Andrew Jackson

by H. W. Brands

  The founders of the state of Franklin agreed with the famous doctor on the importance of the West and the Mississippi, and in August 1784 they sent delegates to Jonesboro, on the Nolichucky River, to discuss their grievances against North Carolina and the United States. The delegates voted unanimously to establish a state government. Four months later a constitutional convention drafted a charter for Franklin.

  But then the republican spirit ran into the capitalist spirit. Among the Franklinites were a substantial number of speculators, who sought a state government primarily to secure titles to land. When the speculators began fighting among themselves, Franklin’s progress toward statehood stalled. It didn’t help matters that the Franklinites received no encouragement from Congress, which would ultimately have to ratify their handiwork. For a few years Franklin operated a land office and conducted diplomacy with Indian tribes, but neither its land titles nor its Indian treaties carried weight with anyone besides those directly involved. When Congress, following adoption of the federal Constitution, created the Southwest Territory in 1790, the state of Franklin vanished into the mists of the Smoky Mountains.

  Yet the sentiments that gave rise to Franklin weren’t so easily dispelled. Since the voyage of the Donelson party, the inhabitants of the western region had wondered whether geography didn’t dictate that their future lay with whatever country controlled the Mississippi. And when John Jay, in defiance of Benjamin Franklin’s dictum about front doors, proposed a treaty with Spain that would have ceded control of the Mississippi to the Spanish, the westerners were outraged. Some tried to block the treaty; others discussed joining the enemy. The latter group commenced clandestine talks with Spanish officials, offering to lead a secession movement that would take the West out of the Union and into the Spanish empire.

  James Wilkinson was the most active of the pro-Spanish conspirators. In 1787 he loaded two flatboats with farm produce and floated to New Orleans, where he sold his cargo for a hefty profit. This aspect of his journey drew the notice of all upstream, who had wondered how their goods would be received at the Spanish port. But commerce was Wilkinson’s cover for a deeper game. While in New Orleans he secretly renounced his American citizenship and swore fealty to the king of Spain, and he proposed a scheme for detaching the trans-Appalachian districts from the United States and attaching them to Spain’s dominions. America’s westerners, he said, were desperate for access to the Mississippi and New Orleans. They would seek the protection of whatever government could guarantee them this. “The leading characters of Kentucky . . . ,” he told Estevan Miró and Martín Navarro, respectively the Spanish governor and commandant at New Orleans, “urged and entreated my voyage hither in order to develop if possible the disposition of Spain towards their country and to discover, if practicable, whether she would be willing to open a negotiation for our admission to her protections as subjects.” Wilkinson dissembled here; the separation scheme was his idea. Nor did he want it shared, even with—or especially with—those leading characters of Kentucky until it was a fait accompli. “Gentlemen,” he concluded to Miró and Navarro, “I have committed secrets of an important nature, such was would, if they were divulged, destroy my fame and fortune forever. . . . If the plan should eventually be rejected by the Court, I must rely on the candor and high honor of a dignified minister to bury these communications in eternal oblivion.”

  Miró and Navarro passed Wilkinson’s proposal to the viceroy of New Spain, who in turn forwarded it to the Spanish government. The council of state considered the plan with interest but decided not to press the matter “until the Kentuckians attain the independence from the United States to which they aspire.” Meanwhile, though, the separatists should be encouraged in commerce and other activities that fostered separation. And Wilkinson should be given a “hope of remuneration” to keep him interested.

  These matters took many months, and by the time Wilkinson got the reply to his first proposal, the United States had a new constitution and a more assertive government. Though neither was popular west of the mountains, each possessed sufficient novelty to make many Kentuckians want to wait and see what became of them. This complicated Wilkinson’s plan. He judged it politic to push independence for the West rather than attachment to Spain. The latter might draw Spain into war with the United States or Britain or both, and in such a war Spain could never defend its new acquisition. Western independence, on the other hand, would be less provocative and almost equally to Spain’s purpose. “That section of the country,” Wilkinson said, in a second memorial to the Spanish government, “bound by its own interests, would still continue to serve as a barrier for Louisiana and Mexico as fully as if it were under the jurisdiction of Spain.” To facilitate the separation, Spain should make covert payments to influential individuals; Wilkinson helpfully supplied a list of recipients and appropriate amounts, ranging from five hundred to two thousand dollars. For himself he asked seven thousand dollars. He again stressed the need for discretion, lest discovery of his plan “expose me to great embarrassment.”

