Jackson took a particular interest in the progress of his ex-ward’s love affairs. His affection for his cousin Mary McLemore having cooled, Hutchings upon settling down on his farm in Alabama fell in love with another cousin, General Coffee’s daughter Mary; and Jackson, obviously in favor of the match, helped it along with encouragement to the swain and an occasional adroit word of commendation for Hutchings when he was writing to Mary. They were married on November 14, 1833. Jackson wrote warm letters of congratulation to both of them; and, as early as June, 1834, he was writing Hutchings: “You have not even hinted whether a cradle will be necessary to compleat the furniture of your house. Do inform me.”
Andrew Jackson Hutchings, his harum-scarum young days behind him, developed into a responsible and respected citizen and planter. Jackson kept in touch with him through correspondence and occasional visits, and he enjoyed great gratification at Hutchings’s success in establishing himself as a substantial and respected man. When Hutchings, following the death of his wife in 1840, went to Cuba in an effort to restore his own health, Jackson wrote a letter of introduction in which he described him as “a gentleman of the highest principles of honor and honesty.” The trip to Cuba, however, was ineffectual, and Hutchings returned to Alabama to die in January, 1841.
* * * *
Donelson and Hutchings were but two of the numerous children Jackson took into the Hermitage and brought up as his own. A complete roster of them would be a long list. Apparently Jackson’s friends had a habit of dying and leaving their orphans to his care. His old friend Edward Butler, for instance, appointed the General guardian of his two sons and two daughters when he died in 1804, and there were other odd children left under his wing from time to time. But Rachel had a heart big enough to find room for them all; and Jackson, despite his engrossing responsibilities and his excruciating headaches, never objected to their noisy play as they tumbled about in the Hermitage while he was talking business and politics with his numerous visitors.
An exotic and pitiful member of the Hermitage household for a few years was Lyncoya, the young Indian whom General Jackson rescued from the Creek battlefield of Tallushatches in November, 1813. When this bloody battle was over, this year-old infant boy was found at the breast of his dead mother, lying on the field. The baby was brought by John Coffee to the tent of General Jackson who sought to have some of the surviving Indian women take it and nurse it. With savage indifference they refused to make any effort to save the baby’s life; indeed, they sullenly suggested that the baby might as well be killed since its parents had already been slaughtered by the whites. General Jackson, however, determined to take it upon himself to see that the little waif survived. Accordingly he had it fed regularly on brown sugar and water and bread crumbs, and on this rude fare it survived until it could be sent back to civilization and given proper diet and attention. First the baby was sent to Huntsville, to be cared for there by Colonel LeRoy Pope; and it was his daughter, so tradition says, who conferred the name Lyncoya on the child. At last the little Indian reached the Hermitage, and under the kindly Rachel’s care soon bloomed with health again. General Jackson had written home that he was sending the little Indian as a present to little Andrew—much as one would speak of sending a puppy or lamb or some other form of pet. “I wish to know if little Andrew got his little Lyncoya and what he thinks of him,” the General wrote later to Rachel; and in all of his subsequent letters home he had something to say about the derelict Indian baby. “How is Lyncoya?” he wrote to Rachel from Mobile late in 1814. “Although he is a heathen he is an orphan, and I know you will extend a motherly care over him.” And Rachel did.
The exact status of Lyncoya in the Hermitage menage is now not entirely clear. General Jackson probably shared the frontier sentiment that an Indian was just barely a human being, and at first he seems to have looked upon him as little more than a novel sort of pet for little Andrew. But the young redskin must have grown in Old Hickory’s affections, for in subsequent letters he refers to “my little sons, including Lyncoya,” and as soon as he was old enough he went to school along with the white boys. Lyncoya, according to tradition, soon showed signs of his racial origin: He decorated his head with turkey feathers, and with a bow and arrow that he made for himself he kept the chicken yard in an uproar. As he grew older, General Jackson’s plans for him grew more ambitious. In 1823 he wrote from Washington to Mrs. Jackson: “I would be delighted to receive a letter from our son, little Hutchings and even Lyncoya. The latter I would like to exhibit to Mr. Monroe and the Secretary of War, as I mean to have him received at the Military School as early as I can.” But by the time Lyncoya was old enough to enter the Military Academy the national administration had changed and Jackson’s enemies were in power. Accordingly, the General decided to have the young Indian learn a trade, and so took him to Nashville and carried him around town so that he could see with his own eyes men working in the various shops, and then let him decide which one was most attractive to him. Lyncoya for some reason (and by a strange coincidence, since Jackson himself had worked in his boyhood at the same trade) chose the shop of a saddler as the scene of his future labors. So he was apprenticed to a Nashville saddle maker in 1827; but it was his custom to spend his Sundays at the Hermitage, riding one of the General’s fine saddle horses to and from Nashville. The confinement of the shop, however, did not agree with him and within a year he fell ill with a heavy cold that settled on his lungs. He was given permission to go home to the Hermitage, where he was carefully nursed by Mrs. Jackson, but he grew gradually worse and died June 1, 1828—his being the first death to occur in the Hermitage. Just where he was buried nobody seems to know. At least one chronicle has stated that he was buried in the garden; but, if so, there is no sign of it. No stone there bears his name, and there is no unmarked grave in the family plot. It has also been suggested that he was probably buried in the slaves’ graveyard down in the thicket, back of the carriage house. But all this is mere conjecture.
Lyncoya must have been a problem to General Jackson who, in common with other pioneers, hated the Indians as a race, although he apparently had nothing but affection and pity for the forlorn individual he had brought to live under his own roof. That he trusted him implicity is shown by a brief note in Jackson’s handwriting now in the possession of a Nashville connection: “Mr. John Summerville will please send me by Lyncoya, who will hand him this, fifty dollars in small notes. Please enclose it under cover to me and oblige your friend Andrew Jackson.” Mr. Summerville lived in Nashville, and if Jackson had not had the greatest confidence in him he would never have sent a thirteen-year-old boy on that long, lonesome horseback ride to Nashville and back to get that money.
* * * *
An almost lifelong resident of the Hermitage, described by General Jackson as “my friend and companion” was Ralph E. W. Earl, the artist who married Mrs. Jackson’s niece. He was born in 1788, the son of Ralph Earl, an artist of distinction; and, following his father’s example, took up the profession of artist himself. He came to Nashville in 1816, and through painting Jackson’s portrait established an acquaintance with the General which ripened into lifelong friendship. One of his friends in a contemporaneous letter described him as “the very soul of goodness and honor”; and that seems to have been the general opinion of him.
While in Natchez exhibiting a portrait of Jackson which he had painted, Earl met Miss Jane Caffery, a daughter of Mrs. Jackson’s sister Mary, whom he married after a short courtship. Upon their return to Nashville they were invited to live at the Hermitage, and when Mrs. Earl died a few months afterwards, Jackson insisted that Earl continue his residence there. From then until his death he was the intimate friend of General Jackson, going to Washington with him when he was elected President, and accompanying him as a companion on most of his travels.