat of the Federals known by them as the Battle of Bull Run; and the ladies of the Hermitage neighborhood had gathered there for a picnic and celebration. The sudden appearance of the idolized Forrest and his men added just what was needed to make the affair a stupendous success; and the Confederate calvarymen partook of the picnic dinner under the trees, walked the garden paths with the young ladies and wandered through the halls of Old Hickory’s old home like typical sight-seers, temporarily oblivious of the fact that a detachment of Yankees was hot on their trail.
When the occasion demanded it, the hospitality of the Hermitage could function on a wholesale, large scale basis. For instance, when a regiment of Texas volunteers paid a visit of respect to General Jackson just before his death they did not go away without entertainment or without refreshment. Only a day before their visit did Jackson learn of their impending descent on him and immediately all the plantation’s facilities were directed to the preparations for the visitors. Sheep, beeves and chickens were killed in large quantities, and every fireplace on the plantation was filled to capacity with meats of every description. A wagon was sent to Nashville and brought back a wagonload of bread, for the Hermitage’s ovens couldn’t bake that much bread on such short notice; and when the 900 Texans marched up the driveway the next morning everything was ready for them. The officers were entertained in the dining room while the rank and file were fed, picnic fashion, on the lawn. This occasion was enlivened, during the course of the proceedings, by the chance discovery by Aunt Hannah of one of the camp followers of the regiment making off with two of the Hermitage’s handsome silver pitchers. Cries of “Stop, thief! Stop, thief!” by the faithful old servant quickly attracted the attention of the soldier guests, the thief was promptly apprehended and the pitchers recovered. And while the soldiers were receiving Old Hickory’s congratulations for recovering his highly prized pitchers the thief quietly walked off in the confusion and thus escaped punishment.
Was there ever such a house for hospitality? Peddlers and Presidents, rich men and poor men, famous men and obscure youths, individuals and regiments of soldiers—all looked alike to the Hermitage. Is it any wonder that it was famous, far and wide, as a place where everybody—friend or foe—was always welcome?