  Miró and the Spanish could keep secrets. Not for decades would Wilkinson’s Spanish connection cause him the embarrassment he feared, and then because Andrew Jackson made a point of calling him on it. Meanwhile Wilkinson secretly collected a pension from the Spanish government and openly encouraged the settlers of the Cumberland to name their neighborhood the Mero District, in misspelled honor of the Spanish governor.

  It was to the Mero District that Andrew Jackson relocated about the time the Spanish court answered Wilkinson’s first proposal. The open agitation for the state of Franklin and the veiled discussions with Spain caused North Carolina to reconsider its cession of its western lands, and after talks with some of the inhabitants of the interior it reasserted its jurisdiction and established institutions of governance. Foremost of these institutions was a court, with power to punish crime, compel payment of debts, and otherwise bring order to the frontier. The court required a judge, and the judge a solicitor, or prosecutor. Neither post was a plum. Each appealed chiefly to lawyers lacking profitable practice in the East. Jackson perhaps hoped for the judgeship, but it went to his Salisbury roommate John McNairy, who had better political connections. Yet McNairy tapped Jackson for the solicitor’s job. In the summer of 1788 the judge and the prosecutor prepared to travel to Nashville, the town that had grown up near the Big Salt Lick and that served as capital of the Mero District.

  Conditions of travel had improved in the eight years since the Donelson party’s voyage but not by much. Though the Cumberland had been settled, the two hundred miles of wilderness that separated it from Jonesboro remained almost as howling as ever. Wild animals roamed freely, and Indians attacked those intruders for whom they had no use. McNairy and Jackson reached Jonesboro without incident, but they waited there for reinforcements before pushing farther west.

  Perhaps his impatience to be at his new post made Jackson touchy. Perhaps he felt that a prosecutor needed to establish a reputation for brooking no slights. Perhaps the sensitivity of the skinny, fatherless child who had to battle for everything in life simply pushed to the surface. Whatever the reason, Jackson in Jonesboro precipitated his first duel. Waightstill Avery was a graduate of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), a distinguished veteran of the Revolutionary War, and one of the most respected attorneys in North Carolina. In fact, Jackson had applied to apprentice with Avery but been turned down. At Jonesboro the two men—the dean of the North Carolina bar and the rank novice—took opposite sides in a civil suit. Unsurprisingly, Jackson found himself overmatched. “The cause was going against him, and he became irritable,” Avery’s son recalled later. “My father rather exultingly ridiculed some legal position taken by Jackson, using, as he afterwards admitted, language more sarcastic than was called for. It stung Jackson, who snatched up a pen, and on the blank leaf of a law book wrote a peremptory challenge, which he delivered there and then.”

  Avery didn’t take the courtroom challenge serio
usly, so Jackson reiterated it the next day. “When a man’s feelings and character are injured he ought to seek a speedy redress,” he wrote Avery. “You received a few lines from me yesterday, and undoubtedly you understand me. My character you have injured, and further you have insulted me in the presence of a court and a large audience. I therefore call upon you as a gentleman to give me satisfaction.” Lest he be brushed off again, Jackson specified the time and place: “This evening after court adjourned.”

