The Hermitage, Home of Old Hickory

by Stanley F. Horn

Young Mrs. Jackson’s widowed sister, Mrs. Adams, was musically talented, and during the General’s declining years she gave him much pleasure with her playing of the piano and guitar and with her singing. The General’s favorite song was “Auld Lang Syne;” but when Mrs. Adams would take her guitar of an evening, seated at the fireside, and would play and sing “Johnny Sands” or some of the other humorous songs of the day, Jackson showed his keen enjoyment even though he loved the old songs best.

Mrs. Adams, with her musical talent, was a valued and enlivening addition to the Hermitage family group, and after her coming she always provided the music for the many impromptu dances in the Hermitage parlors. Despite his advanced years the General took great delight in these affairs; and it was the customary thing for him to start off the festivities of the Virginia Reel by taking his daughter-in-law as a partner and dancing the first round with her.

It was one of the minor tragedies of Jackson’s life that he, who set such store by his home life, should have no family of his own; but to fill the vacant place in his heart left by the lack of children he legally adopted his wife’s nephew and bestowed on him the most sincere and lavish affection a father could give his own son.

It was on December 22, 1809, that the wife of Severn Donelson, Mrs. Jackson’s brother, gave birth to twin boys. The news reached the General and his wife as they sat at the breakfast table in the old Hermitage. Mrs. Jackson, upon receiving the message, looked across the table at the General and said: “I’m afraid brother’s wife will be unable to raise both the little fellows with all those other children—she isn’t very strong, you know. Suppose we take one of them.”

Rachel’s merest suggestion was law to the General; and so after breakfast the horses were brought to the door and away they went to brother Severn’s to see the new twins and suggest the adoption. The mother agreed to the proposal, the General promptly had the infant’s name officially changed to Andrew Jackson, junior; and from that day he treated him as his own son. Aunt Hannah, the most trusted of the house servants, was assigned to his special care; and it was in her strong arms that he was carried two miles through the woods from his birthplace to the Hermitage which was to be his future home. Hannah lived to be 101 years old, and never tired of telling of how she reared the young master. Later she was assigned to the duty of looking after Mrs. Jackson; and then Alfred took charge of little Andrew and helped bring him up to the estate of young manhood. Those were gay days on the Hermitage farm when little Andrew was growing up, and the loyal and loving Alfred was taking him hunting and fishing, along with the little Donelson cousins.

The tender and patient devotion of the old General to his adopted son is one of the most touching chapters of his life. From the day old Hannah brought him in her arms across the threshold of the Hermitage, the General ever referred to him as “my son;” and had the boy actually been his own offspring he could not have treated him with more kindly and enduring affection. In his letters to his wife, while he was off fighting the Indians in Alabama, he never failed to mention little Andrew; and in one of these letters, following the bloody battle with the Creeks at Tallapoosa, he wrote: “Tell Andrew that I have for him a warrior’s bow and arrow.” The picture of the rough, turbulent, Indian-fighting frontiersman painted by conventional history does not tell us much of this side of the old soldier’s nature.

When the General returned from the Indian wars, Mrs. Jackson went to Huntsville to meet him and carried the little boy along; and when she went to New Orleans in 1815 to attend the popular celebration given there by the citizens in honor of her illustrious husband’s great victory over the British, little Andrew again went with her. A current account of visit of the General’s family to New Orleans brings out the fact that little Andrew was a pet at headquarters; and it is easy to believe the statement that the General could not deny him anything and spent every leisure moment in playing with him, often holding him in his arms while he transacted business. One evening, so the story goes, some companies of soldiers stopped beneath the windows of headquarters and the crowd began to cheer the General and call for his appearance. Little Andrew, asleep in the next room, was waked up by the commotion and began to cry. The General had already started to the window to answer the cheers of the people in the street below, but when he heard the boy whimpering he went to his bedside, picked him up, soothed away his tears and carried him along to the balcony where he bowed to the people and, at the same time, amused little Andrew with the scene in the street.

When the General was made Governor of the Florida Territory in 1821, and went there with Mrs. Jackson to take up his residence, they took Andrew with them as Mrs. Jackson would not think of leaving him behind; but the country around Pensacola was not, with its heat and its mosquitoes, an ideal place for a child, and so in August he was sent home when one of Jackson’s staff officers returned to Tennessee.

As the boy grew older he was sent to college in Nashville and was given every opportunity available to the son of a prosperous and distinguished father; and it is easy to see, from what Jackson said and wrote, that he had the greatest ambitions for the boy he had chosen to be his son and to perpetuate his name.

When he went to Washington to be inaugurated President in 1828 he left young Andrew at the Hermitage to help wind up affairs there; but Andrew went on to Washington in a few months, as soon as his foster father had got settled in the White House. After a brief stay in Washington he returned to the Hermitage, however, chiefly because of a love affair with a young lady of the neighborhood, a ward of their neighbor Colonel Ward who lived at Hunter’s Hill and mentioned in one of Jackson’s letters as “the daughter of my deceased friend,” but now known only as “Miss Flora.”