Transcriber’s Note: New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY

Contents

Copyright 1906 by Trotwood Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Entered as second-class
matter Sept. 8, 1905, at the Postoffice at Nashville, Tenn., under the
Act of Congress of March 3, 1879.

Historic Highways of the South

PAPER IV—THE ROAD TO THE HERMITAGE

By John Trotwood Moore

The story of Andrew Jackson and his famous home. And if the telling of it take more than one paper, be not surprised, for after an hundred and thirty years of the Republic—and a thousand of progress—this man stands one in the great trilogy—Washington, Jackson and Lincoln.

The others have been mostly figureheads with the usual sprinkling of fools.

To know a man we must first know the dirt he digs into. To grasp his character, the secret influences of his life, we must see the trees that grew above him, the flowers at his feet, the pictures God made for him, in hill and river, in the storm cloud, in the thunder shaking his fields at night, in the grass and grain which came, the fruit of his hand.

For these go into the man.

When we shall have seen the Hermitage and the breadth of its fields and hills we shall begin to understand the broadness of the man, for a man’s home is the effect of the cause of that which is in him.

When we shall have seen this country he lived and died in, so bountifully endowed, lying between the Cumberland and the Stone, fit for a king to fight for, we shall understand why Jackson loved it, fought for it—why patriotism burned as a religion in his soul.

To him it was the Union—of the home he killed Dickinson for, that he might live there untouched by slander; of the country he killed the British for, that it might be the great republic of all ages. And so, when John C. Calhoun shouted nullification he might as well have nailed a red flag to the horn of the bull of the valley.

When we shall have seen the simplicity of his home, the rugged, brave purity of his mind, as shown in everything around him, from the wall paper in his halls, telling the story of Ulysses and Telemachus, to the few really great books he owned and loved, we can form some idea of the man who, in an age of strong speech and strong passions and free whiskey and free fights, loved only one woman, was pure in a day of impurity, was brave in a day of bluster, was far-sighted in a wilderness, and a gentleman of his word always and all the time.

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.

And so the picture which clings to me always of Jackson is this told by Senator Benton of him many years ago:

It was a cold, raw March day, and Jackson, the Fighter and Doer of Great Deeds, was old and tired. The woman he worshiped had died and his heart was broken. His children and the friends of his youth had gone too. And so this neighbor saw the picture I want some great master to paint for the coming ages—the most beautiful, soul-telling picture that could be painted for the world. The old warrior sitting by the big hickory fire of the Hermitage. He loved little children and a little child, an adopted grandchild, had climbed up on his knee. But the little fellow had found a half-frozen, motherless lamb in the meadow and he would not “be good” unless the old fighter took his playmate, the lamb, too. And there he sat with both of them in his arms and up against his big, great, game, kind heart, that loved so the fields and the farm and the sweet, quiet things of life, but whom God had sent to fight the bullets and the bullies of his day and generation.

For Greatness is a hermit that must suffer and be sacrificed. And the burden placed on it to do, is not the thing it would love to do.

Let us look now at Jackson’s land. Let us see it as it was to a raw boy when he came over the mountains of North Carolina to make his home here.

Aeons and ages ago, when the earth was young, there burst upon the banks of the Cumberland one of the many thousands of sulphur springs which an All-wise Physician said would be good for the health of beings, both beast and human, who should, through countless ages, inhabit the land.

The pioneers called it “The Great Salt Lick,” the “French Lick,” because before ever the American hunter and trapper had arrived the French had been there.

They all called it a lick because all wild animals licked it. Pioneers have a quick way of naming things and a way that went to the heart of things.

Countless herds of bison and deer had claimed the lick as theirs long before ever the sound of a human voice had been heard in the great forests which towered above it, or echoed from the canoe on the beautiful river that flowed by it. For animals were on the earth before man; and untold generations of buffalo, elk and deer told it, in their own way, to untold generations which came after them, of the health-giving salty-sulphurous water which bubbled from the low bottom, amid the cane and beneath the big, cool trees on the river banks.

And it became history and tradition to them.

It flows to-day in the same low bottom, in the heart of a city man has made out of half-baked bricks and called Nashville. And it is no longer the Great Salt Lick for the hunter and the hunted have passed and both have become dust upon the surface of things. To-day men call it the Sulphur Spring, and true to the laws of the land men have walled it in and piped it up and shut out all other animals, both of his kind and the others; and that which the Great Physician made to be free for all the countless sweet animals of the earth, man and woman and the chubby child, links which make life worth the living, and the beautiful deer, kine, elk and caribou, this greedy little tribe of animals called men, of whom you and I are one, not satisfied with having killed off all the other beautiful, sweet animals for their hides and tallow, and not satisfied in having felled all the cool, sweet trees which grew on the river, that the land might parch and burn, and unborn men might forever have to buy more water as the land grew more barren and more thirsty.

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.

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.

