by H. W. Brands
Most wars are fought by fits and starts; “hurry up and wait” has been the soldier’s motto for centuries. America’s War of 1812 fit the pattern, especially in the West. Jackson had been out of touch during the month of the voyage, but on reaching Natchez he received a letter from James Wilkinson, who commanded American forces in the West from headquarters in New Orleans. Jackson still distrusted Wilkinson; if Burr’s accomplice had been in cahoots with the Spanish, why not with the British? Jackson’s doubts disposed him to read Wilkinson’s letter with close skepticism, especially once he caught its gist. Wilkinson ordered Jackson to remain at Natchez till further notice. The British hadn’t arrived on the coast, Wilkinson explained, and so the services of the Tennessee volunteers weren’t required there. Moreover, positive reasons existed for keeping the soldiers’ distance from the lower river, starting with the hazard to their health as the warm season neared and the possibility that their services would be required in Florida, to which approach was easier from Natchez than from New Orleans. Wilkinson’s tone was reasonable and respectful. He gave no hint of having heard all the nasty things Jackson had said about him regarding the Burr conspiracy. “If it is in my power to add to the comfort and accommodation of the band of patriots under your orders, it is only necessary to point out the mode to me,” he told Jackson.
Jackson doubtless scanned this letter several times for evidence of ulterior motives. If Wilkinson possessed them, they weren’t to be found here, and Jackson had no choice but to acquiesce in the army general’s directive. He did point out that it contradicted previous orders from Washington, “the substance of which is to proceed to New Orleans and there await the orders of Government.” But he would accept Wilkinson’s judgment and do as told. “In the meantime I will be happy to communicate with you on the public safety and defence of the lower country, and will move my troops to any point best calculated for this object.” He hoped they wouldn’t have to wait long for new orders. “My wish is to keep them employed in active service, as indolence creates disquiet.”
Jackson occupied his troops as best he could. They drilled, cleaned their weapons, practiced their shooting, and packed and repacked their kits to be able to march at a moment’s notice. Meanwhile Jackson wondered what Wilkinson was up to and whether the War Department was deliberately slighting the militia in favor of its own soldiers. Since the Revolutionary War, Americans had gone to battle in two columns: the regulars and the militia. The former considered themselves superior in training and discipline, the latter in courage and initiative. There was something to each stereotype yet more to the fact that the regulars were raised by the national government while the militia were mustered by the states. In wartime the national government claimed command of all forces, which was why Jackson took orders from Wilkinson. But the tension never disappeared, and the abiding constitutional struggle over sovereignty—were the states supreme or the nation?—played itself out in the ranks of the military.
Jackson’s suspicions of the army intensified dramatically upon receipt of a letter from John Armstrong, the recently appointed secretary of war. There was something wrong with the letter, as Jackson could tell from the start. It was dated January 5, although Jackson knew that Armstrong hadn’t been sworn in until February. This might have been a simple misdating. But the substance of the letter was what was truly bizarre. “The causes for embodying and marching to New Orleans the corps under your command having ceased to exist, you will on receipt of this letter consider it as dismissed from public service,” Armstrong said. There was no further explanation, only a directive to deliver to General Wilkinson any equipment or other property acquired at public expense. And a single line that hardly counted as gratitude: “You will accept for yourself and the corps the thanks of the President of the United States.”
Jackson must have read this letter a dozen times. It made no sense. At great effort, substantial cost, and no little peril, he had led two thousand men several hundred miles from home in the dead of winter to defend their country. Now the secretary of war was telling them it was all for nothing. They must turn around and go home. And they must do so at their own expense.
For most of the next decade Jackson would battle the War Department more often and almost as bitterly as he fought the avowed enemies of the United States. The struggle began in Jackson’s camp on the banks of the Mississippi in that late winter of 1813. He couldn’t decide whether Armstrong’s disbanding order was a case of economizing run amok, with the Madison administration trying to trim costs to avoid angering the war’s opponents further; whether it was part of some nefarious plot between Armstrong and Wilkinson to weaken western defenses and deliver New Orleans to the British or the Spanish; or whether it was a way for the army to discredit the militia, perhaps compelling Jackson’s men to continue to New Orleans individually, there to enlist in the regulars under Wilkinson.
