Seeing it all here and knowing it, we may understand the very religion of holiness in the eye that could take such deliberate aim down the pistol barrel that put out of business the head of the set of political opponents, who, for a chance to kill him, ruthlessly touched the only raw spot Fate’s finger had blistered in the mould of his life.
And he killed them—those who would destroy his home—as religiously as he did those who would destroy his country—that long, red, quadruple-massed line of British bullies, foul-mouthed and flame-touched, marching on the South shouting: “Beauty and booty.”
No life story of this man has been truly told, because the Thackerays do not write biographies; and the men who write the hard things of history, by a strange rule of their craft’s ethics, seem to think it womanly to write of the sweeter things of the soul. And so the lives of Jackson have all been, more or less, partisan political histories of his times. As if we did not have enough of it in our own day, that we must wince under the brutal, bruising things Jackson had to cut through in fighting the battles of the common people.
He did It and did it well. It was a thing placed on him by Fate and he shirked not. But I love to look at the other and that greater side of the man—the home side, the husband side, the man side, the farmer and horseman and friend and neighbor—a picture which should live when his politics are forgotten. For the story of the politician is ever like the high tide that comes with its wave of splutters in the bay of Fundy and then goes back again to oblivion and with much noise.
Entrance to the Hermitage as it is to-day.
(Photo March, 1906, by E. E. Sweetland.)
But the Man is the sea into which it has flown, and in their great depths have become silent and been forgotten.