The Hermitage, Home of Old Hickory

by Stanley F. Horn

The wedding ceremony took place in Natchez, Mississippi, whither she had fled to escape from her husband’s threats. “I’m going to haunt you!” Robards told her when he left her; and she, not knowing exactly what that threat implied but well knowing her moody husband’s erratic disposition, feared bodily harm and thought it safest to get as far away from him as possible. The home of relatives in Natchez provided a pleasing asylum in this emergency; and so it was there that the marriage ceremony was performed.

But, alas, it developed that the news of the divorce was premature—the marriage with Jackson was consummated before the attenuated Kentucky divorce proceedings had been actually completed. Legally, therefore, Mrs. Robards-Jackson was technically guilty of bigamy; but the incensed Robards used a harsher term in discussing the young Tennessee lawyer’s relations with his erstwhile wife. Jackson patched the thing up as best he could by having another wedding ceremony promptly performed in January, 1794, after the Kentucky divorce was actually granted; but the irregularities attending his marriage rose to plague him again and again throughout his life, with his political enemies gleefully making capital of the unfortunate episode to the fullest possible extent.

Jackson at the time of his marriage, though still a young man, was in prosperous circumstances. His success as a lawyer in the new community had been almost instantaneous, due largely to an unusual state of affairs existing in the Cumberland settlements when he arrived there. Nashville was still a young and undeveloped frontier town and up until the time of Jackson’s arrival boasted only one lawyer. This representative of the legal fraternity had been retained as counsel for a sort of combination of habitual debtors; and the result was that the merchants, as well as other creditors, found it well-nigh impossible to collect what was owing to them. When Jackson appeared on the scene and let it be known that he was a lawyer looking for clients, he was immediately offered these claims; and it was characteristic of him that he accepted with avidity a difficult class of litigation from which many other young lawyers might have shrunk. But Jackson’s physical and moral courage made him enjoy the kind of a fight against odds that most people would avoid; and he prosecuted his clients’ claims with such boldness and vim that he soon drove an irresistible wedge into the debt-paying strike. Naturally this immediately popularized him with the responsible elements in Nashville, and his law practice quickly flourished. Within seven years of his arrival in 1788 he had more cases on the docket in Davidson County than all the other Nashville lawyers combined. In the four terms of court in the county in 1794 there were 397 cases; Andrew Jackson appeared as counsel in 288 of them.

Although he had accepted his official appointment with a mental reservation and had really come out to Nashville on a sort of prospecting trip, he soon decided to stay and grow up with the new settlement. His position as attorney-general or public prosecutor of the Mero District gave him distinction and naturally strengthened his legal prestige, and his private law practice had quickly developed to such an extent that at the time of his marriage he enjoyed a comfortable income.

There is a persistent legend that Jackson quickly accumulated vast holdings of land by reason of his practice of taking land grants and acreage tracts in lieu of legal fees, and that when he married he had so much land he hardly knew the extent of his property. It is true that after he had been in Nashville several years he did begin to trade and traffic in land, and gradually blossomed into a land speculator on a grand scale whose holdings ran into the thousands of acres. Contrary to tradition, however, at the time of his marriage he did not own an acre of ground anywhere; and he did not have a home to which to take his new bride.

The records are rather vague as to the first two or three years of the married life of Andrew and Rachel; but, from all the available facts, it appears that they spent at least a part of their honeymoon living at or near Natchez and then returned to Nashville and probably lived temporarily with Mrs. Donelson. But in February, 1792, the land transfer records show that Andrew Jackson bought from John Donelson (Rachel’s brother) a farm of 330 acres located in the foot of Jones Bend of the Cumberland River, just across the river from the home of old Mrs. Donelson on the Gallatin Road.

Here on this 330-acre river farm Jackson established his first home of his own. He called the place Poplar Grove—at least a letter written to John McKee on May 16, 1794, is so headed. Apparently, however, this name did not exactly suit him, for a letter to John Coffee written the next year is dated from Poplar Flat. All trace of his habitation on this farm has now disappeared, although there is a faint reminiscence of his tenancy in a “Jackson’s well” still to be found in that neighborhood.

It is interesting to note, that this Jones Bend (now called Hadley’s Bend) was the site chosen by the United States government for the location of its gigantic smokeless powder manufacturing plant in 1917, and the acreage of Poplar Flat was swallowed up in the consolidation of the farms that went to make up the great powder plant tract. In honor of the old hero who once tilled these acres, the operation was officially known as the Old Hickory Powder Plant; and the little industrial town that has grown up out of that development is now called Old Hickory.

Jackson’s personal affairs flourished while he was living at Poplar Flat, and the land records of Davidson County in 1793 begin to show the first evidences of his land trading. As he prospered he, as was natural, wanted a better and bigger place to live; and so on March 16, 1796, he bought from one John Shannon a tract of 640 acres further up in the bend of the river, and here he set up his new home which he called Hunter’s Hill.

There was a strange element of romance connected with this selection of a place to live—perhaps by design, perhaps through coincidence. It appears that when young Captain Robards effected his reconciliation with Rachel in 1788 it was part of the agreement that they would set up a home in Tennessee. At any rate, Robards entered 640 acres, “on the south side of Cumberland River, beginning at an ash, thence south 234 poles, etc.” for which he paid the state of North Carolina at the rate of ten pounds for each hundred acres. After his divorce in 1794 Captain Robards—a little sadly, no doubt—sold his tract of land to John Shannon of Logan County, Kentucky, and it was this self-same piece of ground that Jackson bought from Shannon in 1796 and on which he established his new home.