OLD HICKORYBORN AT WAXHAW SETTLEMENT, MARCH 15, 1767DIED AT THE HERMITAGE, JUNE 8, 1845By Robert L. Taylor
BORN AT WAXHAW SETTLEMENT, MARCH 15, 1767
DIED AT THE HERMITAGE, JUNE 8, 1845
By Robert L. Taylor
The most noted character in American history, one whom the coming ages will number among the truly great, was born at a point so obscure that its exact location is still in dispute. On the remote frontier of the Carolina colony, whose boundary lines were uncertain; far up on the forest-clad banks of the Catawba, whose slopes were just beginning to feel the pioneer’s axe; on the fifteenth day of March, 1767, Andrew Jackson was presented to humanity.
The story of his mother partakes of the tragic, the heroic and the pathetic. The daughter of a fairly prosperous linen weaver of Carrickfergus, she linked her destiny with young Andrew Jackson, a Scotch-Irishman, and, after a few years at home, they left the shores of the Emerald Isle, seeking fortune in the new colonies. Scarcely had they fixed their abode in the Waxhaw Settlement and begun to make a home, when death claimed the young husband, and the bereaved widow was left almost destitute, with two young sons, Hugh and Robert, her sole dependence. Within a few days Andrew was born, and necessity forced her to send her eldest son, Hugh, to live with a relative, while she and the two younger made their home with another.
Here in the primeval forests young Andrew began to imbibe that love of liberty which fitted him later so to bless humanity. His education was obtained in the old field school, but, impatient of its restraints and loving best the rifle and the chase, he spent the earlier years in developing the sinews of a vigorous manhood.
When yet a mere lad the sweep of the Revolution reached the Waxhaw Settlement, and Mrs. Jackson willingly gave her two older boys to the service of the colonies, but clung to her youngest born until the insult of a British officer gave intensity to an inclination that was destined to cost England so dear.
OLD HICKORY
OLD HICKORY
OLD HICKORY
Peace found young Andrew bereft of mother, brothers and worldly inheritance, but with a vigorous constitution, a chivalrous sense of moral duty and a deep, abiding love for his country, he set out resolutely upon an unexampled career, the chief characteristic of which in earlier years was reckless daring, in which he was unconsciously laying the foundations for that intrepid adherence to right principle that later set him apart and above his fellows. Of uncommonmental endowment, he easily acquired such education as was then obtainable and adopted the profession of law, and when but twenty-one years of age he fell in with the adventurous spirit of the times on the frontier and made his way with the pioneers into the Southwest Territory. After lingering in the Watauga settlements a time, he followed the trail still farther into the wilderness until he reached the beautiful basin of the Cumberland, where he took up his final abode.
There, from the first, he took his place easily and naturally as a leader of men and began to work out that great destiny which will link his name indissolubly with liberty and free government as long as men love to be free, the symbol of the soundest and strongest fundamental principle in government ever conceived by man.
Measured by the moral standards now obtaining, many of his acts and habits in those earlier years cannot be justified, although there is little to indicate that they were held to be reprehensible then. His chief characteristic was towering and intolerant mastery of men, his greatest foible was his love for a race-horse, and he left nothing further to be done in following both bents, and yet he was actuated in everything by the highest conception of honor and principle, and imparted dignity and the virtue of his own indomitable character to every transaction in which he engaged.
The annals of men do not afford, and fiction has never conceived, an instance of more sublime devotion to womanhood than Andrew Jackson held for his wife. He loved her with an intensity of tenderness that was the exact antithesis of that fierce and stormy love of adventure and aptitude for arms that possessed him; and if nothing else were known of him but this, it would enshrine his name forever. She could not have been less than a charming, loving woman to have deserved the devotion of such a man and held it to the end, and she sleeps now by his side under a slab inscribed with a tribute by his hand that for entreating tenderness of sweet affection is scarcely paralleled:
“Here lie the remains of Mrs. Rachel Jackson, wife of President Jackson, who died the 22d of December, 1828, aged 61. Her face was fair, her person pleasing, her temper amiable, her heart kind; she delighted in relieving the wants of her fellow-creatures and cultivated that divine pleasure by the most liberal and unpretending methods; to the poor she was a benefactor, to the wretched a comforter, to the prosperous an ornament; her piety went hand in hand with her benevolence, and she thanked her Creator for being permitted to do good. A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound, but could not dishonor. Even death, when he tore her from the arms of her husband, could but transport her to the bosom of her God.”
