Andrew and Sarah were back in the East early in 1833 to visit Jackson in the White House and Sarah’s family in Philadelphia. In July they accompanied the President and his party to the Rip Raps in Hampton Roads for a summer vacation of six weeks, and then after another visit in Philadelphia they were back at the Hermitage in October. While in Philadelphia Andrew had instructed one of his friends there to order a chest of tools for use on the farm; and when the bill was presented to the President in November he paid it and wrote Andrew the following revelatory letter, one of the very few of his family letters in which the sardonic note intrudes:

My son: Inclosed you will find Mr. Toland’s receipt to Mr. Brown for the chest and tools laid in for you by your friend Mr. Hart, and Mr. Brown’s receipt for a check for $62.03 drew by me in his favor, being in full for that bill. You will find the chest (from the price charged, a nice piece of furniture for the parlour) not well suited to a negro’s workshop; and the tools very fine, such I suppose as cabinet-makers use. Be this as it may, bought wit is the best—when not bought too dear; and I could not permit either your feelings or character to suffer for the amount of the bill; but I think that it will henceforth admonish you to purchase your own tools for the farm and not entrust it to an agent. Remember my advice, my son: Never purchase any useless article. Those that are needed for your comfort or that of your dear little family purchase always as far as you have the means; and be always certain, if you wish to die independent, to keep your wants within your means; always, when you have the money, paying for them when bought. I have said before and now repeat: The world is not to be trusted. Many think you rich, and many you will find under false pretensions of friendship would involve you if they can, strip you of your last shilling and afterwards laugh at your folly and distress.

In the ensuing years there must have been many times when Andrew Jackson, junior, looked back on the sage advice embraced in that letter and wished that he had indeed learned a lesson from the injudicious purchase of the tool-chest suited for a parlor and the tools such as cabinet makers use. He had plenty of “bought wit” in the years to come; and most of it was, indeed, “bought too dear.”

Andrew also caused the old man considerable worry at this time by having purchased a slave in Maryland before returning to the Hermitage, paying only a part of the purchase price in cash and leaving a balance due. He neglected to say anything to Jackson about the unpaid balance, and he learned of it only when the Maryland slavetrader dunned him for the money. This annoyed and embarrassed Jackson, but his chief concern was evidently not the money involved; he was worried about Andrew’s careless business habits. “Why will you not, my dear Andrew,” he wrote him, “attend to my admonition about money matters?” And, further, “My son, at all times and on all occasions state to your father things just as they are.”

Inattentive to these admonitions, however, Andrew gave further cause for annoyance during that summer when he repurchased the old Hunter’s Hill property adjoining the Hermitage. Jackson had consented that Andrew make the purchase if he thought it advisable, encouraging the young man to take the initiative and make the decision for himself; but he was particular to impress on Andrew that he wanted him to have the terms of the sale reduced to writing and a copy of the agreement forwarded to him. Nevertheless, his first knowledge of the purchase was a draft drawn on him for the first payment on the purchase price; and then began a long succession of letters from father to son unsuccessfully seeking to learn the exact details of the trade. Similarly, he was unable to get from Andrew information as to the number of pounds of cotton baled and shipped to New Orleans. “My son,” he wrote in May, “surely it is a duty that you would owe to an entire stranger, surely more imperious to me, to acknowledge the receipt of such business letters as these.” And again, despairingly, in June: “My son, why will you not learn to transact your affairs like a man of business?”

Andrew, apparently, was incorrigibly negligent about answering letters; for in October, when Jackson had returned to Washington after spending the summer at the Hermitage, he wrote him: “Thirty-one days have elapsed since we left the Hermitage, Sarah on a sick bed. I had your promise that you would write me how they were; and I am now, even now, without one line from you.”

To add to the old General’s worries at this stage of young Andrew’s career, there is strong evidence that he had reason to be fearful of his son’s falling into intemperate habits. Perhaps the young wife conveyed the idea to the old man. At any rate, Sarah went on a visit to Philadelphia early in April, 1835, leaving Andrew at home, supposedly looking after the work of rebuilding the burned Hermitage; and on April 14,1835, Jackson wrote him a long and pointed fatherly letter concerning the evils of intemperance, in the course of which he said: “When I reflect on the fate of your cousin Savern, brought on him by intemperance, from being an honor to his friends reduced to the contempt of all by his brutal intemperance, I shudder when I see any appearance of it in any other branch of our connection. Your conduct, standing as my representative, the son of the President, draws upon you the eyes of the world, and the least deviation from the rules of strict decorum and propriety are observed and commented upon by all our enemies and those who envy you of your situation. Added to this, your charming little wife and sweet little ones’ respectability in society depends on your upright course in your walks of life. This, my son, ought always to be before your eyes, and I am sure must be; and your pledge to me on the point of intemperance assures me that you never will permit spirits to enter your lips again.”

