And so I am going out of the usual line in this story, and to tell the real story of Andrew Jackson and his home, I am going to tell the story of his wife and the great influence which she had on all his life. For when it is studied and sifted everything that Jackson did is closely bound with the twine of this woman’s love and influence.
Middle Tennessee was so rich and fertile and so full of game the Indians would not permit any one tribe to own it. It was their common hunting ground. One may imagine how they would regard its occupancy by the whites. Mr. Charlville, a French trapper, stopped at the Big Lick and lived in the old deserted Shawnee fort on the bluff in 1714. Later, Boone and other hunters passed, but not until 1779, during the war with England, did James Robertson and his company of nine from the old settlement of Jonesboro, in North Carolina, come to stay, building their fort and log cabins on the bluff near the Big Lick. When he left the settlement it had been agreed that his friend and neighbor, Colonel John Donelson, would follow, bringing a number of others, among them the family of James Robertson. This Donelson did, in boats, over a route that would stagger a sane man of to-day, down the Holston to the Tennessee, down the Tennessee to the Ohio, up the Ohio to the Cumberland, up the Cumberland to the Big Lick two thousand miles by water, and the route infested with hostile savages. The story of this four months’ journey reads as nothing else does in early American pioneer history. “Among those who shared the dangers of this voyage,” writes the biographer Parton, “was Rachel Donelson, the leader’s daughter, a black-eyed, black-haired brunette, as gay, bold and handsome a lass as ever danced on the deck of a flatboat or took the helm while her father took a shot at the Indians.” They reached their destination April 24, 1780. Later, Rachel married Lewis Robards, a Kentuckian and was living there when her brave old pioneer father, John Donelson, was killed in a field near Nashville by Indians several years afterwards.
Jackson came to the settlement a young lawyer from Salisbury, N. C., in 1788. Of his early life every one knows—his poverty, his patriotism, his grit, his wildness. I have studied that wildness. It was the wildness of nervous energy that must do something. It was the same thing that put Theodore Roosevelt to living the cowboy and hunting grizzlies. For there is much in common in the characters of these two remarkable men.
Jackson arrived in Nashville in 1788 with scarcely more than a horse (there never was a time when it seems he did not own a horse!) and his saddlebags. In ten years he was a rich man and had laid the foundation for his large estate including the land around the Hermitage. He was a fighter and a worker by nature. He jumped at once into a large law practice, “and in those days a lawyer’s fee for conducting a suit of no great importance,” says an old historian, “might be a square mile of land or, in Western phrase, a six-forty.” Jackson appears frequently in the records as the purchaser of wild lands. He bought the 640 acres which afterwards formed the nucleus of the Hermitage for $800, a high price for those days. In 1797 he sold more than $6,000 worth of land to a gentleman in Philadelphia and had several thousand acres left. The secret of his wealth is that he bought large tracts of land when they could be bought for a horse or a cow bell and held them until the torrent of immigration made them valuable.
Surely in this there is more than a hint for the Southerner of to-day. When we consider the richness and cheapness of our soil, the salubriousness of our climate and the fact that immigration has not really yet started toward the South, the man who has the forethought now to invest in Southern land will lay the foundation of a future fortune more surely than in any other way.
He hated debt, yet his notes would raise money in Boston when nothing else in Tennessee would. In 1804, when he lived at Hunter’s Hill, thirteen miles from Nashville and two miles beyond the present Hermitage and came so nearly being ruined financially by the failure of David Allison, of Philadelphia, who had passed Jackson his notes for land and which Jackson had endorsed and exchanged for goods, he sold 25,000 acres of land in one body, paid all his debts and moved to the log cabin at the Hermitage reproduced in this issue.
He made money on his horses and no living man knew a horse better than Jackson. We have told before in Trotwood’s of his races at Clover Bottom. He rode to Virginia and back to find a Truxton. He imported horse after horse to beat Haynie’s Maria, and never did it. When he was President he drove to his carriage in Washington two beautiful iron-grays, descendants of Truxton. “General,” said a lady who journeyed from the far East to see him in his old age at the Hermitage, “you ought to be the happiest of living men. Every honor in life has been given you. You have accomplished every thing you have ever undertaken.”
“On the contrary, madam, my life has been a dismal failure,” he replied. “The one great object I have worked for has never been accomplished. I was never able to beat Haynie’s Maria,” and he smiled at her astonishment.
The tragedy, as well as the sweetness of Jackson’s life lies around his love for Rachel Donelson.
This paper will tell of the tragedy.