As early as 1831 the President conceived the idea of issuing a farewell address to the people upon the eve of his retirement; and a few weeks before the election of Van Buren he sent to Taney a list of subjects which he proposed to touch upon in the document, requesting him to “throw on paper” his ideas concerning them. The address was issued on March 4, 1837, and followed closely the copy subsequently found in Taney’s handwriting in the Jackson manuscripts. Its contents were thoroughly commonplace, being indeed hardly more than a résumé of the eight annual messages; and it might well have been dismissed as the amiable musings of a garrulous old man. But nothing associated with the name of Jackson ever failed to stir controversy. The Whigs ridiculed the egotism which underlay the palpable imitation of Washington. “Happily,” said the New York American, “it is the last humbug which the mischievous popularity of this illiterate, violent, vain, and iron-willed soldier can impose upon a confiding and credulous people.” The Democrats, however, lauded the address, praised the wisdom and sincerity of its author, and laid away among their most valued mementoes the white satin copies which admiring friends scattered broadcast over the country.
Showered with evidences of undiminished popularity, the General came down to his last day in office. One enthusiast sent him a light wagon made entirely of hickory sticks with the bark upon them. Another presented a phaeton made of wood taken from the old frigate Constitution. A third capped the climax by forwarding from New York a cheese four feet in diameter, two feet thick, and weighing fourteen hundred pounds—twice as large, the Globe fondly pointed out, as the cheese presented to Jefferson under similar circumstances a quarter of a century earlier. From all parts of the country came callers, singly and in delegations, to pay their respects and to assure the outgoing Chief of their goodwill and admiration. March 4, 1837, was a raw, disagreeable day. But Jackson, pale and racked by disease, rode with his chosen successor to the place where he had himself assumed office eight years before, and sat uncovered while the oath was administered and the inaugural delivered. The suave, elegantly dressed Van Buren was politely applauded as the new Chief to whom respect was due. But it was the tall, haggard, white-haired soldier-politician who had put Van Buren where he was who awoke the spontaneous enthusiasm of the crowds.
Three days after the inauguration Jackson started for the Hermitage. His trip became a series of ovations, and he was obliged several times to pause for rest. At last he reached Nashville, where once again, as in the old days of the Indian wars, he was received with an acclaim deeply tinged by personal friendship and neighborly pride. A great banquet in his honor was presided over by James K. Polk, now Speaker of the national House of Representatives; and the orators vied one with another in extolling his virtues and depicting his services to the country. Then Jackson went on to the homestead whose seclusion he coveted.
No one knew better than the ex-President himself that his course was almost run. He was seventy years of age and seldom free from pain for an hour. He considered himself, moreover, a poor man—mainly, it appears, because he went back to Tennessee owing ten thousand dollars and with only ninety dollars in his pockets. He was, however, only “land poor,” for his plantation of twenty-six hundred acres was rich and valuable, and he had a hundred and forty slaves—“servants” he always called them—besides large numbers of horses and cattle. A year or two of thrifty supervision brought his lands and herds back to liberal yields; his debts were soon paid off; and notwithstanding heavy outlays for his adopted son, whose investments invariably turned out badly, he was soon able to put aside all anxiety over pecuniary matters.
Established again in his old home, surrounded by congenial relatives and friends, respected by neighbors without regard to politics, and visited from time to time by notable foreigners and Americans, Jackson found much of satisfaction in his declining years. For a time he fully lived up to the promise made to Benton and Blair that he would keep clear of politics. His interest in the fortunes of his party, however, was not diminished by his retirement from public life. He corresponded freely with Van Buren, whose policies he in most respects approved; and as the campaign of 1840 approached the “old war-horse began once more to sniff the battle from afar.” Admitting to his friends that the situation looked “a little dubious,” he exerted himself powerfully to bring about the reëlection of the New Yorker. He wrote a letter belittling the military qualities of the Whig candidate, thereby probably doing the Democratic cause more harm than good; and finally, to avert the humiliation of a Whig victory in Tennessee, he “took the stump” and denounced the enemy up and down through all western Tennessee and southern Kentucky. But “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” was too much for him; the Whig candidates carried both Tennessee and Kentucky and won the nation-wide contest by 234 to 60 electoral votes.
The old warrior took the defeat—his defeat, he always regarded it—philosophically, and at once began to lay plans for a recovery of Democratic supremacy in 1844. For another quadrennium his hand was on the party throttle. When men speculated as to whether Van Buren, General Cass, General Butler, or Senator Benton would be the standard bearer in 1844, they always asked what Jackson’s edict on the subject would be; and the final selection of James K. Polk, while not fully dictated by the ex-President, was the result of a compromise in which his advice played a prominent part. Though past seventy-seven and hardly able to sign his name, Jackson threw himself into the campaign and undoubtedly contributed to the election of his fellow-Tenneseean. His satisfaction with the outcome and with the annexation of Texas which quickly followed found expression in a barbecue attended by all the Democrats of the neighborhood and by some of note from a distance. “We have restored the Government to sound principles,” declared the host in a brief, faltering speech from the Hermitage portico, “and extended the area of our institutions to the Rio Grande. Now for Oregon and Fifty-four-forty.”
Oregon—although not to fifty-four forty—was soon to be duly made American soil. But Jackson did not live to witness the event. Early in 1845 his health began to fail rapidly and on the very day of Polk’s inauguration he was at the point of death. Rallying, he struggled manfully for three months against the combined effects of consumption, dropsy, and dysentery. But on Sunday, the 8th of June, the end came. In accordance with a pledge which he had given his wife years before, he had become a communicant of the Presbyterian church; and his last words to the friends about his bedside were messages of Christian cheer. After two days the body was laid to rest in the Hermitage garden, beside the grave of the companion whose loss he had never ceased to mourn with all the feeling of which his great nature was capable. The authorities at the national capital ordered public honors to be paid to the ex-President, and gatherings in all parts of the country listened with much show of feeling to appropriate eulogies.
“General Jackson,” said Daniel Webster to Thurlow Weed in 1837, “is an honest and upright man. He does what he thinks is right, and does it with all his might. He has a violent temper, which leads him often to hasty conclusions. It also causes him to view as personal to himself the public acts of other men. For this reason there is great difference between Jackson angry and Jackson in good humor. When he is calm, his judgment is good; when angry, it is usually bad. … His patriotism is no more to be questioned than that of Washington. He is the greatest General we have and, except Washington, the greatest we ever had.”
To this characterization of Andrew Jackson by his greatest American contemporary it is impossible to make noteworthy addition. His was a character of striking contradictions. His personal virtues were honesty, bravery, open-heartedness, chivalry toward women, hospitality, steadfastness. His personal faults were irascibility, egotism, stubbornness, vindictiveness, and intolerance of the opinions of others. He was not a statesman; yet some of the highest qualities of statesmanship were in him. He had a perception of the public will which has rarely been surpassed; and in most, if not all, of the great issues of his time he had a grasp of the right end of the question.