A few weeks later, taking as his text the experience of a Washington friend who had been humiliated by public drunkenness, Jackson wrote Andrew another letter of warning against “intoxication, which reduces the human being below that of the brute,” concluding his letter with: “Oh, my son, if you were to be found in such condition it would destroy me.”

These letters apparently had the desired effect, for Major Lewis after visiting the Hermitage in May, 1835, wrote Jackson that he was much gratified at the fine and healthy appearance of the young man, that he looked like a different person; and, he concluded: “I have no doubt he has faithfully complied with his promise to you to the letter.” Jackson, upon receipt of Major Lewis’s letter, wrote at once to Andrew telling him how delighted he was at the favorable report of his good conduct and healthful appearance and his good standing with everybody. “This, my son,” he said, “is more grateful to your dear father than all the wealth of Peru, and I have now the greatest confidence in your good conduct through life”—which confidence, the future revealed, was well placed.

Early in the summer of 1835 Andrew joined Sarah and the children at the White House and they went with the President for another vacation at the Rip Raps in July and August. They went on a visit to Philadelphia in September, and late in that month Andrew went back to the Hermitage, leaving Sarah to return to Tennessee later. They were there at the Hermitage in the summer of 1836 when Jackson came to look at his rebuilt home, but they went to Philadelphia again in October and then for a final visit to the White House. They left there with the worn-out ex-President in March, 1837, and all returned to the Hermitage together.

At this time the son’s little family consisted of his wife, Sarah, and a little son and daughter: Andrew, III, born April 4, 1834; and Rachel, born in 1832. Both the children were born at the Hermitage, and they were a never-failing source of pleasure and comfort to the old General in his declining years. Little Rachel was his especial pet from the time she was born, and she was one of those who stood by his bedside when he died.

Like every doting grandfather, he was inordinately proud of her cunning little ways; and he chuckled as he related to his friends how the little girl, upon her arrival at the White House with her mother following the burning of the Hermitage, greeted him with: “Grandpa, the great fire burned my bonnet; and a big owl tried to kill Poll, but Papa killed the owl.” Needless to say, Grandpa dropped all the affairs of State long enough to see that little Rachel was supplied with a new bonnet without delay. And he probably joined her in rejoicing over the narrow escape of old Poll from the owl, for the old Hermitage parrot was a great pet of the General’s. In his letters home he inquired about her, and William Donelson in writing to him in December, 1829, said: “Poor Poll is doing well. She is as fat and saucy as ever. From her continued good health I think she will live to be an old bird. Elizabeth desires to be remembered affectionately to you, and says that she will insure Polly’s life till you return.” As a matter of fact, the old bird outlived the General himself; and she distinguished herself by introducing an element of the grotesque into the solemnity of the funeral services when she suddenly startled the assembled mourners by bursting into a loud torrent of profanity which made it necessary to suspend proceedings until her perch could be removed from the upper front portico to a more remote vantage point.

Second only to his adopted son in General Jackson’s affections was Andrew Jackson Donelson, son of Samuel Donelson, one of Mrs. Jackson’s brothers. Samuel had been Jackson’s law partner in his early days and he it was whose elopement Jackson had aided back in 1797 when Samuel romantically stole his bride, Polly Smith from the window of the “Rock Castle” home of her father, General Daniel Smith—the same Daniel Smith who helped survey the much disputed extension of the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina. The eloping couple had fled to Jackson’s near-by home at Hunter’s Hill to have the wedding ceremony performed; and, strangely enough, it was at the Hermitage that Samuel died in 1802, death overtaking him there suddenly one evening when he had stopped by to pay a fraternal visit. He left three young sons—Andrew Jackson, Daniel and John—and General Jackson was made the guardian of the eldest of the three, his namesake. At first all three boys continued to live with their mother at the home of her father, General Smith; but one day when Jackson paid a visit to them, little Andrew returned to the Hermitage with him, riding behind the General on his horse. He came to spend a few days; but so firm a hold did he gain on Jackson’s affections that he was never sent home. From then on the Hermitage was his home, and he was reared there with all the love and care that could be shown one’s own son.

