American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  No matter what happened after he left the White House, though, Jackson’s legend grew. In January 1840, Mrs. C. M. Stephens passed along a rumor to Stockley Donelson’s wife, Phila Ann, from Cuba. “It was reported that Gen. Jackson was expected at Havana and it created quite a sensation. There are many here who would delight to see him.” In June of that year, Leonidas Polk, now the Episcopal missionary bishop to the Southwest, wrote to his mother from Ashwood, his plantation in Maury County, Tennessee. “I was in Nashville the other day … where I met Genl. Jackson. He looks very well and is very spirited yet.” George P. A. Healy, an American artist living in Paris, had been sent to the United States to paint Jackson and others—including Henry Clay, whom the painter was to meet after finishing the image of Jackson. Healy overstayed his time at the Hermitage. When Healy at last appeared at Ashland, Clay said: “I see that you, like all who approached that man, were fascinated by him.”

  TRY AS HE might, however, not even Jackson could defeat mortality. In the late spring of 1845 he began his final decline. A niece wrote to Stockley Donelson of “our poor old grey headed Uncle Jackson.” Sarah Jackson kept watch over him. “He is swollen all over, sometimes his face is out of all shape, and his sufferings are very great,” she wrote Emma Donelson, her cousin, on Wednesday, April 30, 1845. In a postscript dictated by Jackson, he added: “My health is very low. I am compelled to employ an amanuensis, not being able today to sit up much.” A few weeks later, Sarah told Emma that Jackson “still continues about the same as when I last wrote, excepting a very troublesome diarrhea, which produces at times violent pain. He is still able to sit up part of the day, but is very feeble, and very much changed.”

  On Sunday, May 25, 1845, he was too sick to go to the Hermitage church, and asked that the family bring the minister back to him after services. They did, and, surrounding his bed on the first floor of the house, they watched as he took Holy Communion. Jackson was stoic about his death; he felt, Andrew Jackson, Jr., wrote, “that it was not far distant” and “he had no fears of it, let it come when it might.” The old warrior spoke of Jesus as he would have a comrade in arms; he was impressed by the Christian Messiah’s physical courage in enduring the Crucifixion. “When I have suffered sufficiently,” Andrew junior recalled Jackson saying, “the Lord will then take me to himself, but what are all my sufferings compared to those of the blessed Savior, who died upon that crossed tree for me. Mine are nothing—not a murmur was ever heard from him—all was borne with amazing fortitude.” At midnight a few days later, Sarah, at his bedside, asked how he felt, and he replied that “I cannot be long with you all,” and told her to reach out to Major Lewis to arrange the funeral. “I wish to be buried in a plain, unostentatious manner without display or pomp, or any superfluous expense,” he said, and fell asleep.

  He died as he had lived, fighting the world’s battles. In the days before his death he spoke of things close to his heart. Texas remained a question, and there were tensions between London and Washington over the Oregon territory. “He conversed generally about his farm and business and talked much of his beloved country,” Andrew junior recalled. He was sure Texas would come into the Union and hoped the Oregon matter would be settled peaceably. But if not, his son recalled Jackson saying, “let war come. There would be patriots enough in the land found to repel foreign invasion come from whatsoever source.”

  HE SENT VALEDICTORIES to his old friends. “My dear Andrew,” he wrote Andrew Donelson, who was in Texas as chargé, “you have my blessing and prayers for your welfare and happiness in this world.” To Blair, Jackson wrote: “This may be the last letter I may be able to write you. But live or [die I am your] friend.… As far as justice is due to my fame, I know you will shield it. I ask no more. I rest upon truth, and require nothing but what truth can mete to me.” To Kendall, he said: “On the subject of my papers: You are to retain them so long as you think necessary to use them. Should you die they are to pass forthwith into Mr. Blair’s hands. I have full and unlimited confidence in you, both that my papers will be safe in your hands and that they never will be permitted to be used but for a proper use.… Here, my friend, I must for the present close, tendering you with my prayers for your health, long life and prosperity, and that we may at last meet in a blissful immortality.” On Friday, June 6, he wrote President Polk, who had won the White House in 1844, a letter with advice about the Treasury Department; the next evening, Saturday, the seventh, he finished and franked his last letter, a note to Thomas F. Marshall, a congressman from Kentucky. At one point Jackson broke into what Andrew junior called “cold, clammy perspiration, an evidence of death approaching,” and the attending doctor thought Jackson was gone. The sad word spread through the household, only to have the old man revive after ten minutes.