  “My father was no duelist,” Avery’s son said. “In fact, he was opposed to the principle, but with his antecedents, in that age and country, to have declined would have been to have lost caste.” Avery said nothing to Jackson in court about the challenge, yet as soon as the trial went to the jury, he sought a man to act as his second. This fellow arranged the details with a man Jackson had engaged for the same purpose. The parties met in a low-lying area north of Jonesboro after sunset. By now Jackson’s anger had cooled, and he apparently acceded to the advice of the seconds that honor would be assuaged even if no blood flowed. At any rate, after Jackson and Avery stepped off the agreed-upon distance, they fired and both deliberately missed. “General Jackson acknowledged himself satisfied,” Avery’s son concluded. “They shook hands, and were friendly ever after.”

  By early October 1788 enough emigrants had gathered at Jonesboro to risk the journey west. The state of North Carolina, hoping to demonstrate its concern for the Mero District (and thereby neutralize some of the secessionist sentiment), had enlisted a special squadron of armed guards to travel with the emigrants through the most dangerous stretches of the wilderness. The guards had particular instructions to ensure the safe arrival at Nashville of Judge McNairy and Solicitor Jackson. To lose the court’s charter officers to Indians would have been very bad for civic morale.

  Sixty families made the trek. The road was too narrow and stump-strewn to accommodate four-wheeled vehicles, and even the two-wheeled oxcarts a few of the emigrants drove had a difficult time. Most of the travelers’ goods were packed on horses, mules, or the travelers themselves. “I had my saddlehorse—a fine young stallion—and a stout pack-mare carrying my personal effects,” Jackson recalled. “These were my spare clothes, blankets, etc., half a dozen books, with small quantities of ammunition, tea, tobacco, liquor, and salt.” For arms he carried a pair of pistols in saddle holsters, a pistol worn on his belt, and a new rifle.

  Jackson almost had occasion to use his guns. On guard one night he heard owls in the forest beyond the halo of light cast by the campfire. He listened carefully, for he had heard owls before, but none quite like these. Suddenly he decided they weren’t owls at all, but Indians preparing to attack. He awoke some members of the party who had local knowledge, and they agreed that the birds sounded suspicious. Quietly but quickly the party broke camp and took to the road. Later Jackson and the others learned that a group of hunters had occupied their camp shortly after Jackson’s party left, and been attacked by Indians, with fatal results.

  At the end of October 1788, Jackson’s train reached the bend in the Cumberland where Donelson had ordered his boats ashore. Nashville by this time boasted a handful of stores and taverns, a distillery, and an eclectic array of log cabins, horse sheds, and chicken coops. Jackson didn’t record his first impressions. Possibly he compared it with the towns farther east and wondered what he had got himself into. Perhaps, on the other hand, he detected opportunity in the very rawness of the place. He had turned twenty-one the previous spring, and he was commencing his majority with no advantages but his native intelligence and his ambition. Nashville was half his age, but it too relied on wit and drive, in this case of its few hundred inhabitants. The young man and the younger community made a likely couple.

  John Donelson was dead by the time Andrew Jackson reached Nashville, but no one could say quite how he had died. He had planted his family on a Cumberland farm they called Clover Bottom for the lush meadow that sprang from the black, flood-deposited earth. Yet Donelson and his boys had only just got their first corn crop in the ground when the river made another deposit, burying the crop and forcing the family to higher elevation. Subsequent Indian troubles discouraged a return to Clover Bottom, and the Donelsons beat a temporary retreat into Kentucky. They were back on the Cumberland by 1785, when Donelson installed his wife, Katherine, and the children who hadn’t yet left home in a log house ten miles from Nashville. He farmed during the summer and took odd jobs during the winter. Among those jobs was surveying for speculators hoping to turn a profit on western lands. He was surveying in the woods not far from Nashville when he met a violent death. As Indians were still very active in the area, they initially appeared the likely culprits. Yet examination of the corpse revealed that it retained its scalp but not its wallet, and suspicion fell on white highwaymen. They were never found, though, and the mystery was never solved.