Young Donelson was educated at Cumberland College (University of Nashville), Transylvania University at Lexington, and at West Point. Throughout his college life he was an outstanding student, and at the Military Academy he distinguished himself by finishing the four-year course in three years and graduating second in his class. Upon his graduation he was appointed an aide-de-camp to General Jackson, at the latter’s special request, and served with him in the Florida wars. After his return to Nashville he practiced law for a short while, but soon abandoned this and began to take an active and useful part in General Jackson’s political activities.

Jackson had a genuinely high regard for young Donelson. “I have reared and educated him as my son,” he wrote a friend on one occasion; and that the old General had the most unlimited ambitions for him is shown by a letter he wrote to him while he was at Transylvania College encouraging him to seek his associates and friends among the better class of students and concluding: “I look forward, if you live, to the time when you will be selected to preside over the destinies of America.” Donelson did not climb that high on the political ladder, but he did achieve distinction in his own right in public affairs; and there were many of his friends who thought that his star might have shone with greater brilliance had it not been dimmed by the too-close effulgence of his famous guardian and friend.

By the time Jackson was elected President in 1828 the young man had reached such a place in his confidence and affection that he was his spontaneous choice as private secretary, and he went with him to Washington in this capacity. The Jackson administration, however, had not been afloat very long before it ran on the rocks of the Peggy Eaton embroglio, that tempest in a teapot that threatened for a while to upset the government; and Major Donelson and his wife became the storm centers of this furious affair. Mrs. Donelson was a niece of Mrs. Jackson’s, the major having married his own first cousin, Emily, daughter of Captain John Donelson; and Jackson felt for her a very real avuncular affection when he installed her as mistress of the White House. Red-headed Miss Emily, however, was a spunky individual with a spirit of her own; and, although she reluctantly consented to receive Peggy Eaton coldly but courteously as an official guest at the White House, she flatly refused to visit Mrs. Eaton or to have any other social contacts with her. This brought about strained relations in the White House family, but the affair was temporarily kept from coming to a head; and the President and the Donelsons returned in amity together to Tennessee to spend the summer of 1830. There had almost been a flare-up before leaving Washington. The Eatons had been invited to dine at the White House, and the petulant Peggy had refused to enter the house while the Donelsons were there, claiming that Emily had publicly snubbed her a short while previously. This naturally riled the General and he raised considerable of a rumpus. In his flurry of anger he threatened to take the Donelsons home and leave them there, and this threat got under the Donelsons’ skin. Accordingly, when they all got back to Tennessee in June, the Donelsons did not go to the Hermitage to stay but went to the home of Mrs. Donelson’s mother, then a widow. The Eatons made a rather showy and carefully pre-arranged visit to Tennessee during this summer, a feature of the trip being their entertainment at the Hermitage; and Major Donelson later explained that he and his wife went to Mrs. Donelson’s to stay because they did not want to put themselves in the way of the honors General Jackson intended to pay to the Eatons at the Hermitage. But the President’s feelings were hurt. “When I expected you and Emily to go to my house and remain with me as part of my family, it was declined,” he wrote in a letter to Major Donelson that fall when the two of them were back in Washington carrying on that childish interchange of formal letters within the walls of the White House which almost precipitated a crisis at that time.

Jackson smelt trouble brewing as early as July, when he mentioned in a letter to Major Lewis from the Hermitage: “It may so happen that I shall return to the city in company with my son alone,” and asked the Major to be looking about for some eligible man to serve as his secretary. “My connections have acted very strangely here,” he wrote; adding, with characteristic fire: “but I know I can live as well without them as they can without me, and I will govern my own household or I will have none.” When the time came to return to Washington in October, Mrs. Donelson announced that she would spend the winter in Tennessee with her widowed mother; and it is not recorded that General Jackson interposed any violent objection to this program. Major Donelson, however, went along with him.

Hardly had they got back to Washington before General Jackson wrote back to Emily’s sister, Mary Eastin, saying that “Major Donelson has informed me that the house appears lonesome; and on his account it would give me great pleasure if you and Emily and the sweet little ones were here.” He went on to say, however: “Provided you will pursue my advice and assume that dignified course that ought to have been at first adopted, of treating every one with attention and extending the same comity and attention to all the heads of Departments and their families.” He told Miss Eastin to convey this qualified invitation to Emily and he himself told Major Donelson what he had written. Then ensued that absurd and pathetic intramural correspondence between these two strong-willed men who lived in the same house, worked together daily in the close and confidential relations of a President and his private secretary—but who fought out their private quarrel by means of long, formal letters.

