“On returning to the house, some friends of General Jackson who probably had not seen him for some time, begged him to show them the arms presented to him in honor of his achievements during the last war; he acceded to their request with great politeness and placed on a table a sword, a saber and a pair of pistols. The sword was presented to him by Congress; the saber, I believe, by the army which fought under his command at New Orleans. These two weapons, of American manufacture, were remarkable for their finish and still more so for the honorable inscriptions with which they were covered. But it was to the pistols that General Jackson wished more particularly to call our attention. He handed them to General Lafayette and asked him if he recognized them. The latter, after examining them attentively for a few minutes, replied that he fully recollected them to be a pair he had presented in 1778 to his paternal friend, Washington, and that he experienced a real satisfaction in finding them in the hands of one so worthy of possessing them. At these words the face of ‘Old Hickory’ was covered with a modest blush, and his eye sparkled as in a day of victory. ‘Yes, I believe myself worthy of them,’ exclaimed he, in pressing the pistols on Lafayette’s hands to his breast, ‘if not from what I have done, at least for what I wished to do for my country.’ All of the bystanders applauded this noble confidence of the patriot hero, and were convinced that the weapons of Washington could not be in better hands than those of Jackson.” (These pistols, it should be here interpolated, were presented to General Jackson by General George Washington’s nephew, Bushrod Washington; and were a part of the valued collection of trophies in the Hermitage until they were lost in the fire in 1834.)
The front parlor, with original furniture, carpet and damask silk hangings.
Front of upstairs hall, showing the linen closets flanking the wide doorway leading onto the upper front gallery.
Lafayette’s stay at the Hermitage was short. In the late afternoon his steamboat returned to Nashville where a grand banquet was given in his honor that evening, with General Jackson presiding. The Marquis left the next morning by steamboat for Louisville, and had a narrow escape from death when the boat struck a snag in the Ohio and sank within a few minutes. Fortunately, however, he escaped without injury.
Another distinguished visitor from France in the early days was the elder Michaux, the great naturalist, who tells in his journal how he “spent the night twelve miles from Nashville at the home of a Mr. Jackson.” Michaux, however, with his naturalist’s heart, was much less impressed by the reputation, then hardly more than local, of General Jackson than he was by the beauty of the yellow-wood trees he found “on land belonging to a Mr. Overton south of Nashville” in greater abundance than he had ever noticed the trees elsewhere. He sent home some seeds from these trees found on Judge Overton’s hills, and in two of the parks of Paris today may be seen specimens of this rather rare tree grown from the seeds sent from Nashville by this early visitor.
Still another celebrated Frenchman visited the Hermitage in 1843 and paid his respects to the old hero—Marshall Bertrand, one of Napoleon’s famous marshals, who came to Nashville in the course of his travels in America and, as a matter of course, was entertained at dinner by Jackson, despite his debilitated health.
Perhaps the greatest strain ever placed upon the hospitality of the old house was when it was visited in August, 1830, by Major John H. Eaton and his bride, the erstwhile Peggy O’Neal, the storm center of the early days of the Jackson administration. This was a visit that required no little stage managing and window dressing; for the vivid Mrs. Eaton had not only disrupted the President’s Cabinet, she had brought discord into his own family; and it was in the midst of the strained relations existing between Jackson and the Donelsons that the Eatons made their visit to Tennessee.
Jackson was spending the summer of 1830 at home, and he was determined that the Eatons should be formally entertained at the Hermitage and that his connections, as he called Major Donelson and his wife, should assist in the reception. Here was a situation that called for all the keenest diplomacy of the most astute members of the Kitchen Cabinet; but the old reliable John Coffee, himself one of the “connections,” exercised his powers of persuasion on the Donelsons and at length it was arranged that they would help Old Hickory entertain his celebrated but slightly tarnished guests. Gleefully Jackson wrote to Eaton in August when Coffee had finished with his wire-pulling: