The Pike at the Hermitage, going toward Nashville.
(Photo March, 1906, by E. E. Sweetland.)
The greatest tragedy of the centuries is not the killing of the Innocents or the massacre of St. Bartholomew or the disasters of war or flame or famine, but it is the butchery by man of the trees of the earth—those stately messengers between the clouds and the land, the felling of which breaks the covenant of great laws invisible and blight the earth as with fire.
It is that and the accursed Spirit, which, for a few dollars given, claims the right to monopolize the things God made for all men.
When one drives down the first dozen miles of the Lebanon pike one has a quiet, reverent feeling if he has a spark of patriotism in him. It is a typical road of Middle Tennessee—for all of Middle Tennessee is a rich loam lying on limestone. The rocks have been beaten into pikes and the gray-white roads pencil the distant slope or fade away into the gentle valleys. Around, everywhere, is the typical Southern home, the Southern farm of the grain and stock raising kind.
This sketch is not a story of the life of Andrew Jackson. That were impossible in a short article. We have books and books on his life and character. Every school boy knows his history, the poverty of its beginning, the honor of its end. This is merely intended to be a quick picture of the man and his home as it was then—as it is to-day.
Home in the South means more than it does anywhere else in the world, for the entire law and religion of the South is based on the idea of local self government—the home idea. Throughout Jackson’s life every plantation was a self-governing institution, a little government in itself. And in this home the woman was the queen and the real ruler. In no other country in the world has this idea been so clearly cultivated. It is all through the South to-day. Ask any child in the South: “Who lives yonder?” and it will always answer with the woman’s name. A visitor to the South to-day would think it was widowed.