Jackson had a deep and sincere affection for Major Donelson, but he felt that his honor was at stake; worse than that, he had tortured the shabby controversy into a “conspiracy” to strike at him through Eaton and through him at his departed Rachel. Donelson, on the other hand, while his letters breathed love and respect for his uncle, felt that his and his wife’s dignity and self-respect would not permit of any dictation as to their social contacts.

So matters rocked along, and in December Jackson wrote General Coffee that Donelson’s “demeanor toward Major Eaton is more free.” He kept up a friendly correspondence with Emily back in Tennessee, and wrote Coffee that he expected her to come on to Washington in March or April. Major Donelson wrote his wife in January, 1831, that he had had “a very satisfactory conversation with Uncle in relation to our social difficulty” and that “He has left to my own discretion the period of your return, without alluding to the influence which produced your stay in Tennessee.” The Major expressed great gratification at the prospect of getting things patched up, and on March 8th left Washington for Nashville to get his little family and take them back to the White House with him.

Late in March, however, the Eaton affair boiled over in Washington again, and some new developments there made the President furious. On March 24th he wrote a long letter to Major Donelson, couched in words of genuine affection but reflecting plainly his agitation. The partially healed sore was reopened and he candidly said: “As much as I desire you and your dear little family with me, unless you and yours can harmonize with Major Eaton and his family, I do not wish you here.”

This new crisis in the Eaton affair resulted in the resignations of Van Buren and Eaton from the Cabinet, and Jackson hastily wrote Donelson on April 19th telling him of these resignations and predicting that “you will find an entire new Cabinet when you arrive.”

But now the Donelsons were offended. Upset by the strong words of Jackson’s letter of March 24th they, as General Coffee expressed it, “fear that you require more than they can consistently comply with.” In reply to this letter Donelson wrote a reply which Jackson styled “a vindictive phillippic,” the general tenor of which was that he could not return with his wife under the terms set forth in Jackson’s communication. Jackson’s reply was firm, though tempered with expressions of his affection, and showed clearly the extent to which the controversy had upset him. His letter concluded: “I am laboured almost to death, and have been a good deal afflicted; but will try amongst strangers to get a man who will aid me and who will think it no disgrace to associate with me and my friends.” This must have cut Donelson to the quick, but it did not alter his determination to sever his official relations with his godfather, the President. He went back to Washington—alone—to wind up his personal affairs there; and before leaving finally, on June 18th, he wrote an affectionate note to Jackson giving “assurance of my readiness to resume the relation which I have maintained near you for so many years, whenever you think that my services can be of any avail.” In a letter written home to his wife he told of a long conversation he had had with Jackson, and dropped the strange comment that “After what has now passed, while our duty remains the same, I am almost as well satisfied that the view which Uncle takes is correct.” Nevertheless, he went on home; and Jackson engaged as his private secretary Mr. Nicholas P. Trist (whose wife was a granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson), and he served until the reconciliation with the Donelsons.

The reconciliation, as might have been expected where there was so much mutual love and esteem, was not long in coming. Jackson kept up a friendly correspondence with Andrew and Emily as though nothing had happened, and in July two Nashville friends, John C. McLemore and John Bell, took it upon themselves to act to bring Jackson and Donelson back together. They talked to the Major, read all the letters the President had written to him, and then gave him the sensible advice to pack up his family and return to the White House “without further correspondence.” They wrote Jackson that they had given Donelson this advice and stated further that “we think there is no necessity for the specification of terms on one side or the other.” That this effort of the peacemakers was at length successful is shown by a single reference in one of Jackson’s letters to Coffee on September 6th: “Major Donelson and his little family reached here yesterday.”

Thus ended the spat between General Jackson and the Donelsons; and in all their future relations there was never anything to suggest that there had ever been the slightest asperity between them. Mischief-making Peggy Eaton drove them apart; but even she, with her genius for creating dissention, could not keep them apart.

In 1818 Major Donelson had inherited from his father a handsome plantation called Tulip Grove which lies directly across the Lebanon Road from the Hermitage; and in 1834 General Jackson, perhaps to seal the reconciliation, engaged Messrs. Reiff and Hume to build on it the handsome residence which still stands there. Emily, the innocent stormy petrel, died December, 1836, of tuberculosis. The disease wasted her strength rapidly and she died before her husband could get back from Washington where he had gone to help wind up the affairs of the Jackson administration under the impression that she was not dangerously ill. Major Donelson later married another of his cousins, herself the widow of Lewis Randolph of Virginia, who was a grandson of Thomas Jefferson.