Before she was twenty Rachel Donelson first married Lewis Robards and went with him, as stated, to live in pioneer Kentucky. He was a jealous, drinking, ill-tempered fool. Horsemen have a term which fits him better than any thing elegant I can think of—sour-headed. Robards soon became jealous of his wife and made her life unhappy. Finally he wrote to Rachel’s mother, the widow Donelson, then living near Nashville, that he would send her daughter back to her. This he did, but soon afterward repented and on the promise of better behavior was reunited to his wife by the intervention of Judge Overton and went to live with her near Nashville. Jackson and Judge Overton, both were lawyers, boarded in the same home, the widow Donelson’s, with Robards and his wife, and in a lengthy article written 1827, when Jackson was a candidate for President, Judge Overton tells pointedly and graphically of the affair. He says that after Robards sent his wife back to Tennessee he became unhappy and induced Overton, who was then boarding at old Mrs. Robards’ near Nashville, to beg his wife to let him come back to her, agreeing to live in Tennessee and to treat her better. This Overton did, and Robards and his wife were reunited. In the meanwhile Jackson, a young lawyer, came to board in the house, and in a few months Robards began to treat his wife ill again, even accusing her of liking Jackson. Jackson left the house, to avoid any unpleasantness, but Robards finally left his wife, went to Virginia and applied to the legislature in the winter of 1790 for a divorce. This the legislature granted and Jackson married Mrs. Robards in the summer of 1791, believing the marriage between her and Robards was annulled. But it seems under the Virginia law a final decree of the court was necessary, which Robards did not apply for until 1793. Jackson, learning this, was remarried to his wife in 1794.

“It was a happy marriage,” says Parton, the biographer, “a very happy marriage—one of the very happiest ever contracted. They loved one another dearly. They held each other in the highest respect. They testified the love and respect they entertained for one another by those polite attentions which lovers cannot but exchange before marriage and after marriage.

“Their love grew as their age increased and became warmer as their blood became colder.

“No one ever heard either address to the other a disrespectful, an irritating or unsympathizing word. They were not as familiar as is now the fashion. He remained ‘Mr. Jackson’ to her always never ‘General,’ still less ‘Andrew.’ And he never called her ‘Rachel,’ but ‘Mrs. Jackson,’ or ‘wife.’ The reader shall become better acquainted with their domestic life by and by. Meanwhile, let it be understood that our hero has now a Home where lives a Friend, true and fond, to welcome his return from ‘wilderness courts,’ to cheer his stay, to lament his departure, yet give him a motive for going forth; a home wherein—whatever manner of man he might be elsewhere—he was always gentle, kind and patient.

“He was most prompt to defend his wife’s good name. The peculiar circumstances attending his marriage made him touchy on this point. His temper, with regard to other causes of offense, was tinder; with respect to this it was gunpowder. His worst quarrels arose from this cause or were greatly aggravated by it. He became sore on the subject, so that at last I think he could scarcely hate anyone very heartily without fancying that the obnoxious person had said something or caused something to be said which reflected on the character of Mrs. Jackson. For the man who dared breathe her name except in honor he kept pistols in perfect condition for thirty-seven years.”

There is a fool and a meddler in every tragedy between men. For a fool is naturally a meddler.

“T. Swann, Esq., lately of Virginia,” filled the role above mentioned and brought on the duel between Jackson and Charles Dickinson. T. Swann, Esq., was a young lawyer who came from Virginia to the Western settlement. He was a quarter horse with wheels in his head who entered himself with the Four-milers. He strutted and would be a man. He wore fine clothes and volunteered to loan money he never possessed. He used strange oaths and professed knowledge of horses. He posed as a fighting gentleman and carried tales. He butted in and backed out, of course.

In the fall of 1805 General Jackson matched his horse, Truxton, against Captain Joseph Ervin’s Plowboy, for $2,000, payable in notes on the day of the race, the notes to be then due. If either party failed to race he was to pay a forfeit of $800. Six persons were interested in the race for Truxton: General Jackson, Maj. W. P. Anderson, Major Verrell and Captain Pryor. For Plowboy: Captain W. P. Ervin and Charles Dickinson, his son-in-law. Before the day of the race arrived Dickinson and Ervin found that Plowboy was not fit, withdrew him and paid forfeit. It was done to the satisfaction of all, amicably done and settled.

The famous Clover Bottom race track, the scene of early horse racing in Tennessee, and where Jackson’s horses ran so many races. Scene of the triumph of Haynie’s Maria and her great rider, “Monkey Simon,” a pair which Jackson could never defeat.

(Photo March, 1906, by E. E. Sweetland.)

Charles Dickinson was a young lawyer of talent and fine connections. He would drink at times and was then wild and reckless, but he was not unamiable and was a gentleman when sober, but when excited by drink he swore violently and was loose in his talk. Soon after paying forfeit in the Truxton-Plowboy race he “got in his cups” and spoke disparagingly of Mrs. Jackson. In fact all of Jackson’s enemies, even from John Sevier down (whom Jackson once came very near killing for the same cause), used the unfortunate haste of Jackson’s marriage whenever they wished to offend him most deeply. Jackson called on Dickinson and quickly took him to task. Dickinson apologized, said if he had used the words he was drunk and was sorry, and they separated in a friendly manner.

But Dickinson soon got into his cups again, and in the Nashville Inn used most offensive words concerning Mrs. Jackson. Jackson was always most cool and thoughtful in the closest places. This time he went to Captain Ervin and advised him to use his influence with his son-in-law to control his tongue, and added: “I wish no quarrel with him; he is being used by my enemies to pick a quarrel with me. Advise him to stop in time.”