Jackson didn’t air all his suspicions in his response to Armstrong, but he did register his vigorous objections. Did the secretary, or anyone else in the administration at Washington, appreciate what disbanding in Natchez entailed?
Those that could escape from the insalubrious climate are to be deprived of the necessary support and meet death by famine. The remaining few to be deprived of their arms pass through the savage land where our women, children, and defenceless citizens are daily murdered. Yet through that barbarous clime must our band of citizen soldiers wander and fall a sacrifice to the tomahawk and scalping knife of the wilderness, our sick left naked in the open field and remain without supplies, without nourishment or an earthly comfort.
The government had called on its people to rally to the nation’s defense, and Tennessee had answered. Was this how her volunteers were to be repaid?
The order was simply unacceptable, and Jackson refused to accept it. “I animated those brave men to take the field,” he told Armstrong. And he would see them home. “I mean to commence my march to Nashville in a few days, at which place I expect the troops to be paid and the necessary supplies furnished by the agents of Government.”
Jackson’s pen was still smoking when he wrote to Felix Grundy, Tennessee’s war-hawk congressman. Armstrong’s order was so wickedly wrongheaded, Jackson declared, that he “must have been drunk when he wrote it or so proud of his appointment as to have lost all feelings of humanity and duty.” Whether drunk or sober, unwitting or aware, Armstrong was furthering the army’s design to destroy the militia. The design included institutional aggrandizement, but it went much deeper than that, to the very meaning of American self-government. Destroy the militia, Jackson argued, and nothing would stand between the people’s rights and those who would take them away. “The path is plain. The militia not being competent to defend the country on a sudden war, it is necessary that a standing army in time of peace should be kept up. . . . This once done (and I have very little doubt of the intentions of some), the liberties of the country are gone forever.”
But such would not occur while Andrew Jackson had strength to oppose it. He would preserve his portion of the militia and tend to his citizen-soldiers. “As long as I have friends or credit, I will stick by them.”
He broke the news to the troops the next day. He praised them for their alacrity in answering their country’s call, for their steadfastness during the journey south, for their focus on learning the arts of the soldier. All this entitled them to the thanks of their compatriots and the esteem of their commander. “He knows that if you had met an enemy, from your pride, your patriotism, and attention to discipline you would have gained laurels for yourself and honor for the country from which you come.” But for causes vouchsafed only to the government, the campaign was over. “We are now to turn our faces to the north.”
Jackson declined to reveal that he was defying orders in leading his men home. What he did say was that they had a long and arduous march ahead of them. They would be passing through a “savage country,” inhabited by hostile tribes. “It is necessary for the safety of the de
tachment that we march in good order, and that the whole detachment continue together until we arrive at Nashville.” They could count on their commander. “He will not leave one of the sick nor one of the detachment behind. . . . The sick, as far as he has the power and means, shall be made comfortable. They shall all be taken along. Not one shall be left unless those that die, and in that event we will pay to them the last tribute of respect; they shall be buried with all the honors of war.”
Even as Jackson wrote these words, he had no idea how he would carry them out. The return would be much harder than the journey south. Men had fallen ill and needed to be carried. More to the point, the march would be a march rather than a boat-drift downstream. The detachment’s stores weren’t exhausted but were dwindling. And the army refused to send or authorize more. “I dare not incur the responsibility of the expense which must attend the march of the corps of your command back to Tennessee,” James Wilkinson wrote, politely but maddeningly. Jackson had no money with him, but he did have credit with Nashville merchants and bankers, which he was more than willing to employ though it threatened him with bankruptcy. He scornfully answered Wilkinson that what the government wouldn’t furnish the soldiers who rallied to its banner, their own general would. He would “provide the means for their support out of my private funds.” Should these fail, officers and men would eat their horses.
Jackson’s defiance of authority—word got out that he was bucking orders—and his pledge of his personal resources on behalf of his men won him their love and admiration as nothing else could have. He might be cashiered, might lose his home and farm, but he would get them home safely. Jackson had never been much to look at. Next to the hale young men who composed his army, he appeared almost puny. But now they saw in him a toughness, a resilience on which they could rely. Someone compared him to a hickory branch: thin but impossible to break. The image caught on, and before long, when he rode down the line of march, his men pointed to him and said there goes Old Hickory.