Major Donelson, after Jackson’s administration closed went back to Tulip Grove and lived the life of a farmer for a few years, keeping in touch with Uncle Jackson across the road and helping him sometimes with his flood of correspondence. By President Tyler he was appointed charge de affairs to the Republic of Texas, and he played an active and able part in promoting the annexation of the Lone Star State. When James K. Polk was elected President he was made minister to Prussia, an office which he filled with ability and distinction. Following this service he became editor of the Washington Union; and in 1856 took his last fling at politics when he was a candidate for Vice President on the ticket with Millard Fillmore. He died on June 26, 1871.

Major Donelson ever stood high in the affections of Andrew Jackson, and when the old statesman made his will in 1843 he left to him the gorgeous gold-encrusted sword which had been presented to him on July 4, 1822, by the State of Tennessee in honor of his services in the War of 1812. This priceless heirloom is still in the possession of Mrs. Bettie M. Donelson of Nashville, widow of Major Donelson’s son Alexander. There is a note of pathos in the apologetic explanatory clause embraced in the paragraph of the will in which this bequest is made: “This, from the great change in my worldly affairs of late, is, with my blessing, all I can bequeath him”; but, the dying General added: “This bequest is made as a memento of the high regard, affection and esteem I bear for him as a high-minded, honest and honorable man.” And, since a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, what more precious bequest could anyone receive?

* * * *

Andrew Jackson Donelson was not by any means General Jackson’s only ward. Another namesake and relative of his wife’s who was bequeathed to him and who was brought up at the Hermitage was Andrew Jackson Hutchings, orphan son of his old partner in the mercantile business, John Hutchings, who died in Alabama in November, 1817. The elder Hutchings was then a widower, and when he knew that death was upon him he sent for his old partner and asked him to consent to act as guardian to the little five-year-old boy he was leaving behind him. Jackson took the boy (“little Hutchings” he generally called him in his letters about him), and carefully reared him at the Hermitage, giving him every possible attention and advantage.

When Jackson went to Florida in 1821 he did not take Hutchings with him, the reason assigned, in a letter to John Coffee, being a strange one: “I am aware if I did and an accident happen his grandfather would believe I had destroyed him that his estate should go to his father’s family.” So he engaged a combination nurse and tutor to take up her residence at the Hermitage during his absence and keep the boy at his studies; and in his letters home from Florida he never neglected to inquire about the lad’s health and send him messages. “Say to him his cousin Andrew will bring him a pretty present when he returns, and I will buy him a pony.”

Hutchings, as the years passed on, developed into a rather difficult subject. Jackson had hardly arrived at the White House in March, 1829, heart-broken over his wife’s recent death and naturally worried over the tremendous burden of responsibility he was taking on his shoulders, when news reached him that the boy had been suspended from the University of Nashville. Much perturbed, he wrote to William Donelson asking him to send Hutchings to the school conducted by Mr. Otey at Franklin. “I wish him taught penmanship, arithmetic and bookkeeping, algebra and some of the other branches of mathematics, moral philosophy, belles letters and such other branches that may be profitable to him as a farmer and private gentleman. I have lost all hope of making him a classic scholar, and do not wish him to touch the languages except to review those books of Latin and Greek that he has read, but wish him to understand his grammar well.” He also wrote Hutchings directly that he wished him to enter the school at Franklin, but Hutchings was having too good a time back home at the Hermitage where there was no restraining hand save that of the overseer, and he began to parley about a choice of schools, claiming that he had an aversion to Mr. Otey’s school and would prefer to go to one conducted by Mr. Williford at Columbia. While all this was going on, Jackson’s friend Colonel Charles J. Love visited the Hermitage and wrote: “Young Hutchings is very much in the way at the Hermitage. He rode one of the brood mares away the other day and got her eyes put out. A letter from you might be of service. Mr. Steel is anxious he should leave the place.”

Hutchings finally went off to the Columbia school, but did not last long there. In July Jackson wrote General Coffee, who was helping him manage the boy’s estate: “His conduct has filled me with sincere regret. I can not think of letting him be lost, and have concluded to bring him here and place him at the college at George Town under the control of the Catholics. It is an excellent university and perhaps, under my own eye, I might be able to control him and convince him of the impropriety of his ways.” Accordingly he came on to Washington when Andrew, junior, returned from a visit to the Hermitage a little later; but in April Jackson sent him back to Mr. Williford’s school at Columbia. “Hutchings has behaved well at college,” he wrote Coffee, “but he has such a great dislike to this place and his health not good that I have consented to let him return under a promise that he will abandon his extravagance.” But after he had left Washington Jackson found that he had left a lot of bills unpaid, and he instructed Coffee to “notify everyone that no accounts will be paid only those authorized by you. This will be necessary to preserve him from bankruptcy and ruin.”

