Presidential House Retrospective: A Pennsylvania Yankee in King Andrew's Court

If James Monroe is Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle, then Andrew Jackson is Clint Eastwood, specifically Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. He’s mean, he’s tough, he doesn’t suffer fools, he’s really unstable, and yet you kind of like him. Intellectually, I realize that Andrew Jackson had a lot of unsavory qualities and made many damaging decisions, but I can’t help but admire many aspects of his personality.

By the age of fourteen he was already orphaned and in the militia during the Revolutionary War. He was captured by the British and ordered to clean a British commander’s boots, and his refusal won him a saber slash to the forehead. Thus began Andrew Jackson’s intense hatred of the British, which would spur him on to major victories against the British during the War of 1812. His campaigns during the war also demonstrated his undeniable leadership ability. During the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson led a ragtag group of militia men and pirates to victory against superior British forces. Getting this group of misfits not to kill each other would have been impressive; leading them to victory is almost miraculous.

Andrew Jackson continued to live a miraculous life-- miraculous in that it was a miracle he survived it. In a time when a toothache could kill you, Jackson survived a slew of incidents that would have easily ended in death for almost anyone else. Many of these near death experiences stemmed from problems in his love-life. When Jackson fell in love with and married a young divorcee named Rachel Robards, it later turned out she wasn’t quite as divorced as she had thought. At the time, only a man could petition for divorce, so Rachel had to rely on her estranged, jealous husband to grant her a divorce. Everything eventually got sorted out, but the damage was done. When a man named Charles Dickinson published some unsavory comments about Mrs. Jackson in a newspaper and finished his statement with a challenge to a duel, Jackson accepted, despite knowing Dickinson was a deadly shot. Jackson let Dickinson shoot first, and took a bullet to the chest that could never be removed because it was too close to his heart. He then raised his pistol, aimed, and fired, shooting Dickinson dead. All told, Jackson engaged in as many as 44 duels over his lifetime. In his old age, he quipped that he “rattled like a bag of marbles.”

I can’t help but admire that sort of toughness, so I was excited to visit The Hermitage, his home for over 40 years. We arrived in Nashville on a sweltering midsummer day. Even with the almost unbearable heat the visitor center was crawling with people. Walking into his stately plantation, I expected to enter an inner sanctum of machismo. Surely the house would positively reek of the tough life of our illustrious seventh president.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The walls were covered in narrative wallpaper based on classical myths which the tour guides assured us was authentic multiple times. While I can appreciate this as a feat of historic preservation, the Hermitage was home to the second most horrifying wallpaper I have ever seen (first place goes to a home in historic Deerfield, MA that depicted the death of Captain Cook at the hands of Hawaiian cannibals. Seriously.) A vast majority of the items in the house were original, which the tour guides are very proud of, as well they should be.

The house was large, spacious, and quite feminine. This was no doubt the influence of his daughter-in-law, whose tastes ran towards the expensive. Jackson and his wife adopted three children: Andrew Jackson, Jr., the the son of her sister (his twin stayed with his birth parents), a Native American boy named Theodore about whom little is known, and an orphaned Creek boy with the best name ever, Lyncoya Jackson. He also served as the guardian to eight other children. I never thought of Jackson as a family man, but standing in the Hermitage, you can imagine the laughter of children sailing in from the backyard.

The most affecting part of the tour was Rachel Jackson’s grave, which is located in the garden next to the house. She died a short time before Jackson’s inauguration, and he believed she was killed by the stress of a messy campaign which prominently featured her checkered past. On her tombstone is a epitaph written by Jackson: "Her face was fair, her person pleasing, her temper amiable, and her heart kind. She delighted in relieving the wants of her fellow-creatures,and cultivated that divine pleasure by the most liberal and unpretending methods. To the poor she was a benefactress; to the rich she was an example; to the wretched a comforter; to the prosperous an ornament. Her pity went hand in hand with her benevolence; and she thanked her Creator for being able to do good. A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound but could not dishonor. Even death, when he tore her from the arms of her husband, could but transplant her to the bosom of her God.”

I tend to think of Andrew Jackson as a wild man who lived a rough and tumble life, but The Hermitage showed his gentler side. Jackson may have been capable of extreme violence, but he was also capable of deep love. He may have been known as a dominating presidential personality, but when it came to decorating his home, he deferred to the judgment of the women in his life. Still, I wonder sometimes whether he was tempted to shoot the wallpaper right off the walls.