Here it would have ended but for “T. Swann, Esq., late of Virginia,” and as so many foolish reports of the famous duel have been published I shall go into details to tell how it was really fought. Every year it is published—how Dickinson at the famous race said in the presence of Jackson that “Truxton ran away from Plowboy like Jackson ran away with another man’s wife,” and so on. All of which is untrue. The Impartial Review and Cumberland Repository, edited by Thomas Eastin, of January, 1806, and now in the library of the Tennessee Historical Society, is full of all the letters and communications leading up to the tragedy, and without going into lengthy details, the main facts of which are these:

1. Mr. T. Swann, one night, was loafing in the store of George and Robert Bell and says he heard Patton Anderson say that the notes offered by Captain Joseph Ervin at the time he paid the forfeit were different from those General Jackson agreed to receive. Charles Dickinson heard of this and called on T. Swann, Esq., to know if it was true, and Swann said it was.

2. T. Swann then loafed over into General Jackson’s store, the old Indian block-house, which stood for many years on the Clover Bottom track, and asked General Jackson if Captain Ervin or Dickinson offered him notes different from those they had agreed to take. General Jackson answered that Dickinson’s were the same, but Ervin’s were a little different, not being due on demand, as agreed.

3. Mr. T. Swann later rode from Clover Bottom to Nashville with Captain Ervin and told him what General Jackson had said.

4. Meeting between General Jackson Ervin and Dickinson in Nashville. Mutual explanations, in which General Jackson said what he thought of T. Swann Esq., in terms forceful but not elegant.

5. A letter from T. Swann, Esq., to General Jackson, calculated to make the latter challenge him to mortal combat, the presumptuous, windy letter of a foolish boy.

6. A hot reply from General Jackson, an elegant letter and a model in the King’s English. This letter alone would refute any idea that Jackson’s intellect was not of the highest or his English half-baked. In it he says: “There are certain traits that always accompany the gentleman and man of truth. The moment he hears harsh expressions applied to a friend he will immediately communicate it, that explanations may take place; when the base poltroon and cowardly tale-bearer will always act in the background. You can apply the latter to Mr. Dickinson and see which fits him best. I write it for his eye, and the latter I emphatically intend for him. When the conversation dropped between Mr. Dickinson and myself I thought it was at an end. As he wishes to blow the coal, I am ready to light it to an end.”

All of which shows that Jackson had decided to strike over the head of T. Swann to the real power behind him—the man who had twice publicly abused Mrs. Jackson.

7. T. Swann cannot keep away from the General, but hunts him up as soon as he comes to town and demands an explanation. He meets abuse and threats of caning, in which the General says he would not want a better breakfast than to eat fifty such as T. Swann, Esq.

8. T. Swann challenges the General to mortal combat. Read the grandiloquent challenge:

“General Andrew Jackson: Think not that I am to be intimidated by your threats. No power terrestrial shall prevent the settled purpose of my soul. The statement I have made in respect to the notes is substantially correct. The torrent of abusive language with which you have assailed me is such as every gentleman should blush to hear. Your menaces I set at defiance, and now demand of you that reparation which one gentleman is entitled to receive of another. My friend, the bearer of this, is authorized to make complete arrangements in the field of honor.”

THOMAS SWANN.

“Nashville, Jany. 12th, 1806.”

9. Jackson comes to town, meets Mr. T. Swann and breaks a cane over his head. T. Swann is game, if he is a fool, and though the cane, to use his own language, becomes “a large bludgeon and a brace of pistols,” he challenges the General again and induces Mr. N. A. McNairy to act for him.

10. Charles Dickinson takes matters up, writes an offensive letter to Jackson, closing with:

“As to the word ‘coward,’ I think it is as applicable to yourself as to any one I know, and I shall be very glad when an opportunity serves to know in what manner you give your medicines, and I hope you will take in payment one of my most moderate cathartics.

“Yours at command,

“CHARLES DICKINSON.

“Jany 10, 1806.”

Dickinson wrote this and took a flatboat for New Orleans, spending the time to and fro practicing with a pistol.

11. Jackson publishes a communication in the town paper, supported by affidavits of John Hutchings and John Coffee, concerning the whole matter, stating that T. Swann brought it all on himself, was an intermeddler and not a gentleman, and raps Mr. McNairy for being in the same class. Bluff old John Coffee writes a page or two telling how Jackson had to cane T. Swann to keep from killing him, and that Mr. McNairy, T. Swann’s friend, told him one thing and did another. The hidden humor of all this preparation for blood-letting is the fact that General Jackson did not consider T. Swann a gentleman, and therefore not entitled to satisfaction with pistols. In proof of it he prints the affidavit of Robert Hays, who solemnly swears and asserts that the said T. Swann volunteered once to loan Sam Jackson $200 but when the said Sam went to get it, T. Swann had loaned it to another man! Several others swear to the same thing, to wit, that T. Swann was no gentleman, because he failed to respond to the touch of the said Samuel.

Under the code of honor T. Swann may not have been a gentleman, but in full cognizance of the record of S. Jackson, Esq., for borrowing, we are in honor bound to reverse our former assertion as to the said T. Swann being a fool!