Instead of going back to Columbia to school, however, Hutchings simply went back to the Hermitage and began to idle his time away again. Before long Jackson had a letter from Overseer Steele complaining of “a quarrel and fight” he had had with Hutchings over the youth’s desire to whip a slave who had offended him; and again the harrassed guardian had to write to Coffee asking him to use his influence to get the boy to go back to school. “At the Hermitage he is to have a home, but I expect he will aid in keeping peace rather than be its disturber,” Jackson wrote.

Hutchings apparently never did go back to school at Columbia, but in September turned up in Washington again and wheedled Jackson into sending him to the University of Virginia. “He says he is now determined to become a learned man,” the hopeful Jackson wrote Coffee; and for a brief time it appeared that there might be something to this hope, for the boy’s professors reported his good conduct early in October. In November Jackson wrote him reproving him for not fulfilling his promise to write to him every week, but inviting him to come and spend the Christmas holidays with him at the White House. Hutchings accordingly came, and the President rounded off the holidays by permitting him to go to Philadelphia to visit his cousin, Miss Mary McLemore of Nashville, who was in school there and with whom he thought he had fallen in love.

By February, 1832, the boy’s determination to become a learned man had faded away. By absenting himself from his classes he laid himself liable to dismissal, and to escape this ignominy he withdrew from the school. Jackson was much chagrined and humiliated when notified of this state of affairs, but derived such consolation as he could from the fact that his ward was accused of no moral delinquency. He urged Hutchings to come to Washington; but the young man was evidently ashamed to face his guardian, and so wrote to General Coffee asking him to send him enough money to return to his farm in Alabama which had been left him by his father. Coffee sent the money, but instead of going to Alabama to take up the life of a farmer, Hutchings was back at the Hermitage again in April—and again causing trouble, this time in connection with the handling of some colts.

It was no doubt with a distinct feeling of relief that the harassed President was at last able to relinquish his guardianship in March, 1833, when Hutchings came of age. In writing to General Coffee, instructing him about turning over the young man’s patrimony to him, Jackson said: “I know I have performed my pledges to his father on his dying bed”; and in a letter to Hutchings he gave him some kindly and wholesome advice about the manner in which he should conduct himself.

Despite all the trouble he had had with him, however, Jackson seemed to have a real feeling of high regard for the orphan boy, son of his old partner and grandson of his wife’s sister Catherine; and he kept up a fatherly correspondence with him all the rest of his life. A significant sidelight on Jackson’s high principles in such matters is revealed by his response when Hutchings, checking over the accounting of his estate noticed that there was no charge made for administration and wrote Jackson notifying him of the supposed oversight. “I have no charge against your estate,” Jackson wrote him, “I never charged an orphan one cent for either time or expense, and I shall not now begin with you.”

Jackson took a particular interest in the progress of his ex-ward’s love affairs. His affection for his cousin Mary McLemore having cooled, Hutchings upon settling down on his farm in Alabama fell in love with another cousin, General Coffee’s daughter Mary; and Jackson, obviously in favor of the match, helped it along with encouragement to the swain and an occasional adroit word of commendation for Hutchings when he was writing to Mary. They were married on November 14, 1833. Jackson wrote warm letters of congratulation to both of them; and, as early as June, 1834, he was writing Hutchings: “You have not even hinted whether a cradle will be necessary to compleat the furniture of your house. Do inform me.”

Andrew Jackson Hutchings, his harum-scarum young days behind him, developed into a responsible and respected citizen and planter. Jackson kept in touch with him through correspondence and occasional visits, and he enjoyed great gratification at Hutchings’s success in establishing himself as a substantial and respected man. When Hutchings, following the death of his wife in 1840, went to Cuba in an effort to restore his own health, Jackson wrote a letter of introduction in which he described him as “a gentleman of the highest principles of honor and honesty.” The trip to Cuba, however, was ineffectual, and Hutchings returned to Alabama to die in January, 1841.

* * * *

Donelson and Hutchings were but two of the numerous children Jackson took into the Hermitage and brought up as his own. A complete roster of them would be a long list. Apparently Jackson’s friends had a habit of dying and leaving their orphans to his care. His old friend Edward Butler, for instance, appointed the General guardian of his two sons and two daughters when he died in 1804, and there were other odd children left under his wing from time to time. But Rachel had a heart big enough to find room for them all; and Jackson, despite his engrossing responsibilities and his excruciating headaches, never objected to their noisy play as they tumbled about in the Hermitage while he was talking business and politics with his numerous visitors.

