“ANDREW JACKSON.”
16. T. Swann still butts in. He comes out in a card, in which he says: “I shall now conclude this address to the public by assuring General Andrew Jackson (to use a favorite expression of his own) ‘that I shall at all times hold myself answerable for any of my conduct.’”
That was May 20, 1806, nearly a century ago. T. Swann, perhaps, is dead by now. But we will faithfully endeavor to secure a picture of his grave as it looks to-day, that he may still appropriately appear in the tragedy his gunpowder head and hair-trigger mouth brought on. Jackson brushed him aside as a bull would a fly and went after the man he had picked out to fight all the time—Dickinson, the best shot in the West, the man who after one warning had dared to impugn the character of Rachel Donelson Jackson.
And so was brought on the great duel, one of the most famous of all times and which cast its shadow over Jackson’s life, even to the portals of death. For the almost fatal wound Dickinson gave him broke out afresh now and then during all his remaining days and helped to carry him off at last.
17. The Duel. A great man always has his bitterest enemies at his own home. The nearer they get to him—friends and enemies—the more they love or hate him. It is the weakness of poor, fighting humanity that they are kind to strangers out of their way, but will fight the neighbor who gets in their way. And when a man becomes so much greater than his neighbors that the world knows him but knows them not, there may he expect to find the essence of all narrowness.
Jackson always had his bitter enemies. Many people of his own town fought him most bitterly, even when he was saving their lives from Indians and their land from the foreigner. He could stand it himself and suffer, but when they took it out by slandering his wife, then it was that his pistols were ever ready.
Pike near the Clover Bottom race track.
(Photo March, 1906, by E. E. Sweetland.)
A political enemy of Jackson living at Nashville published during his Presidential campaign a pamphlet containing a list of “nearly one hundred fights or violent or abusive quarrels.” But Jackson lived seventy-eight years, in an age when personal fights were the law of the land. He always made his friends’ quarrels his own, and for the first fifteen years of his life, as District Attorney, Judge and lawyer he was brought into collision with the tough element and rascals of the State.