12. Nathaniel A. McNairy, knight of high renown, now comes into the arena of newspaper controversy and publishes a most abusive and sarcastic letter about General Jackson, saying among other things—they used many italics in those days—that “the brave General is much more pleased in shedding bushels of ink than one ounce of blood, provided there is an equal chance that that one ounce should be extracted from his own dear carcass. But give him an advantage and he is as brave as Julius Caesar, such as this: Give him a large brace of rifled-barreled pistols and he will race a superannuated Governor in the road as he travels (this refers to Jackson’s quarrel with John Sevier), or he will meet Mr. Swann in some sequestered spot, that the alert General may obtain some dishonorable advantage when no eye can see him; or let him have a pistol and he will shoot at a man who has none and drive him off to Kentucky, God knows for what offense!” etc.

Here was a fight for Jackson, but as he was booked for Dickinson, John Coffee took the job off his hands and fought the duel with McNairy, and they fought to kill in those days. Witness the graphic account of this duel in the Impartial Review, written by Maj. Robert Purdy, the second of John Coffee.

13. In the duel it was agreed that if either man fired before word had been given, the second of the other was to shoot him. One, two, three, fire! was the rule, but McNairy fired at two, wounding John Coffee in the hip. Purdy came near killing McNairy for this, but he begged off, claiming it was an accident.

14. Dickinson returns from New Orleans and, on May 24, publishes a bitter attack in the Impartial Review, on General Jackson, saying among other things “notwithstanding he is a Major General of the militia of Mero District, I declare him to be a worthless scoundrel, a poltroon and a coward.”

The editor of the paper showed this to Thomas Overton before it was published and that gentleman rode to the Hermitage. “General Jackson,” he said, “it is a thing you cannot pass over. You must fight him.”

“General Overton,” said his friend “this is an affair of life and death. I will take the responsibility myself. I will ride to town and see the piece and form my own judgment of it.”

15. He did and this is Jackson’s famous challenge to Dickinson.

“Charles Dickinson.—Sir: Your conduct and expressions relative to me of late have been of such a nature and so insulting that it requires and shall have my notice.

“Insult may be given by men, and of such a kind that they must be noticed and treated with the respect due a gentleman, although (in the present instance), you do not merit it.

“You have, to disturb my quiet, industriously excited Thomas Swann to quarrel with me, which involved the peace and harmony of society for a while.

“You, on the 10th of January, wrote me a very insulting letter, left this country, caused this letter to be delivered after you had been gone some days, and viewing yourself in safety from the contempt I held you, have now in the press a piece more replete with blackguard abuse than any other of your productions. You are pleased to state that you would have noticed me in a different way, but my cowardice would have found a pretext to evade that satisfaction if it had been called for, etc., etc.

“I hope, sir, your courage will be an ample security to me that I will obtain speedily that satisfaction due me for the insults offered, and in the way my friend who hands you this will point out. He waits upon you for that purpose, and with your friend will enter into immediate arrangements for this purpose.

“I am, etc.,

“ANDREW JACKSON.”

16. T. Swann still butts in. He comes out in a card, in which he says: “I shall now conclude this address to the public by assuring General Andrew Jackson (to use a favorite expression of his own) ‘that I shall at all times hold myself answerable for any of my conduct.’”

That was May 20, 1806, nearly a century ago. T. Swann, perhaps, is dead by now. But we will faithfully endeavor to secure a picture of his grave as it looks to-day, that he may still appropriately appear in the tragedy his gunpowder head and hair-trigger mouth brought on. Jackson brushed him aside as a bull would a fly and went after the man he had picked out to fight all the time—Dickinson, the best shot in the West, the man who after one warning had dared to impugn the character of Rachel Donelson Jackson.

And so was brought on the great duel, one of the most famous of all times and which cast its shadow over Jackson’s life, even to the portals of death. For the almost fatal wound Dickinson gave him broke out afresh now and then during all his remaining days and helped to carry him off at last.

17. The Duel. A great man always has his bitterest enemies at his own home. The nearer they get to him—friends and enemies—the more they love or hate him. It is the weakness of poor, fighting humanity that they are kind to strangers out of their way, but will fight the neighbor who gets in their way. And when a man becomes so much greater than his neighbors that the world knows him but knows them not, there may he expect to find the essence of all narrowness.

Jackson always had his bitter enemies. Many people of his own town fought him most bitterly, even when he was saving their lives from Indians and their land from the foreigner. He could stand it himself and suffer, but when they took it out by slandering his wife, then it was that his pistols were ever ready.

Pike near the Clover Bottom race track.

(Photo March, 1906, by E. E. Sweetland.)

A political enemy of Jackson living at Nashville published during his Presidential campaign a pamphlet containing a list of “nearly one hundred fights or violent or abusive quarrels.” But Jackson lived seventy-eight years, in an age when personal fights were the law of the land. He always made his friends’ quarrels his own, and for the first fifteen years of his life, as District Attorney, Judge and lawyer he was brought into collision with the tough element and rascals of the State.

The challenge was sent May 22, and Dickinson promptly accepted it through his second, Dr. Catlett, and named the day of meeting at seven o’clock Friday morning, May 30, 1806, at Harrison Mills, on Red River, in Logan County, Ky. Jackson objected strenuously to postponing it a week. He wanted to fight the next day and sent Overton, his second, to see Catlett and have the date changed. Catlett said Dickinson did not have his pistols ready. Jackson offered to give him his choice of his own, and added: “For God’s sake, let this business be brought to an issue immediately, as I cannot see after publication why Mr. Dickinson should wish to put it off until Friday.”