An exotic and pitiful member of the Hermitage household for a few years was Lyncoya, the young Indian whom General Jackson rescued from the Creek battlefield of Tallushatches in November, 1813. When this bloody battle was over, this year-old infant boy was found at the breast of his dead mother, lying on the field. The baby was brought by John Coffee to the tent of General Jackson who sought to have some of the surviving Indian women take it and nurse it. With savage indifference they refused to make any effort to save the baby’s life; indeed, they sullenly suggested that the baby might as well be killed since its parents had already been slaughtered by the whites. General Jackson, however, determined to take it upon himself to see that the little waif survived. Accordingly he had it fed regularly on brown sugar and water and bread crumbs, and on this rude fare it survived until it could be sent back to civilization and given proper diet and attention. First the baby was sent to Huntsville, to be cared for there by Colonel LeRoy Pope; and it was his daughter, so tradition says, who conferred the name Lyncoya on the child. At last the little Indian reached the Hermitage, and under the kindly Rachel’s care soon bloomed with health again. General Jackson had written home that he was sending the little Indian as a present to little Andrew—much as one would speak of sending a puppy or lamb or some other form of pet. “I wish to know if little Andrew got his little Lyncoya and what he thinks of him,” the General wrote later to Rachel; and in all of his subsequent letters home he had something to say about the derelict Indian baby. “How is Lyncoya?” he wrote to Rachel from Mobile late in 1814. “Although he is a heathen he is an orphan, and I know you will extend a motherly care over him.” And Rachel did.

The exact status of Lyncoya in the Hermitage menage is now not entirely clear. General Jackson probably shared the frontier sentiment that an Indian was just barely a human being, and at first he seems to have looked upon him as little more than a novel sort of pet for little Andrew. But the young redskin must have grown in Old Hickory’s affections, for in subsequent letters he refers to “my little sons, including Lyncoya,” and as soon as he was old enough he went to school along with the white boys. Lyncoya, according to tradition, soon showed signs of his racial origin: He decorated his head with turkey feathers, and with a bow and arrow that he made for himself he kept the chicken yard in an uproar. As he grew older, General Jackson’s plans for him grew more ambitious. In 1823 he wrote from Washington to Mrs. Jackson: “I would be delighted to receive a letter from our son, little Hutchings and even Lyncoya. The latter I would like to exhibit to Mr. Monroe and the Secretary of War, as I mean to have him received at the Military School as early as I can.” But by the time Lyncoya was old enough to enter the Military Academy the national administration had changed and Jackson’s enemies were in power. Accordingly, the General decided to have the young Indian learn a trade, and so took him to Nashville and carried him around town so that he could see with his own eyes men working in the various shops, and then let him decide which one was most attractive to him. Lyncoya for some reason (and by a strange coincidence, since Jackson himself had worked in his boyhood at the same trade) chose the shop of a saddler as the scene of his future labors. So he was apprenticed to a Nashville saddle maker in 1827; but it was his custom to spend his Sundays at the Hermitage, riding one of the General’s fine saddle horses to and from Nashville. The confinement of the shop, however, did not agree with him and within a year he fell ill with a heavy cold that settled on his lungs. He was given permission to go home to the Hermitage, where he was carefully nursed by Mrs. Jackson, but he grew gradually worse and died June 1, 1828—his being the first death to occur in the Hermitage. Just where he was buried nobody seems to know. At least one chronicle has stated that he was buried in the garden; but, if so, there is no sign of it. No stone there bears his name, and there is no unmarked grave in the family plot. It has also been suggested that he was probably buried in the slaves’ graveyard down in the thicket, back of the carriage house. But all this is mere conjecture.

Lyncoya must have been a problem to General Jackson who, in common with other pioneers, hated the Indians as a race, although he apparently had nothing but affection and pity for the forlorn individual he had brought to live under his own roof. That he trusted him implicity is shown by a brief note in Jackson’s handwriting now in the possession of a Nashville connection: “Mr. John Summerville will please send me by Lyncoya, who will hand him this, fifty dollars in small notes. Please enclose it under cover to me and oblige your friend Andrew Jackson.” Mr. Summerville lived in Nashville, and if Jackson had not had the greatest confidence in him he would never have sent a thirteen-year-old boy on that long, lonesome horseback ride to Nashville and back to get that money.

* * * *

An almost lifelong resident of the Hermitage, described by General Jackson as “my friend and companion” was Ralph E. W. Earl, the artist who married Mrs. Jackson’s niece. He was born in 1788, the son of Ralph Earl, an artist of distinction; and, following his father’s example, took up the profession of artist himself. He came to Nashville in 1816, and through painting Jackson’s portrait established an acquaintance with the General which ripened into lifelong friendship. One of his friends in a contemporaneous letter described him as “the very soul of goodness and honor”; and that seems to have been the general opinion of him.

