The hotel at which he stopped was on the main street, and had a broad porch that extended the full length of the house. This was about eight or ten feet high, projecting out over the sidewalk, and was reached by a stairway at each end. On the following day, the President held a reception on this porch, and there shook hands with all of the people who had assembled to see him, they passing up at one end of the porch and down at the other. On this porch, on this day, was dispelled from the minds of some of his friends every vestige of the slight suspicion which had been produced by vile hired slanderers, that his fierce nature, turbulent spirit and stormy life had sapped his mental powers, judgment and reason, and that he was no longer the real Andrew Jackson of New Orleans, but was surrounded and controlled by designing, unscrupulous scoundrels, who were feeding the vanity of the old man in his dotage on flattery which he was then unable to detect and resist. President Jackson stood on the hotel porch at Jonesboro, and, possibly at the very moment when public speakers and editors in other parts of the country were lamenting(?) the loss of his former “energy of character” and the decay of his mind and judgment, gave to those people the very highest evidence that he was the Andrew Jackson of old: his form, although he was sixty-five years old, was “straight as a gun-barrel,” and his eyes as flashing and his mind as clear as on the night of the fire, or on the day when he left the bench and arrested Russell Bean, in that very town. As his old friends would approach him in their plain and simple garb, with their wives and children,[R] he would call out their names, grasp their hands, put an arm around them, kiss their daughters, compliment their younger children, and tell the wife that the good-looking boys and girls “favored her” more than they did the father. Incidents of his early life would suggest themselves to his mind—a lawsuit, a fox chase, a deer drive or something else—as they came up, and he would refer to it in some way, in the few moments which he could spare to that particular individual. His famous horse-race with Col. Love in Greasy Cove was mentioned; and it came very near bringing down the porch when a kinsman of Col. Love, by the same name, grasped the old hero by the hand and asked him if he had any better race horses at the Hermitage than he had when he lived in that country; to which he promptly and laughingly replied: “Yes, better than either one of us had that day; come over to the Hermitage, and you shall have one.” Such were the scenes and incidents of that memorable day on the hotel porch in the historic old town of Jonesboro.[S]
The “bank conspirators,” as they were called, had been at work incessantly, and they had a few—a very few—helpers in that country, who had been furnished with and had repeated (with great regret?) this charge of imbecility of old age, which rendered it dangerous to the liberties of the people and perilous to the government to re-elect the once great man, then a mental wreck. It may, even at this late day, be of benefit to reproduce in part an editorial from one of the newspapers of the period—a strong and powerful one—which, it was said, had been hired to desert and slander President Jackson, and to wait until he was in the midst of his journey through the country to the Hermitage, before it made its first assault on him. This editorial, among other things, said:
Since 1823 I have been the firm, undeviating friend of Andrew Jackson, through good and through evil report. I have defended his reputation and advocated his cause; and, for the last five years, my exertions in his behalf, as the conductor of a public journal, have been known to this country. But the time has now arrived when I owe it to the people, to the institutions of the country and to myself to declare my deliberate conviction that he has not realized the high hopes which his reputation and previously written and declared opinions promised, nor redeemed the sacred pledges which he voluntarily gave on his election to the first station in the world. Let us not be misunderstood: I do not—I never will—impeach his patriotism or his integrity; but as a sentinel at my post, true to the duty which I voluntarily assumed when I became the editor of a public journal, I feel called upon to proclaim to the people that Andrew Jackson is not their President; that, enfeebled by age and the toils, cares and anxieties of an active and laborious life, he no longer possesses his former energy of character or independence of mind, but, confiding in those who have wormed themselves into his confidence, he has entrusted the affairs of this great nation and the happiness of thirteen millions of freemen to the hands of political gamblers and money-changers, time-serving politicians, who, in the pursuit of their unhallowed purposes, threaten ruin to the country and to that sacred charter of our liberties which was maintained by the wisdom of our fathers, after having been purchased with their blood and the sacrifice of every selfish motive on the altar of public good.[T]
The foregoing is from a three-column editorial which appeared during the very week that Jackson was in Jonesboro, and only about two days previous to his reception in that town. Eight newspapers that had theretofore supported Jackson immediately followed the lead of the Courier and Enquirer, took the names of Jackson and Van Buren from their mast-heads, and went over to the support of Nicholas Biddle and the banks, on the ground that the President had lost his mind and his “former energy of character”; but they all lived long enough to find out how the people of Jonesboro received the slander,[U] and also to learn that the whole country knew that they had been hired to traduce the life, character, abilities and public services of this great soldier, statesman and patriot, and to have the finger of indignant, honest scorn point them out as traitors to the cause and slanderers of Andrew Jackson.
Space has been given to this reception at Jonesboro for the reason that it took place during the period of ten days within which nine or ten of the newspapers in the east which had been supporting Jackson suddenly discovered that he had “lost his former energy of character and independence of mind,” and was so “enfeebled by age” that his re-election would endanger the happiness of the people and the “sacred charter of liberty.” This was nothing more nor less than the first move in the conspiracy that was formed to defeat his re-election and destroy him. These newspapers had been bought, the price paid and the trade closed, some time after Jackson’s nomination on the 21st of May preceding, at Baltimore; but they were instructed to reserve their opening fire upon him until an opportune time. It was ascertained that he was about to visit the Hermitage, and that he was going “overland” down across Virginia and on through Tennessee. When he was about midway on this journey, with no telegraph or fast mail communication to give him information, these “bushwhackers” fired on his character, his integrity and his administration, and yet protested in the same editorials that they did not intend to “impeach his patriotism or his integrity.”
The cold-blooded, savage brutality of this conspiracy; its “lying in wait,” concealment in ambush for weeks, to catch the victim away from home, out in the interior on a long journey, and then assault and attempt to assassinate his character, is without parallel in American political warfare. But the people could not be bought, deceived, driven nor intimidated. Of the popular vote cast in the election, that year, Jackson received 687,502, and Clay 530,189. Jackson carried seventeen out of twenty-four states, and received 219 out of 288 electoral votes.
If the men who became the tools of this conspiracy to ruin his usefulness, and to cloud his former fair name and fame, had any sensibilities left, what must have been the depth of their humiliation when, in June, 1833, Andrew Jackson, then President of the United States for a second term, and sixty-six years of age, rode on horseback along Broadway in the city of New York. Parton describes it in a few words:
And what a scene was that, when the Old Man, victorious over nullification, and about to deal his finishing blow at the bank, visited New York, and was borne along Broadway on one roaring wave of upturned faces and flashing eyes; when it seemed, said a spectator, as if he had but to speak the word, and they would have proclaimed him on the spot a king.[V]
This ovation in New York was after he had been elected; the other mentioned was before he was elected, and was given to the man, in a country road, between crooked rail fences, under the shade of the native oaks.
President Jackson, during his second term, carried out his “previously written and declared opinions and promises,” and “redeemed the sacred pledges which he voluntarily gave,” by crushing the United States Banks and freeing the people, commerce and trade from their domination, bringing shame and disgrace upon the conspirators and the hired traducers of this great man, whose name and fame will not perish until the departed spirit of American Independence shall shake hands with the ghost of Liberty across the grave of the greatest republic that has ever existed.