But Dickinson would not yield, and for a week the impetuous Jackson could only chafe and wait.

From Nashville to Harrison Mills, in Logan County, Ky., is fully fifty miles across country. Horseback was the only mode of travel through the new country then, but a ride of fifty miles a day, used to horseback as they were, and riding such horses as he rode, was no unusual thing for him.

The Sulphur Spring—“The Great French Lick,” as it appears to-day on Cherry Street, Nashville. Quere: What would the buffalo and hunters of old have thought of that thing in their day, with a negro in the tower?

(Photo March, 1906, by E. E. Sweetland.)

Dickinson arose Thursday morning before day. His young wife was sleeping by his side and knew nothing of it. He dressed then awakened her and kissed her with more than usual tenderness: “Good-bye, darling. I shall be sure to be home to-morrow night.”

“Where are you going?” she asked, surprised. “Oh, just over into Kentucky on a little matter of business. I will be back to-morrow night.”

He started out, but she called him back and kissed him again. He laughed boyishly, recklessly at the look of doubt and fear that had crept into her eyes for she had heard rumors only of what the whole town knew, but it never occurred to her that the tragedy was so near.

It was a gay, rollicking crowd of a half-dozen young men who joined Dickinson for his ride across two counties to Kentucky. Never was a more hilarious party. They took short cuts. They galloped across dangerous places, displaying horsemanship and nerve. They drank and made the woods echo with their shouts. Before he left Nashville, Dickinson had bet $500 that he would kill his man—that he would put his ball within a half-inch of the coat button over Jackson’s heart. When they stopped for dinner, he amused the crowd with his wonderful marksmanship. He tied a string between two trees and three times he cut it in twain with his pistol ball. At twenty-four feet he put four bullets in a spot no larger than a silver dollar. “When General Jackson comes along here,” he said to the landlord of the little eating house, “show him these.”

He thought to weaken Jackson’s nerve, but little did he realize the real nerve of the man who was afterwards to send to death and defeat the troops that conquered Bonaparte.

There is no record of Jackson’s home-leaving, except that he started early and went quietly along, those two soldiers of the Revolution and of Indian warfare. If his wife knew it, she was not the woman to try to stop him. She had much of the stubborn, solemn, predestined Scotch-Irish nature of her husband. She was used to his fights, for he had many of them, and to her he was always right. She would not stop him if she could, and that no one ever stopped him she knew. There was the dignity of great love and respect between the two. They never questioned each other’s motives. The one never trespassed on the other’s world. She was intensely religious—of the Presbyterian predestined kind. If she kissed him good-bye, not an eyelash quivered, not a tremor of doubt or fear, and if she said anything, doubtless it was:

“Good-bye, Mr. Jackson. Of course you will kill him. God is on our side!”

If Dickinson and his crowd rode along with shouts and songs, and wild, reckless fun, very different was Jackson’s and Thomas Overton’s journey. They knew Jackson’s chances for death were five to one. He was an indifferent shot—all high-strung, nervous men are. He had but one chance, and he and Overton thought it out as calmly as ever generals planned a battle. For it was a battle—a battle of life and death, with the chances all against Jackson. It reminds me of the night before Hastings which Harold, the Saxon king’s, army spent in drink and song and cheer and wild hilarity. But down on the sandy beach William the Conqueror’s men spent theirs in solemn thought and silent sleep and prayer.

Little things count most in the crises of life and it was Dickinson’s talk at last that gave Jackson the plan of his fight.

“General,” said Thomas Overton, as they rode along, “I have been thinking of the only chance we have got. It’s a bitter pill, but it’s our only chance with a man who shoots as quick and true as Dickinson.”

Jackson was silent. He knew his second; that no gamer, truer man lived; that he was not only a soldier himself, but had been in many affairs of honor before; that he would let no chance escape him.

“You see, it is this way,” went on the second; “we have agreed on the mode of fighting, as you know. The distance is twenty-four feet. We will toss up for position. There will be no counting. Each man is to hold his pistol down by his side until the word fire is given, then each is to fire as he pleases.”

Jackson was still silent. He knew this was not to his advantage. But as the challenged party Dickinson’s second had the choice of weapons and conditions. He knew that Dickinson, expert shot that he was, needed no time to aim and fire, but that he himself did. Dickinson shot instantly, as a boy shoots a marble; no aim, but that true action of the hand and eye which come together by practice and long instinct. There is no aim that equals it—it is natural, it is the mark of the expert.

“Now I have thought it out. There is no chance for me to get the first shot. Dickinson can shoot quicker than you and with more chance of success. All you can do is to wait till he shoots and take your chance. If he wounds you or misses you take your time and kill him. If you try to shoot first, you will miss him and he will kill you. It’s hard, but it’s all we can do.”

Jackson agreed and went to the field, a six foot three inch target at twenty-four feet, for a man who could put four balls in four shots into a space not half the size of Jackson’s heart! It took a heart of steel to know that, as he traveled wearily along the rough road, and when the landlord pointed to a sparrow’s head Dickinson had shot off, he smiled grimly and said:

“Never mind, my dear sir, he will come this way day after to-morrow in a box. Be sure of that.”