  The next day, Lewis arrived. “Major, I am glad to see you,” Jackson said. “You had like to have been too late.”

  He continued to defy expectations. Andrew Donelson’s wife, Elizabeth, had hurried over from the Hermitage church, expecting to find Jackson dead. Instead, he looked up at her and asked how everyone was at home. She said all was well. “I am glad to hear it,” Jackson replied.

  John Samuel Donelson, who had been born in the White House in 1832, approached his uncle to say farewell. “Johnny went and kissed him,” his stepmother wrote his father, and Jackson told the boy “to be a good boy and obey his parents, to remember the Sabbath and to keep it.”

  Unable to make out the faces of those in the bedroom in the late afternoon light, Jackson asked for his spectacles, which were on his bureau. He licked the lenses, dried them on his sheet, and put them on. Seeing the children and grandchildren in tears, he said, “God will take care of you for me.” He was speaking not only to his relations and the children, but to the slaves who had gathered in the room to mark the end. Jackson said: “Do not cry; I hope to meet you all in Heaven—yes, all in Heaven, white and black.”

  Near death, Jackson sought comfort in the promises of the faith he had embraced in retirement. “My conversation is for you all,” he said, and then renewed his talk of the world to come. “Christ has no respect to color,” Jackson said. “I am in God and God is in me. He dwelleth in me and I dwell in him.”

  The emotion in the room grew thicker. “What is the matter with my dear children?” Jackson asked. “Have I alarmed you? Oh, do not cry. Be good children and we will all meet in Heaven.”

  He asked one of the slaves, George, to remove two of the three pillows beneath his head: having said all that he had to say, he was ready. The room was still. “Just then,” Hannah said, “Master gave one breath, hunched up his shoulders and all was over. There was no struggle.”

  It was six o’clock in the evening, on Sunday, June 8, 1845, and Andrew Jackson, seventy-eight years old, older even than the nation, was dead.

  SARAH SUFFERED WHAT Elizabeth Donelson called “spasms,” fainted, and had to be carried out to be bathed in camphor while Andrew junior “seemed bewildered.” Hannah, in grief, would not leave the room.

  “Although it was looked for, the shock is great, and grief universal,” Elizabeth Donelson wrote her husband. She told him, too, that she would hold on to a note he had written Jackson that arrived after the end—the last of so many, through so many years, through so much. “Yours to the Genl I will keep,” Elizabeth wrote. “He will never see it.”

  With those five words—“he will never see it”—the long connection between Andrew Jackson and one of his many namesakes, Andrew Jackson Donelson, ended, coming to a close in the heat of an early summer Sunday in Tennessee. Donelson could not make the funeral in time. He remained in Texas, at work to fulfill the old dream of his uncle’s, that Texas would one day join the Union. Sam Houston, who had just left Donelson, arrived at the Hermitage on the night Jackson died. He had brought his wife and son, and, after kneeling at the bed where Jackson lay, Houston turned to his boy.

  “My son,” he said, “try to remember that you have looked on the face of Andrew Jacks
on.”

  JACKSON’S FUNERAL DREW a reported three thousand people to the Hermitage. The Reverend John Todd Edgar conducted the service from the front portico, looking out over the twin rows of native Tennessee Eastern red cedar trees that Jackson had planted along the carriage drive. He preached on a verse from the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, “These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” The Ninetieth Psalm was read, and hymns were sung, including “How Firm a Foundation, Ye Saints of the Lord,” a favorite of Rachel’s:

  Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed,

  For I am thy God and will still give thee aid;

  I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand

  Upheld by My righteous, omnipotent hand.

  When through the deep waters I call thee to go,

  The rivers of woe shall not thee overflow;

  For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,

  And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.