  During the next few years the Donelson children continued to scatter. But one returned to the nest. Rachel Donelson was described by a contemporary as possessing a “beautifully molded form, lustrous black eyes, dark glossy hair, full red lips, brunette complexion, though of brilliant coloring, a sweet oval face rippling with smiles and dimples.” She must have been alluring, for she had no trouble attracting admirers, starting with Lewis Robards. Rachel and Robards (apparently pronounced “Roberts,” to judge by the frequent misspellings to that effect) met during the Donelsons’ sojourn in Kentucky. They married not long after her seventeenth birthday and stayed behind when John and Katherine took the other children back to the Cumberland. For a time the young couple got on well, living with Robards’s widowed mother, who grew attached to her daughter-in-law. But when the widow Robards took in a boarder named Peyton Short, trouble developed. Short found Rachel attractive, and she appreciated his gallantries. Probably these were mere flirtations, but Robards became jealous. He accused Rachel of unfaithfulness and Short of cuckolding him. Rachel protested her innocence, and Robards’s mother told him to calm down. But he refused to be mollified. He cast his wife from his—or rather his mother’s—house and sent her packing for the Cumberland.

  Rachel reached Nashville about the same time Andrew Jackson did. The new solicitor required housing and upon inquiry learned that Mrs. Donelson would be happy for a lodger. She could use the money, but, more important, she wanted the protection a male would provide. In Indian country every gun helped.

  Jackson bunked in a small cabin a short distance from the main house on the Donelson property. Before long he acquired a roommate, John Overton. Like Jackson, Overton was a lawyer; he would go on to a distinguished career at the Tennessee bar. He had been a boarder at the widow Robards’s house in Kentucky when Rachel and Lewis Robards were living there. He saw the rift develop between husband and wife, and after Rachel returned to her mother’s home, he watched Robards grow lonely and remorseful. The widow Robards, upset at the loss of her daughter-in-law and convinced that her son had seen his error, asked Overton to intercede. “The old lady told me he regretted what had taken place, and wished to be reconciled to his wife,” Overton recalled. Overton insisted on hearing it from Robards. “He assured me of his regret respecting what had passed; that he was convinced his suspicions were unfounded; that he wished to live with his wife, and requested that I would use my exertions to restore harmony.” Overton then set out for Nashville and reached the Donelson place a few weeks after Jackson moved in.

  His mediation worked. Rachel was almost as unhappy at the separation as Robards was. She may have still loved him, but in addition she confronted a dismal future as an abandoned wife. Divorce was difficult to obtain in those days, requiring a special act of the legislature, which in turn required having, or cultivating, influential friends. As her wedding had taken place in Kentucky, which was still a part of Virginia, freedom from Robards necessitated traveling across the mountains to Richmond or hiring someone to make the trip. At a minimum the process would consume years and more money than Rachel could easily spare. As events wou
ld prove, Rachel didn’t know all the details of obtaining a divorce. But she knew it wouldn’t be easy, and it might well be impossible, especially if Robards fought it. So when he related, through Overton, that he wanted a reconciliation, she consented. He traveled from Kentucky to join her.

  Robards owned a piece of land on the south bank of the Cumberland, several miles from the Donelson home. He intended that he and Rachel should make their home there, but in the meantime he lived with Rachel in Mrs. Donelson’s house. He came to know Andrew Jackson, as Jackson and Overton took their meals with Robards, Rachel, and Mrs. Donelson.

  But Robards’s old suspicions resurfaced. “Not many months elapsed before Robards became jealous of Jackson,” Overton remembered. Overton thought the jealousy reflected the fevered state of Robards’s mind rather than anything objective—and objectionable—between Jackson and Rachel. Overton wasn’t unbiased between Robards and Jackson; at the time he told his story he and Jackson had been friends for almost forty years. But their friendship was grounded in his assessment of Jackson’s character, which Overton knew as well as anyone, starting with their time at Mrs. Donelson’s, where they “lived in the cabin room and slept in the same bed,” as Overton put it. “As young men of the same pursuits and profession, with but few others in the county with whom to associate, besides sharing, as we frequently did, common dangers, such an intimacy ensued as might reasonably be expected.”