“Here lie the remains of Mrs. Rachel Jackson, wife of President Jackson, who died the 22d of December, 1828, aged 61. Her face was fair, her person pleasing, her temper amiable, her heart kind; she delighted in relieving the wants of her fellow-creatures and cultivated that divine pleasure by the most liberal and unpretending methods; to the poor she was a benefactor, to the wretched a comforter, to the prosperous an ornament; her piety went hand in hand with her benevolence, and she thanked her Creator for being permitted to do good. A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound, but could not dishonor. Even death, when he tore her from the arms of her husband, could but transport her to the bosom of her God.”
Jackson’s character as a warrior and a statesman are so conspicuous as to dwarf by comparison his record as a lawyer. It is said that he filed seventy lawsuits for clients in the first month of his practice, and that out of one hundred and ninety-two cases before the court in 1790 he was counsel in forty-two. Three years later his cases numbered seventy-two out of one hundred and fifty-five, and the next year he increased this to two hundred and twenty-eight out of three hundred and ninety-seven. It was no inconspicuous lawyer who could make such record as this. But for his other resplendent traits, his reputation as a jurist might rest more securely, but it doubtless suffered much by his own indisposition to build his fame upon it.
He was only eight years in Tennessee before being made Major-General of militia, which in those times meant active service in the field. His career as a soldier needs scant recapitulation here to establish the statement that it was characterized by a most unselfish patriotism. He hesitated at nothing when his country’s interests were in jeopardy, creating opportunities and anticipating the power to meet them, daring even to invade a friendly territory, to disobey superior orders, to take fate and destinyin his own hands at any peril to himself.
It was this same unchanging, unconquerable spirit of invincible daring that characterized his administration of the government and nerved him to defy and conquer the money power that was then dominating the country through the United States Bank and gave him power to meet and quell the turbulent and dangerous doctrine of the right of a state to nullify a proper act of Congress.
The most conspicuous service rendered to mankind by Andrew Jackson was the creation and enforcement of the political cult that is expressed in his name. “Andy Jackson Democracy” has no mere partisan significance, but it denotes a principle and power in popular government that is to save to America forever the right of the people to rule themselves—the invincible strength of a central government based upon the supreme power of the separate states acting in harmony.
What was the secret of Jackson’s power? Whence came the attraction that drew men to him as the magnet draws the needle? It is not difficult to find the secret of his popularity with the pioneers. He appealed to them through his devotion to the “sport of kings,” for no man loved a fast horse or would risk more upon its prowess than he, and he led the sport in which the people most delighted. And then he stood first in all the feats of daring to which frontiersmen were addicted—a perfect shot, swift of foot, a mighty wrestler, capping it all off with a spirit of chivalrous gallantry and a gentlemanly bearing that rendered him superb. But what drew the sage of Monticello to him? What gave him such mastery in statecraft and charmed men to his standard? It was his inherent, unswerving love of human liberty, his tense loyalty and stern faith in the institutions of his country, his immaculate conception of right and duty, and the superb fearlessness that possessed him, that made the manconvincing.
It is said that Jackson has more biographers than any other national character. His career was so replete with incidents inviting interpretation that writers are drawn to it like flies about the sugar-bowl. Of no other man can historians resort to panegyric in substitute of statement and be justified by public criticism. There are perhaps more anecdotes told of him than any other public man, and never one that does not denote courage and power and strength. Indicative of his intuitive powers of quick decision is the story that when the subject of a site for a new treasury building to replace that burned by the British was broached one day, he was walking on Pennsylvania Avenue. With instant emphasis, he struck his stick upon the ground and said: “Put it here!” And there it stands to-day.