  IN KENTUCKY, Thomas Marshall returned home from traveling in his former congressional district to find Jackson’s letter to him. Marshall was moved, he wrote Andrew Jackson, Jr., to see “the last characters his hand ever drew,” as Marshall put it. Recalling this souvenir of “the dying Hero,” Marshall promised to visit the grave in the autumn. “He knew how deeply he had impressed himself upon my whole soul,” Marshall wrote of Jackson.

  In Washington, the historian and statesman George Bancroft painted him as an epic figure. “Before the nation, before the world, before coming ages, he stands forth the representative, for his generation, of the American mind.”

  In New York City, Benjamin Butler, the former attorney general, said, “Sleep sweetly, aged soldier, statesman, sage, in the grave of kindred and affection.”

  In Nashville, according to legend, a visitor to the Hermitage asked a slave on the place whether he thought Jackson had gone to heaven. “If the General wants to go,” the slave replied, “who’s going to stop him?”

  FROM STATE TO state, courthouse square to courthouse square, Jackson’s eulogizers loved the theme of the childless hero who rose to project paternal authority over a nation. “Washington was the father of his country, Jackson its defender and savior,” said Hugh A. Garland, a lawyer, author, and legislator, in a Petersburg, Virginia, address a month after Jackson was buried. “Neither having natural children of their own, they embrace[d] the whole country in the arms of their affection.” And what became of those whom Jackson embraced more intimately even than the country—the advisers and friends who saw him through?

  Francis Preston Blair remained a crucial figure in the capital for decades after Jackson’s death. Blair gave up the Globe in 1845, shortly before Jackson’s death, after President Polk decided he wanted his own editor in charge of the party organ. (The paper closed in April 1845, and Polk’s cause was taken up by the Washington Union, which Andrew Donelson edited for a time.) Always generous with the Jackson family financially, Blair had loaned Jackson $10,000 in 1842, and continued to try to help the perennially hapless Andrew Jackson, Jr., eventually playing a key role in the sale of the Hermitage to the state of Tennessee. Blair’s son James brought three cedar chests full of Jackson’s papers from the Hermitage for safekeeping, but Blair did not produce the Jacksonian tome he had hoped. In politics, Blair became a great Unionist, ultimately coming to believe that the slavoc-racy embodied by the old Jacksonian enemy Calhoun was going to destroy the nation. In 1848 Blair helped engineer the Free Soil nomination of Van Buren for president, in hopes of ending the extension of slavery as new states were added to the Union. In 1860, Blair supported Lincoln as the Republican nominee; the next year, he urged the new president to stand strong at Fort Sumter.

  On Lincoln’s authority, Blair invited Robert E. Lee to his family home across from the White House to offer the Virginian the Union command. “Mr. Blair,” Lee said to Jackson’s ancient lieutenant, “I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four million of slaves at the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?” Blair’s Silver Spring, Maryland, country house was occupied by Confederate troops. One of his sons, Montgomery Blair, served as Lincoln’s postmaster general, and is depicted with Lincoln and the rest of the Cabinet in Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s painting of Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation; a portrait of Jackson hangs in the background. In the last days of 1864, in part at the suggestion of the Republican newspaperman Horace Greeley, Blair asked Lincoln for permission to travel to the Confederacy on a secret peace mission. On Wednesday, December 28, Lincoln authorized the journey with a card: “Allow the bearer, F. P. Blair, Sr., to pass our lines, go South, and return.” Blair reached Richmond through the good offices of General U. S. Grant and met with Jefferson Davis. Slavery, Blair told Davis, had been “the cause of all our woes,” and that argument was settled. It was, Blair said, “the sin offering required to absolve us and put an end to the terrible retribution” of the war. Back in Washington, Blair reported on his meeting, and Lincoln told Blair that he would “receive any agent whom [Davis], or any other influential person now resisting the national authority, may informally send to me, with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.” The result was a Friday, February 3, 1865, conversation between Lincoln, Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, and others aboard a ship at Hampton Roads. Nothing came of the effort, but it was a noble one.

