PAPER IV—THE ROAD TO THE HERMITAGE
By John Trotwood Moore
The story of Andrew Jackson and his famous home. And if the telling of it take more than one paper, be not surprised, for after an hundred and thirty years of the Republic—and a thousand of progress—this man stands one in the great trilogy—Washington, Jackson and Lincoln.
The others have been mostly figureheads with the usual sprinkling of fools.
To know a man we must first know the dirt he digs into. To grasp his character, the secret influences of his life, we must see the trees that grew above him, the flowers at his feet, the pictures God made for him, in hill and river, in the storm cloud, in the thunder shaking his fields at night, in the grass and grain which came, the fruit of his hand.
For these go into the man.
When we shall have seen the Hermitage and the breadth of its fields and hills we shall begin to understand the broadness of the man, for a man’s home is the effect of the cause of that which is in him.
When we shall have seen this country he lived and died in, so bountifully endowed, lying between the Cumberland and the Stone, fit for a king to fight for, we shall understand why Jackson loved it, fought for it—why patriotism burned as a religion in his soul.
To him it was the Union—of the home he killed Dickinson for, that he might live there untouched by slander; of the country he killed the British for, that it might be the great republic of all ages. And so, when John C. Calhoun shouted nullification he might as well have nailed a red flag to the horn of the bull of the valley.
When we shall have seen the simplicity of his home, the rugged, brave purity of his mind, as shown in everything around him, from the wall paper in his halls, telling the story of Ulysses and Telemachus, to the few really great books he owned and loved, we can form some idea of the man who, in an age of strong speech and strong passions and free whiskey and free fights, loved only one woman, was pure in a day of impurity, was brave in a day of bluster, was far-sighted in a wilderness, and a gentleman of his word always and all the time.