Edmund Winston Pettus.
“Sir,” said the man, “I observe that you are an old man. Will you kindly tell me if the people of those days wore clothes like those in the picture there?”
“No, sir,” thundered Pettus, “they did not! I was in that battle, and I saw no such clothes as those. So far as that raiment is concerned that representation is a mere pictorial lie!”
It is remarkable that from one section of Alabama—the Black Belt—and from one town in it—Selma—should have come two such men as Pettus and Morgan, both now octogenarians, and the same intellectual giants they were a half century ago.
In a near issue of Trotwood’s, perhaps in the next number, will be told the story of that section—a section rich not only in sturdy, progressive people, but in a soil and climate of such great natural advantages that the mere telling of it will be a revelation to those who have not heard of it before.
Mr. John Trotwood Moore, Columbia, Tenn.—My Dear Sir: I received your letter and the magazines you sent me. I read carefully your article on what Parton calls “The murder of Dickinson,” and I enjoyed it very much. I have always thought that people who live in this age give too much importance to questions of right and wrong, to what I call “modern ideas,” or, rather, who attach too little importance to the theories of the former generations. I have lived through four generations complete, and there have been in my day marvelous changes in public opinion, and even the established theories in the churches as to whether a certain thing is right or wrong. When I was a boy in North Alabama instrumental music in a church was considered as a sacrilege, and was not allowed under any circumstances. Duelling was not more condemned than the resenting of an insult in any other way, and the old saying is perfectly true, “Times change and we change with them.” In your article about the duel you failed to notice that Mrs. Jackson, with her first husband, resided in Kentucky, but Kentucky was then a part of Virginia.
In my young days I was familiar with the Hermitage grounds. For four years I was a student at what was then called Clinton College, which was in Smith County, between Carthage and Alexandria, and about forty miles east of the Hermitage on the old emigrant road from Knoxville to Nashville. I visited the Hermitage on several occasions. My grandfather lived for many years about a mile from the Hermitage, and General Jackson attended the marriage of my father and mother, and my father and several of my uncles went with General Jackson through the Creek War.
In 1840 I went from Clinton College to attend the Nashville convention, in what has been called “the log cabin and hard cider” campaign, and we stopped at the Hermitage to see General Jackson. Whilst we were sitting with a number of persons on the piazza the East Tennessee delegates to the Whig convention, in vast numbers, passed on the pike in front of the house. One party of them had a small cannon, and when they reached the front gate, then about two hundred yards from the house, they brought the cannon inside the gate and fired on the house, with blank cartridges, of course. This created great indignation throughout Tennessee. I did attend the convention. The principal purpose of the students in attending the convention was to hear Henry Clay; and we did hear him. It was as poor a speech as I ever heard from any man reputed to be a speaker. The speech was not more than ten minutes long, and the best part of it was a fling at Felix Grundy. Mr. Clay said that when he reached Nashville he inquired for his old friend, the Hon. Felix Grundy, and that he learned “that he was at his old trade in East Tennessee defending criminals.” Mr. Grundy was then making political speeches in East Tennessee for Mr. Van Buren and the Democrats. You remember that Mr. Clay was beaten for the nomination a few weeks before by General Harrison, and his whole speech and demeanor on that occasion indicated great sourness and dissatisfaction, and did him much injury with his party.