While in Natchez exhibiting a portrait of Jackson which he had painted, Earl met Miss Jane Caffery, a daughter of Mrs. Jackson’s sister Mary, whom he married after a short courtship. Upon their return to Nashville they were invited to live at the Hermitage, and when Mrs. Earl died a few months afterwards, Jackson insisted that Earl continue his residence there. From then until his death he was the intimate friend of General Jackson, going to Washington with him when he was elected President, and accompanying him as a companion on most of his travels.

During the latter part of his life Earl spent most of his time painting portraits of Jackson, and came to be known in a jesting way as the “court painter.” It was intimated around political circles in Washington that Earl’s influence on the President was such that his friendship was a good thing to have; and it was hinted that Earl received many commissions to paint Jackson’s picture from practical men who were less interested in having a hand-painted portrait of the President than they were in currying favor with him. Be that as it may, Earl enjoyed painting the picture of his old friend and benefactor and Jackson enjoyed Earl’s companionship; so everybody was happy. Earl is described by his contemporaries as a man of quiet and gentle ways, and he must have been an excellent foil for the fiery old General.

That he was not without a streak of humor is shown by his skylarking when President Jackson left him in Washington when he returned to the Hermitage in the summer of 1836. He was entrusted with the duty, during Jackson’s absence, of opening the President’s mail and distributing the letters to the proper departments. Earl, with dry wit, remarked to Francis P. Blair that this would place on the Cabinet members the unusual responsibility of attending to their own duties; and there was a good deal of chaffing and carrying-on in the official family while the well-liked pseudo-President was occupying the chair in the White House office with mock gravity. Earl would joke the Cabinet members by seriously referring to them all of the incoherent letters of rattle-brained cranks, including an inventor of a perpetual motion machine who wrote him from the Philadelphia lunatic asylum; and when one of them jokingly objected to being so annoyed, Earl remarked that while he was sitting in the President’s chair he was tempted to go ahead and make some needed changes in the government and thus save Mr. Van Buren (the heir apparent) the trouble. Blair thought all of this great sport and wrote to Jackson back at the Hermitage telling him all about it. “He is thus playing the part of Sancho Panzo,” chuckled Blair, “with those whom he ventures to joke with, making some pretty good hits.” Jackson was never much of a hand for horse play and buffoonery; but if he had any objection to all this pranking of Colonel Earl’s he never voiced it.

Upon the expiration of Jackson’s term as President Earl returned to the Hermitage with him, but did not live long. In addition to being an artist he was also a dabbler in the art of landscape gardening. He had designed the concentric flower beds in the middle of the garden; and when Jackson in the summer of 1837 started to build the guitar-shaped driveway from the gate to the front door of the Hermitage it was Earl who drew the plans and helped supervise the work. The sun shines fiercely in Tennessee in early September, and while engaged in this work Earl suffered a heat stroke which passed into a congestive chill from which he never recovered. He died on September 16, 1838, leaving uncompleted a portrait on which he was working of Jackson in his major-general’s uniform. In writing to his former secretary, Nicholas P. Trist, notifying him of Earl’s death Jackson said: “His death is a severe bereavement to me. He was my sincere friend and constant companion, and when I was able to travel always accompanied me. He was an invaluable friend, a most upright and honest man; but he is gone to happier climes than these ‘where the wicked cease to trouble and the weary are at rest.’” Earl was buried in the family plot in the corner of the garden, and Jackson made his little niche in history secure by directing that there be engraved on his headstone the words: “Friend and companion of General Andrew Jackson.”

In the journal of a Nashville citizen of that era, Mr. Matthew Delamere Cooper, the funeral of Colonel Earl is commemorated in a quaint and touching poem which he has entitled “The Burial,” in introducing which he says: “That the following lines may be understood it is necessary to mention that they were written on the occasion of the burial of Colonel Earl, a portrait painter of considerable eminence, for many years the intimate friend of General Jackson and long an inmate of the General’s house. He was followed to the grave by a few friends, amongst them the venerable hero, who did honor to his memory and consecrated the accumulating heap over his remains by a few tears that would not be represt. The man of iron soul, the hero of a hundred battles, wept over his departed friend! He was buried near a weeping willow and within a few feet of the cenotaph destined to receive the mortal remains of Andrew Jackson. (May it long be an empty tomb!!)”