No man has lived who had a simpler human way of loving his friends and hating those who hurt him than Andrew Jackson. His fiercest wrath, however, was reserved for those who dared traduce his wife. In his Florida campaign, when supplies failed the army, he set the example of eating nuts and roots and berries. One of his friends at the other end of a long table at a barbecue became involved in a difficulty, which Jackson no sooner perceived than he cried, “I’m coming!” and, mounting the table, strode its full length to the rescue. He was singularly tender to little folks. How touching is the picture of this grim warrior, the seasoned duelist, the fierce hater, tenderly wrapping a sugar-rag for a ragged papoose found in a Creek village after a battle, and nursing it until he could send it to a friendly woman in Montgomery! Such was his hold upon the affections of his people that a certain traveler, reaching a Tennessee town the day after he was elected President, found the populace engaged in applying tar and feathers to two reckless burghers who had dared to vote against the General! And there is still a happy valley somewhere in remote Arcadia, we are told, where the old men hobble to the polls quadrennially in Novemberand cast a loyal vote for “Andy Jackson.”
His faculty for remembering faces and names was marvelous. In 1832, returning from Washington to Nashville, he was tendered a reception at Cincinnati. A rough-looking fellow was seen trying to make his way past the reception committee. The General’s keen eye spied him and at once he darted forward. “Hello, Ned!” was his hearty greeting, and, turning to his bewildered committee, he explained: “One of my old boys in the Fourth Infantry, gentlemen—had to release him from the guard-house once or twice for fighting or stealing chickens, but he was a good soldier, gentlemen.” “How long since you have seen him, General?” asked one of the committee. “Oh,” was the matter-of-course answer, “it’s about twelve years. I saw him on guard at the Governor’s house the day I left Pensacola.”
Early in the spring of 1845, after his arduous campaign in Polk’s behalf, General Jackson’s health began to fail. He met the idea of death with that same fortitude which nerved him when a lad of thirteen to suffer a sabre cut rather than black a British officer’s boots.
His career, which had been like the blaze of the sun in the fierceness of its glory, melted into a passing away as tranquil as a summer evening. The majestic energy of an indomitable will gave way to the gentleness of a heart rich in the tenderest affections. No man in private life more completely possessed the hearts of all around him; no man ever retired from public life with more complete mastery of the affections of the people. No man was more truly and typically American in his ideas; no man expressed them more boldly or more sincerely. He was always, under all circumstances, wholly sincere and true. I cannot do better, in closing, than to quote from George Bancroft, the historian.
“Up to the last,” he says, “he dared do anything that it was right to do. He united personal and moral courage beyond any man of whom history keeps the record.
“Before the nation, before the world, before coming ages, he stands forth the representative, for his generation, of the American mind. And the secret of his greatness is this; by intuitive conception he shared and possessed all the creative ideas of his country and his time; he expressed them with dauntless intrepidity; he enforced them with an immovable will; he executed them with an electric power that attracted and swayed the American people. The nation, in his time, had not one thought of which he was not the boldest and clearest expositor.
“Not danger, not an army in battle array, not wounds, not widespread clamor, not age, not the anguish of disease, could impair in the least degree the vigor of his steadfast mind. The heroes of antiquity would have contemplated with awe the unmatched hardihood of his character; and Napoleon, had he possessed his disinterested will, could never have been vanquished. He conquered the wilderness; he conquered the savage; he conquered the bravest veterans trained on the battlefields of Europe; he conquered everywhere in statesmanship; and when death came to get the mastery over him, he turned the last enemy aside as tranquilly as he had done the feeblest of his adversaries, and passed from earth in the triumphant consciousness of immortality.”
Notwithstanding the fact of his incomparable successes at the bar, on the bench, in Congress and on the field of battle, which demonstrate his sense and genius, and although his state papers compare well with those of any President, there are yet those living who believe him to have been illiterate. If Colonel Colyar’s masterly “Life and Times of Andrew Jackson” had naught else to commend it, it would deserve the commendation of the American people in its complete refutation of the charge of illiteracy, all-sufficient and incontestable.[2]
His faithful old body-servant remained at the Hermitage and kept his grave green through all the years, and to all visitors who came he talked about “de Gin’ral” as though he were still in the flesh. The story is told that soon after the death of Old Hickory a visitor asked old Alfred if he thought General Jackson went to heaven.
“I don’t know, boss,” promptly replied the old man, “whether de Gin’ral went to heben or not, but dar’s one thing I does know—he did if he wanted to!”
[2]Life and Times of Andrew Jackson. By A. S. Colyar, Nashville: Marshall and Bruce.
[2]Life and Times of Andrew Jackson. By A. S. Colyar, Nashville: Marshall and Bruce.
[2]Life and Times of Andrew Jackson. By A. S. Colyar, Nashville: Marshall and Bruce.