A letter of cordial thanks was returned, with the words, "I cannot consent that my mortal body shall be laid in a repository prepared for an emperor or a king. My republican feelings and principles forbid it; the simplicity of our system of government forbids it.... I have prepared an humble depository for my mortal body beside that wherein lies my beloved wife, where, without any pomp or parade, I have requested, when my God calls me to sleep with my fathers, to be laid."
The May of 1845 found General Jackson feeble and emaciated, but still deeply interested in his country, writing letters to President Polk and other statesmen about Texas, hoping ever to avert war if possible. "If not," he said, "let war come. There will be patriots enough in the land to repel foreign aggression, come whence it may, and to maintain sacredly our just rights and to perpetuate our glorious constitution and liberty, and to preserve our happy Union." He made his will, bequeathing all his property to his adopted son, because, said he, "If she were alive, she would wish him to have it all, and to me her wish is law."
On Sunday, June 8, 1845, the family and servants gathered about the great man, who was dying at the age of seventy-eight, having fought against wounds and disease all his life. "My dear children," he said, "do not grieve for me; it is true I am going to leave you; I am well aware of my situation. I have suffered much bodily pain, but my sufferings are but as nothing compared with that which our blessed Saviour endured upon that accursed cross, that all might be saved who put their trust in him.... I hope and trust to meet you all in Heaven, both white and black—both white and black." Then he kissed each one, his eyes resting last, affectionately, upon his granddaughter Rachel, named for his wife, and closely resembling her in loveliness of character; then death came.
Two days before he died, he said, "Heaven will be no Heaven to me if I do not meet my wife there." Who can picture that meeting? He used to say, "All I have achieved—fame, power, everything—would I exchange, if she could be restored to me for a moment." How blessed must have been the restoration, not "for a moment," but for eternity!
The lawn at the Hermitage was crowded with the thousands who came to attend the funeral. From the portico, the minister spoke from the words, "These are they which came out of great tribulation, and washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb."
All over the country, public meetings were held in honor of the illustrious dead; the man who had said repeatedly, "I care nothing about clamors; I do precisely what I think just and right."
"He had had honors beyond anything which his own heart had ever coveted," says Prof. William G. Sumner, in his life of Jackson. "His successes had outrun his ambition. He had held more power than any other American had ever possessed. He had been idolized by the great majority of his countrymen, and had been surfeited with adulation."
Politicians sometimes sneered about his "kitchen cabinet" at Washington, the devoted friends who influenced him but did not hold official position, for, self-reliant though he was to a marvellous degree, he was neither afraid nor ashamed to be influenced by those who loved him. He was absolutely sincere and unselfish. He hated intensely, and loved intensely; with an affection as unchanging as his adamantine will. Patriotic, determined, energetic, and heroic, he attained success where others would have failed. He illustrated Emerson's words, "The man who stands by himself, the universe will stand by him also." Francis P. Blair, his devoted friend, used to say, "Of all the men I have known, Andrew Jackson was the one most entirely sufficient for himself." During his presidency, the steamboat which once conveyed him and his party down the Chesapeake was unseaworthy, and one of the men exhibited much alarm. "You are uneasy," said the general; "you never sailed with me before, I see."
As a soldier, he was a brave, wise, skilful leader; as a statesman, honest, earnest, fearless, true—"I do precisely what I think just and right."
Said a friend who knew him well, "There was more of the woman in his nature than in that of any man I ever knew—more of woman's tenderness toward children, and sympathy with them. Often has he been known, though he never had a child of his own, to walk up and down by the hour with an infant in his arms, because by so doing he relieved it from the cause of its crying; more also of woman's patience and uncomplaining, unnoticing submissiveness to trivial causes of irritation. There was in him a womanly modesty and delicacy.... By no man was the homage due to woman, the only true homage she can receive—faith in her—more devoutly rendered.... This peculiar tenderness of nature entered largely, no doubt, into the composition of that manner of his, with which so many have been struck, and which was of the highest available stamp as regards both dignity and grace."