The Hermitage, Home of Old Hickory

by Stanley F. Horn

The first Hermitage on the present site, as it appeared from the time it was built in 1819 until the wings were added in 1831.

But the Hermitage remains as an enduring and impressive challenge to that erroneous characterization of this many-sided and little understood statesman. This, it is plain to see, was the home of no mere backwoodsman or ruffian. A mansion when it was built more than a hundred years ago, it was obviously the seat of a man of genteel characteristics, of refined, though simple taste.

It is no uncommon thing today for visitors to the Hermitage to express surprise that such a house should have been built by Andrew Jackson; but such surprise grows out of a misconception of the man’s true nature and characteristics.

The usually accepted picture of Jackson in the public mind is largely the result of our American admiration of the primitive, a love for the so-called manly and rugged qualities which sometimes leads us into overdoing our humanizing of some of our early heroes. As a matter of fact, Jackson, though not a college graduate, was by no means a typical example of the popular conception of an illiterate frontiersman. He had had formal schooling, had studied law and had been admitted to the North Carolina bar when at the age of twenty-one years he crossed the mountains and came to the Cumberland settlements in what is now Tennessee. His standard of education was notably higher than the average of that day and locality. He came to the Cumberland country as the state’s attorney for the newly created Mero District, and we may be sure that an uneducated, uncouth man would never have been selected by the governor of North Carolina for this important post.

Furthermore, although he was born in comparative poverty—a posthumous child—his widowed mother, soon to die of yellow fever while nursing wounded Revolutionary soldiers, had relatives with whom to leave him. These relatives were people of substance, ranking sufficiently high to entertain George Washington on his visit to South Carolina in 1791, and they gave the orphan Andrew the benefit of a boyhood spent amid the surroundings of a prosperous and cultured Southern family.

So, while the youthful Andrew Jackson engaged in cock-fighting, horse-racing and dueling, these were by no means unusual pastimes for the high-spirited youths of that time. He had the innate qualities of a gentleman; and those qualities find their truest manifestation in the home he built for the declining years of his wife and himself.

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The Hermitage, though it has gained world-wide fame as Andrew Jackson’s home, was not his dwelling place when he first settled in the Nashville community in 1788. At that time the danger of attacks by Indians had not yet entirely disappeared, and residents of the outlying districts still frequently lived in “stations”—groups of houses gathered about a central habitation, thus offering the opportunity for protection against attack. At such a station near Nashville lived the widow of John Donelson, who had been one of the founders of the original Nashborough, and it was in one of the cabins adjacent to her home that Andrew Jackson lived when he settled in the new country. With him lived his friend, John Overton, later his law partner and his lifelong confidant and advisor. The two young lawyers hung out their shingle together, with their office in the cabin where they lived, taking their meals with the widow Donelson.

Living with Mrs. Donelson at this time was her daughter Rachel, the estranged bride of a high-spirited and jealous Kentuckian named Lewis Robards. The young couple had gone to Kentucky to live when they married, but the jealous husband made life with him intolerable and Rachel soon returned to her mother’s house, where Jackson found her when he went there to live. Largely through the pacific efforts of John Overton, an old friend of the Robards family, and at the instigation of Lewis Robards’s mother whose sympathies were with Rachel in the affair, a reconciliation was patched up and Captain Robards came to the widow Donelson’s home late in 1788 to live again with his wife. Soon, however, Robards created a new crisis by charging Jackson with undue attentions to his wife. The fiery young lawyer challenged Robards to a duel, but the challenge was declined and in the spring of 1790 Robards returned to Kentucky with the avowed intention of getting a divorce. In the fall of that year the news drifted down to Nashville that the divorce had been granted, and about a year later, in the latter part of 1791, Jackson married Rachel.