“In your letter although you have informed me of your visit to your dear mother’s tomb, still you have not informed me of its situation, and whether the weeping that we planted around it are growing, or whether the flowers reared by her industrious and beloved hands, have been set around the grave as I requested. My D’r son, inform me on this subject, you know it is the one dearest to my heart, and her memory will remain fresh there as long as life lasts....”
“As long as life lasts....” Each evening at sunset a failing old man turned his footsteps toward the garden. The chattering little girl who held his hand paused at the gate and watched in silence while he made his way slowly down the garden paths to the white stone temple in the lower end of the garden.
“No one ever went to the tomb with him,” Mrs. Lawrence told Mr. Heiskell. “I always went to the gate, and saw him in, but I realized he was going to the tomb. He would stay there a half hour, I suppose, then return. He did this as long as he was able to walk.”
It was not long to wait. Louis Philippe sent the artist Healy to paint his portrait, and Sam Houston was hastening from Texas that his fast-failing friend might lay his hands on his young son’s head in blessing. The portrait was finished three days before the old General’s death, but Sam Houston reached the Hermitage just a few hours too late.
The end came quietly and peacefully on June 8, 1845, and two days later Andrew Jackson was laid to rest beside his beloved Rachel. Their mortal remains have rested peacefully in the earth they loved these many years, while the changing seasons have brought their fleeting beauty to the garden—but who shall say that their story has not become immortal?
ADDITIONAL NOTES
(Plans for this volume were made during Mrs. E. A. Lindsey’s term as regent of the Ladies’ Hermitage Association. They were brought to completion during the administration of her successor, Mrs. Reau E. Folk, with the full coöperation of Mrs. Lindsey and other members of the board of directors. Plans for the present edition were begun under the regency of Mrs. George F. Blackie and are being completed under the regency of Mrs. Robert F. Jackson. The purpose of this little book is to provide a small, easily readable volume on the Hermitage of Andrew Jackson’s day and to bring out certain interesting unpublished material relating to this period. These additional notes, given in the briefest possible space, represent material too voluminous to publish at the present time, but too important to pass without some mention.)
Preservation and Refurnishing of the Hermitage.—The reader is naturally interested in the period which intervened between the death of Andrew Jackson and the opening of his home as a patriotic shrine, the authenticity of the relics, the degree to which the garden and the grounds are faithful to their past, and other details of the preservation of the historic Hermitage estate.
The Hermitage and five hundred acres of adjoining land were purchased by the State of Tennessee from Andrew Jackson, Jr., in 1856. At this time Andrew Johnson, another Tennessean who was to ascend to the Presidency of the United States, was governor. The original purpose was to tender the property to the United States Government for the establishment of a military academy similar to West Point, and such an offer was made to Congress by the State of Tennessee. The plan was not consummated, however, for clouds which gave warning of the great storm of internal strife which was about to break, obscured all other interests. The Civil War soon followed and five young men from the Hermitage—sons of Sarah York and Andrew Jackson, Jr., and of Mrs. Jackson’s widowed sister, Mrs. Adams—went to join the Confederate Army. Only one, Colonel Andrew Jackson, III, returned.
Andrew Jackson, Jr., died in 1865, but his widow continued, at the invitation of the State of Tennessee, to live at the Hermitage until her death in 1888. In the following year, 1889, the Ladies’ Hermitage Association was organized, and on April 5, 1889, the mansion, tomb, and adjoining buildings were conveyed to the trustees of the Ladies’ Hermitage Association. After this first step the Association busied itself with the raising of funds for the purchase of furniture, relics, and valuable papers which belonged in the mansion and which Col. Andrew Jackson, III, had inherited from his mother. The major portion of the present collection was completed by 1900, and in that year Col. Jackson and his sister, Mrs. Rachel Jackson Lawrence, signed a statement which forever establishes the authenticity of the relics. Col. Jackson died in 1906, but Mrs. Lawrence lived until 1923 and under her guidance, as well as that of “Uncle Alfred,” the slave who was General Jackson’s body servant, the furniture was rearranged as it was when the old warrior lived in the Hermitage.