The Hermitage, Home of Old Hickory

by Stanley F. Horn

This consoling letter from his old friend must have laid unction to Jackson’s soul; but not all of the Nashville citizens accepted Dickinson’s tragic death with Judge Overton’s complacency. The unfortunate victim of the duel had some warm and influential friends in Nashville; and they spent their days and nights industriously giving circulation to an account of the duel which placed Jackson in the worst possible light. His popularity suffered accordingly. Then close on the heels of this tragedy came the embroglio with Aaron Burr into which he had permitted himself to become innocently entangled. Jackson’s popularity in Tennessee was never at a lower ebb—and he was not a man to regard such a state of affairs with resignation. On top of all this, he was worried about his financial affairs, and it is easy to understand how he might have been attracted by the idea of starting life over again in a new location—and with a government job carrying a comfortable salary.

Mississippi was a new country, the government of which was just being organized, and Jackson wrote to Jenkyn Whitesides, United States Senator from Tennessee, regarding the possibility of receiving a federal appointment as judge in the new territory. “From my pursuits for several years past,” he wrote in February, 1810, “from many unpleasant occurrences that took place during that time, it has given my mind such a turn of thought that I have labored to get clear of. I have found this impossible, and unless some new pursuit to employ my mind and thoughts, I find it impossible to divest myself of those habits of gloomy and peevish reflections that the wanton and flagitious conduct and unmerited reflections of base calumny heaped upon me has given rise to.” It had occurred to him, he said, that new scenes might serve to relieve him from this unpleasant tone of thought, and he was therefore serving notice that he would accept the judgeship if it were offered him. As a further reason for his dissatisfaction he cited the “lethargy and temporizing conduct” of the government, and he expressed the fear that “as a military man I shall have no amusement or business, and indolence and inaction would shortly destroy me.”

One of Mrs. Jackson’s nephews in Natchez, Donelson Caffery, heard of his uncle’s plan to sell the Hermitage home place and remove to Mississippi, and he hastily wrote to dissuade him. “You have nearly got through all your embarrassments,” wrote young Caffery, “You have a delightful farm, from the products of which you will at least be able to live comfortably; by the respectable and well-informed part of the country you are highly esteemed; you are able to select a good society from your neighborhood.” And, concluding in a burst of eloquence: “You have been able there to read the characters of men in their actions; here another volume will be presented to your view in which human baseness will take up a considerable part.”

Jackson persisted, however, in his effort to sell the Hermitage, offering it among others to Colonel Wade Hampton of South Carolina, who later served on his staff at New Orleans. Colonel Hampton made a trip to Tennessee and looked the property over but did not buy it, although he wrote: “I am vastly partial to your elegant seat and fine tract of land.”

Perhaps the advice of young Caffery and his other friends persuaded him not to make the prospective changes; perhaps he was not able to get the desired appointment. At any rate, fortunately for Tennessee and for the country, Jackson remained at the Hermitage and was soon thereafter relieved of his melancholic frame of mind by the declaration of war against Great Britain in 1812. From then on until 1821 he found plenty of “amusement and business” in fighting the Indians and the British and the Spaniards in Florida; and for eight years he had no further cause for complaint on the score of indolence and inaction. He returned to the Hermitage the nation’s idol, and all thoughts of moving to Mississippi or anywhere else were permanently dismissed.

When Jackson moved to the Hermitage tract from Hunter’s Hill his financial condition did not permit of his building immediately another such home as he had left. But Jackson had the primitive virtue of cutting his suit to fit his cloth; and so he set himself up in a comfortable but crude establishment made up of a group of log houses—a large central building, two stories high, which constituted the principal living quarters, with three adjacent log houses which were used as sleeping quarters for guests or members of the family. The main building, which, according to tradition, had in earlier days been used as a block house for defense against the Indians, was 24 by 26 feet and on the first floor had only one large room, with a huge fireplace. At the back was a lean-to containing two rooms, a pantry and a bed-room. This big room on the first floor was a combination of parlor, living room, dining room and kitchen, with all the meals cooked at the big open fireplace. Here Jackson lived for fifteen years—fifteen of the most active years of his life, years when he was carving his name as one of the really big men of the young United States.

Here in this log house he entertained some of the most distinguished visitors who ever came to the Nashville settlements—President James Monroe and Aaron Burr, among others; here it was they brought him, well-nigh fatally wounded, from his duel with Charles Dickinson; and it was to this rude abode that he returned in 1815, following the Battle of New Orleans, with the plaudits of the world ringing in his ears. Also, it was while he was living here in the log Hermitage that he conducted his famous campaigns against the Indians, including his celebrated invasion of Florida which so nearly involved us in war with Spain.

Today there is still standing only one of the small log cabins of the original group. Alongside it is a larger log house, with a steeply sloping roof, built at a later date out of the logs taken from the original two-storied log house which had been permitted to fall into decay. These are located in the meadow a few hundred yards to the rear of the present Hermitage, on the original site, and are in a fair state of preservation. Although the original two-storied house no longer stands, the remains of its stone foundation are still faintly to be seen.

But by 1819 Andrew Jackson—in personal taste, in fame and in social position—had outgrown the log-house mode of living. He had become a man of national, even international, distinction; he had been to Washington, to Philadelphia, New York and New Orleans. He knew how distinguished men were supposed to live. And so there gradually grew in his mind the determination to build a new home, one that would befit his present station in life and one that would permit Rachel to entertain with pride the grandest ladies of the land. Fortunately for his plans, there was a boom market in cotton from 1815 to 1818, following the treaty of peace with England, and the cotton planters of the South had three fat years. With cotton at 34c a pound, many of them waxed wealthy; and although there was a slump in 1819, it appears that Jackson must have been making financial hay while the sun was shining, for it was at this time that he started work on his new house.

The source from which Jackson got the name “The Hermitage” remains more or less of a mystery. The plantation was known by this name before he built a house on it; but nothing in his letters or papers reveals the reason why it was so-called. There is a tradition in the Donelson family that it was named in honor of the old Donelson home-place in Virginia; but this theory has no firmer foundation than tradition—it may be true, but there is no authentic substantiation of it. There is a theory (although it is nothing more than a theory) that he borrowed the name from Jeremy Bentham’s estate in England. Students of Jackson’s political beliefs feel that he was strongly influenced by the great English philosopher and jurist, whose home was called the Hermitage. He read Bentham’s works and corresponded with him; it is not unlikely that when it came to selecting a name for his new plantation he thought of Bentham’s home, the Hermitage, and adopted the name for his own use.