The Spring and Dairy at the Hermitage, where Jackson used to indulge in cool buttermilk.

(Photo March, 1906, by E. E. Sweetland.)

Jackson never would talk in after years of the fight. In fact he never talked of any of them could he help it. Only twice did he ever mention it. Once when he was President and he was fighting for his political life and they were using Dickinson’s death, among other things, to defeat him. “As for Dickinson,” he said, “I would have killed him if he had shot me through the brain.” In his later years he regretted it more and more, and once said: “I never would have killed him if he had missed me. When I killed him I was as sure as I lived that he had mortally wounded me.”

A little tavern kept by David Miller stood on the banks of the Red River in those days, one hundred years ago. Other friends joined Jackson en route, and they reached the tavern, a small party of horsemen, about sunset Thursday afternoon, May 29, and obtained lodgings for the night. Dickinson’s party went to a house two miles lower down the river, kept by William Harrison.

Jackson ate heartily and sat out under the stars after supper smoking his pipe as usual, and chatting with his friends. Jacob Smith, the landlord, soon fell under the magnetic charm of the man and used to love to state how he talked with his guest and how, as he bade him good night, he wished him good luck on the morrow.

Early the next morning an overseer who worked Jacob Smith’s negroes on a near-by farm, saw a cavalcade of horsemen ride to the river’s banks. He knew what was up, and he wished greatly to see it. There was no ferryman at the river, and after waiting and calling, Jackson spurred his horse into the stream and dashed across into the forest beyond followed by his friends. It was a level beautiful spot in the shade of large towering poplars. The trees rose tall and stately, already showering upon the grass beneath their wax-like, blood-flecked blossoms, emblems of the flecks of deeper carmine so soon to crimson the earth.

The cavalcade dismounted and hitched their horses. Dickinson and party were already there. It was not yet seven. Jackson walked between his surgeon and his second.

“How do you feel about it now, General?” asked the surgeon.

“All right, sir; all right. I will wing him, never fear.”

But Overton was still thinking, his head down, silently and deeply. He had just heard of Dickinson’s boast that he would shoot within an inch of the button over Jackson’s heart. Jackson was slender and wore a coat always buttoned tightly around his erect, thin, military form.

“General,” he said quietly, as they walked along, “unbutton your coat to the top button. Let it hang loose.”

And this it was that saved Jackson’s life and gave to his country one of her greatest generals and one of her greatest Presidents.

Dickinson’s second drew the choice for position. He promptly stationed Dickinson with his back to the rising sun. The glare would be in Jackson’s face. But Overton drew the word and his quiet face lighted with pleasure, for he had even thought that out, how he would give it. Nothing escaped Thomas Overton when his friend’s life was at stake.

There were peculiar words in use in the old Revolutionary manual of arms. “Poise fl’ok!” would mean to-day: “Present arms.” The change is obvious: “fl’ok—” “firelock.”

“Ready, aim, fere!” and they dwelt long on f-e-r-e, for it meant fire. And when it came from Overton’s mouth he brought it out with a shriek and volume, quick and sharp, so unexpected that it took calmness and nerve to think more of the shooting than the word.

Dickinson was younger than Jackson and far handsomer. He stood at his mark smilingly, confidently. Jackson stood, his thin, determined face drawn with the intensity of that earnestness and calmness which it ever wore in critical moments. It is said that he had a bullet in his mouth to clench his teeth upon, a thing he often did in the agony of the great physical pain which, from one cause and another, was his inheritance all through life.

The two men were as unlike as nature could make them. Dickinson, who came from Maryland was a well-bred cavalier. Jackson had no breeding at all. He was born a day or two after they buried his father in a pauper’s grave and all his mother ever told him was that they had left Ireland to escape British persecution and that his grandfather was hanged for leading in an Irish rebellion. Dickinson was gay, brave, cool and the best shot with a pistol living.

Jackson was earnest, terribly earnest; cool, but gunpowdery. He stood for something. He was a man of destiny—felt it, knew it. Dickinson was a man of chance. Jackson felt he was destined for great things. He did not see how, but he knew he would kill Dickinson.

“Are you ready, gentlemen?” asked Overton.

“I am ready, sir,” said Dickinson.

“Ready!” snapped Jackson from his thin, drawn lips.

“Then f-e-r-e!” shouted Overton, almost before the word had left Jackson’s lips.

It was a strange word to Dickinson, strangely, fiercely, excitingly said. Up went his pistol—he never took aim—and when it reached the button over Jackson’s heart the quiet sweetness of the virgin poplars canopying the cool, grassy plot echoed to the thunder of his big pistol, hurling at Jackson’s heart the terrible two-ounce cone of lead.

Scene on Stone River just back of the Clover Bottom race track.

(Photo March, 1906, by E. E. Sweetland.)

Overton’s eyes were glued with fear on Jackson. He saw the dust fly out from the button over his heart. He saw Jackson half wince, his face flash with grim anger, half brace himself and throw his left arm across his breast as if to hold his heart in till he could fire. It was done naturally, easily, and Overton’s face lighted with joy as he saw Jackson calmly, coolly raise his own pistol.