  Blair and his daughter Lizzie were constant in their attentions to Mary Todd Lincoln in the aftermath of the assassination at Ford’s Theatre, and Blair was present when Andrew Johnson was sworn in as the seventeenth president of the United States. In 1872 Blair asked to be baptized, and an Episcopal bishop performed the rite at Silver Spring—and then the baptismal party dined on ducks, oysters, and ice cream. Blair died four years later, on Wednesday, October 18, 1876. The New York Times noted that he had been “slashing and fierce upon occasion, and his whole political training had been aggressive and belligerent”—yet, the Times added, he was “in character amiable, affectionate, and grateful. The man and the editor were as dissimilar as possible.”

  Martin Van Buren served a single term as president of the United States. The architect of so much in the years of Jackson and beyond, he was a terrific tactician and embodied the notion that politics is the art of the possible. After leaving the White House he returned to Kinderhook, New York, retiring to Lindenwald, a richly furnished estate with large lawns and a farm. Van Buren twice sought to regain the presidency, once as the candidate for the Free Soil Party. He supported President Lincoln’s fight to save the Union, and died after a long illness in the second summer of the Civil War, on Friday, July 24, 1862. “The grief of his patriotic friends will measurably be assuaged by the consciousness that while suffering with disease and seeing his end approaching,” said Lincoln, “his prayers were for the restoration of the authority of the government of which he had been head, and for peace and good will among his fellow citizens.”

  Amos Kendall stayed on as Van Buren’s postmaster general, leaving office in 1840. He remained in close contact with Jackson and published a biography of the general in 1843. In 1845 Kendall went to work for Samuel F. B. Morse, the pioneer of the electromagnetic telegraph in the United States. A Unionist, Kendall supported President Lincoln during the Civil War; he was a generous donor to Calvary Baptist Church in Washington and a founder of Gallaudet University, the school for the deaf (and, initially, for the blind) in the capital. He died on Friday, November 12, 1869, and was buried at Glenwood Cemetery in Washington.

  After losing the Senate election in Tennessee in the wake of his resignation from the War Department and returning to Washington with his wife, John Henry Eaton was briefly president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company before accepting an appointment from Jackson to serve as governor of the Florida territory. Margaret remained Margaret. “Our fr
iend John Eaton is harassed to death by a very sick hypochondriac wife,” a friend told Martin Van Buren. In 1836 Eaton was dispatched as the minister to Spain. The man he was replacing, Cornelius Van Ness, was harsh about the Eatons in his reports home, writing that “he and she together regularly dispose of two bottles of rum of the strongest kind in the spirit every three days; this is, four glasses each and every day, besides wine; and while they are taking it and he chewing, she smokes her cigars.” Eaton’s years at Madrid—President Van Buren left him in the post until April 1840—were undistinguished. When Eaton returned to the United States, he committed the greatest sin in the Jacksonian universe: he betrayed an old friend, Van Buren, by campaigning for Van Buren’s 1840 opponent, William Henry Harrison. The primary cause, Jackson believed, was bitterness. “My friend Maj. Eaton comes home not in good humor, he says he has been dismissed,” Jackson told Kendall.

  Moving to Washington, where the couple lived with Margaret’s mother, Eaton practiced law before the Supreme Court and served as president of the Washington Bar Association. His old friends, though, found that he drank too much and seemed unstable. He even accepted a case against Kendall, his old ally and defender. “Never did I so much regret the ingratitude and depravity of man more than I have the course of Major Eaton in his conduct towards you.… He is a lost man … trying to destroy the fame of those who had risked much in the time of his need to save him and his family from degradation and infamy.… O tempora, O mores!” Jackson told Kendall. His brother-in-law from his first marriage, William Lewis, also gave up on him. “I have thought ever since he returned from Spain that he would kill himself drinking or perhaps blow his brains out,” Lewis said in 1846. In the summer of 1844, in a moment of reconciliation, Jackson and the Eatons had dined together at the Hermitage, but the fervor of the friendship had long faded, a relic of distant wars. Eaton died on Monday, November 17, 1856, and was buried in Washington’s Oak Hill Cemetery.