But Dickinson—Overton drew his own pistol and turned on him fiercely—Dickinson, pale, astounded, had involuntarily stepped back from his own line, exclaiming:

“My God! Have I missed him?”

“Back to your mark!” shouted Overton, “or I will shoot you in your tracks!”

Dickinson flushed and stepped up to the mark, his eyes down, his smoking pistol in his hand.

Jackson took deliberate aim and touched the hair trigger.

Snap!

It stopped on the half-cock. Never before had it done that, for a truer, better weapon no man ever had. Why this accident, this chance, one in ten thousand? We know not the unseen of life. Who sent it to give Dickinson this chance for his life—to save Jackson from a shadow that would darken all of his?

Coolly, grimly Jackson recocked his pistol. Reeling with pain and loss of blood, but bracing himself to kill, he took deliberate aim, not at Dickinson’s brain, not at his heart, for his chances were small there, but at the middle of his body where he knew he could hit and where death would be sure and lingering.

Dickinson collapsed at the fire and went down, pale, frantic. Jackson stood stoically, reeling, nausea-stricken, but no man knew it. The surgeon and friends rushed to Dickinson and opened his clothes. The blood poured in a rush from near his hip. The surgeon’s face lit up. That did not mean death. But look, the hole was above the center of his abdomen where the large bowel crossed the smaller ones. One glance was enough. “No chance,” he whispered to the second; “that is death.”

Jackson walked off erectly—not a waver, not a limp, between his second and his surgeon. Dickinson’s eyes followed him, and the agony of his failure entered with the agony of his fate.

“Are you wounded, General?” asked the surgeon.

“O, he pinked me a little,” said Jackson, walking rapidly on to his horse as he felt the blood rising in his boot leg. “But don’t let them know; don’t let them know,” he added fiercely.

Overton had walked back to Dickinson and now came up. He said quietly:

“We can retire now, General. He will not trouble you any more.”

They rode back to the Inn. A negro woman was churning in the yard beneath the cool trees. Loss of blood made Jackson thirsty.

“Can you give me a dipper of buttermilk?” he asked her.

She pushed back with her dasher the forming globules of butter and dipped for the milk. For the first time Jackson unbuttoned his top button and looked at his shirt. It was crimson. The woman glanced up.

“My God, marster, are you hurt?”

Jackson smiled and drank the milk at a quaff. Then he walked into his room with his surgeon.

He was badly wounded. The great ball had been put accurately, but his loose coat had saved his life. The bullet struck his breast bone an inch too far to the left, shattered it, two ribs, ploughed around his ribs and came out at his back. His boot was nearly filled with blood.

Later, he sent his own surgeon with a bottle of wine to Dickinson with instructions to do all he could for him. But Dickinson was past help. He lingered all the afternoon in agony, cursing his fate, the ball that killed him and begging for his wife to come. About nine o’clock he suddenly raised up in bed and exclaimed: “Why—why—have—you—put—out—the lights?”

But the lights were not out.

Photo by Julie Royster, Raleigh, N. C.

“ORTERMOBULL”

Say, white folks, wid yo’ stench on steel,

Look twell yo’ h’arts am full;

No, dis heah ain’t no ortermobeel—

It’s jes my ortermobull.

—AUNT BETSY.

“Lorena,” and How It Came to Be Written

By Susie Gentry

Few songs in the world’s history ever had the hold on men’s hearts that “Lorena” did during the war, and for more than a decade after.

Even now it has the power to make misty the eye and soften the heart—particularly if sung by “The Southern Girl” of the war time period. It is one of my earliest recollections, as sung by my mother to our little, three-cornered family—she, my father and myself. Father had sent it to her “enduring of the War.”

I suppose almost every soldier of the war, Confederate or Federal, who had any sentiment sent his sweetheart a copy of this famous song.

How full of pathos are the several verses:

“The years creep slowly by, Lorena;

The snow is on the grass again,

The sun’s low down the sky, Lorena,

The frost is where the flowers have been.

But the heart throbs on as warmly now

As when the summer days were nigh;

Oh, the sun can never dip so low

Adown affection’s cloudless sky.

A hundred months have passed, Lorena,

Since last I held thy hand in mine,

And felt the pulse beat fast, Lorena,

Though mine beat faster far than thine;

A hundred months—’twas flowery May,

When up that hilly slope we climbed

To watch the dying of the day,

And hear the distant church bells chimed.

We loved each other then, Lorena,

More than we ever cared to tell;

And what we might have been, Lorena,

Had our lovings prospered well.

But then ’tis passed; the years are gone;

I’ll not call up their shadowy forms;

I’ll say to them: Lost years, sleep on;

Sleep on, nor heed life’s pelting storms.

The story of the past, Lorena,

Alas! I care not to repeat;

The hopes that could not last, Lorena,

They lived, but only lived to cheat.

I would not cause e’en one regret

To rankle in your bosom now,

For “if we try, we may forget”

Were words of thine long years ago.

Yes, these were words of thine, Lorena,

They burn within my memory yet;

They touched some tender chord, Lorena,

That thrills and trembles with regret.

’Twas not thy woman’s heart that spoke—

Thy heart was always true to me;

A duty, stern and pressing, broke

The tie that linked my soul to thee.

It matters little now, Lorena,

The past is in the eternal past;

Our heads will soon lie low, Lorena,

Life’s tide is ebbing out so fast.

There is a future! Oh, thank God!

Of life this is so small a part!

’Tis dust to dust beneath the sod,

But there—up there, ’tis ‘heart to heart.’”

These words were written by Rev. H. D. L. Webster, born in Stamford, Conn., August 29, 1824; was educated in Columbus, Ohio, and preached at Zanesville, Ohio for some years, leaving there in 1848. The music was composed by J. P. Webster, but no relation.

Ohio claims the writer and the song, but it is known and regarded as a Southern song, having been so extensively sung below Mason and Dixon’s line.

“Lorena” was Miss Ella Blocksom, of Zanesville, Ohio. She was a member of Mr. Webster’s church—the Universalist—also a leading member of the choir, with a beautiful and highly cultivated voice. She was as lovely in face and person as her voice was sweet and touching; and it was but natural that the fine-looking, intelligent young divine should be attracted to that face that was each Sunday opposite him and listened so interestedly to his preaching.

One describes her as “nineteen,” short in stature and petite, with blue eyes and light brown hair and features that took hold upon “the poetry of heaven.”

She was the sister-in-law of one of the “pillars of the church,” a successful manufacturer, and of course the preacher found he often must consult this brother about ecclesiastical matters and see his pretty, charming sister-in-law.

What real love affair ever ran smoothly? This one did not, for Lorena’s sister had better “game” for her to bring down than a poor, though handsome, intellectual preacher; so, like many another worldly-wise elder sister, she, after repeated efforts, made “Lorena” see that she and “Paul Vane,” as Mr. Webster called himself in one of his songs, must part.

On a certain cloudless Sabbath in May these two lovers walked after the morning service, to Hamline Hill and lingered until twilight was closing her wind in the west, and “Lorena” told “Paul Vane” farewell.

The next day she wrote him a letter, in which she said, “if we try, we may forget,” and he knew “’twas not thy woman’s heart that spoke,” but her sister’s through her.

Finding that this world was a blank world to him without “Lorena’s” loving look and smile, he resigned his charge, where, as a minister, he had been so successful and, as a lover, such a failure, and left for parts unknown.

Time went by and he was heard of in the West. He developed the “poetic fire,” and, in 1860, his song “Lorena,” appeared—one hundred months after his farewell to Ella Blocksom.

The song was almost famous before she realized it was a tribute to her from her old and loyal lover. She is accused of having no sentiment, or of being a “namby-pamby,” as she never wrote him one line of thanks for the song, or for his constancy to her, as he had a right to expect. Three years later, he wrote “Paul Vane”—the answer one would think a “Lorena” would have made:

“The years are creeping slowly by, dear Paul,

The winters come and go;

The wind sweeps past with mournful cry, dear Paul,

And pelt my face with snow.

But there’s no snow upon the heart, dear Paul.

’Tis summer always there;

Those early loves throw sunshine over all,

And sweeten memories dear.

I’ve kept you ever in my heart, dear Paul.

Through years of good and ill;

Our souls could not be torn apart, dear Paul,

They’re bound together still.

I never knew how dear you were to me

’Til’ I was left alone;

I thought my poor, poor heart would break the day

They told me you were gone.”

“Lorena” married a young lawyer of Ironton, Ohio, who later on became a Supreme Judge. He died, full of honors, March 2, 1887.

“In the city of Zanesville, surrounded by the scenes of her girlhood days, still lives Lorena in her widowed age. The hill she climbed in that flowery May of long ago is now hidden from sight by the intrusive growth of the flourishing city. She alone remains of her little family.” Her sun is slowly declining toward the horizon and she will soon meet her two lovers, “Paul Vane” and her husband.

The Muskingum, turbid and historic, flows on as in the days when “Lorena” and her lover “when up that hilly slope.” Through the changing panorama of its banks a steamer comes and goes, often filled with merry-makers, laughter and song, and this vessel wears proudly a name ever linked with the River—“Lorena.”

Rev. H. D. L. Webster married February 14, 1850, Sarah L. Wilmot. They had two children, both of whom are living. After the death of his first wife, he married at Racine, Wis., December 31, 1867, Mary M. Skinner. The two children of this union are still living.

Mr. Webster commenced preaching when twenty-two years of age and was greatly beloved, as he was devoted to his work. He organized the first Universalist society, at Tarpon Springs, Fla., and preached there without pay until his health began to fail. He died in Chicago, November 4, 1896.

I am indebted to my friend, Capt. Nelson W. Evans, of Portsmouth, Ohio, for the data of this story, he being a personal friend of “Lorena” and her husband—was a pall-bearer at the Judge’s funeral.

Franklin, Tenn.

A Poem That Will Live

There are poems not written in verse, and this one, the dying request of Ex-Governor Hogg, of Texas, is the greatest poem that has been written this century:

“I want no monument of stone, but let my children plant at the head of my grave a pecan tree and at the foot of my grave a walnut tree, and when these trees shall bear, let the pecans and walnuts be given out among the plain people of Texas, so that they may plant them and make Texas a land of trees.”

Agriculture the Basis of All Wealth

By William Dennison, Fargo, N. D.