The journey home was less momentous than the decision to make it. Jackson signed a note for a thousand dollars to purchase provisions, which fed the men and spared the horses. The five hundred miles from Natchez to Nashville went more rapidly than even he could have hoped. The soldiers averaged almost twenty miles a day, their steps lightened by the knowledge that each mile and day brought them closer to home. The sick began to revive en route, buoyed by the same knowledge. The news of their approach preceded them, and when the column arrived at Nashville, the city turned out in force. “Long will the General live in the memory of the volunteers of West Tennessee for his benevolent, humane, and fatherly treatment to his soldiers,” the Nashville Whig declared, capturing the common sentiment. “If gratitude and love can reward him, General Jackson has them.”
Even Tennesseans, hardened as they were to personal feuds and affairs of honor, found it difficult to explain the fight that nearly killed Andrew Jackson, almost cost him his chance for military glory, and left him debilitated for months and in chronic pain for the rest of his life. The fight should never have happened and probably wouldn’t have if Jackson had taken his role as father of his troops either more or less seriously than he did.
Two roads led to the steps of the City Hotel in Nashville where the confrontation occurred. One was an offshoot of the Natchez Trace, the path trod by the Tennessee volunteers on their way home in the spring of 1813. Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson’s protégé and aide-de-camp, later colonel of infantry, was among several junior officers who distrusted James Wilkinson almost as much as Jackson did, and didn’t want to be placed under his command. Yet apparently Benton agreed with Jackson that discretion dictated acquiescence, lest the bona fides of the Tennesseans come into question. At the time, neither man raised any question regarding the conduct of the other with respect to Wilkinson. Subsequently, though, Benton heeded rumors that Jackson had blamed him for fomenting unrest against Wilkinson. The rumors were absurd; Jackson far more likely would have praised criticism of Wilkinson than blamed it. But Benton indignantly demanded that Jackson set the record straight.
The second road to the City Hotel originated in a quarrel between Jesse Benton, Thomas Benton’s brother, and William Carroll, one of Jackson’s brigade majors. This quarrel, like so many others in that day and place, started trivially but accreted principle as it persisted, till finally it brooked no compromise. Jesse Benton challenged Carroll to a duel. Carroll accepted and asked Jackson to second him. Jackson seems to have declined at first, claiming advanced age and station. Whether he tried to talk Carroll out of the duel is less clear. But Carroll appealed to Jackson as to the father of his troops, and Jackson assented. The duel was even more ludicrous than most. Both men took bullets, Carroll in the hand and Benton in the buttocks. Duelists sometimes dodged or ducked to avoid being hit, but they weren’t supposed to. A wound to the rear was at least as mortifying as it was painful.
Thomas Benton was away when the duel took place, but he shared his brother’s embarrassment and blamed Jackson for his role in the affair. “You conducted it in a savage, unequal, unfair, and base manner,” Benton said. “Savage because the young men were made to fight at ten feet distance, contrary to your own mode, to what is usual among gentlemen. . . . Unequal because the parties were made to wheel, an evolution which Mr. Carroll perfectly understood but which my brother knew nothing about. . . . Unfair because you concealed the mode of fighting from my brother. . . . Base because you avowed yourself to be the friend of my brother while giving to his adversary all these advantages over him.” A man of Jackson’s eminence should have restrained rather than encouraged dueling. “From your known influence over Mr. Carroll you might have managed the affair as you pleased; if not you were at least a free man and might have quit him if you did not approve his course.”
Benton didn’t quite challenge Jackson to a duel. But neither did he keep his complaints to himself. Before long all Nashville knew that the Bentons considered Jackson a dishonorable rogue. Jackson replied in writing to Thomas Benton’s allegations, but the answer satisfied neither Thomas nor Jesse, and their complaining continued. Finally Jackson decided that one or both deserved a thrashing. He learned in early September that the two were staying at the City Hotel in Nashville. He rode to town from the Hermitage and took a room at the Nashville Inn nearby. Accompanied by John Coffee, another of his colonels, he strode past the City Hotel to the post office, to check his mail but also to check out the Bentons, who watched him walk by. On the way back he turned from the sidewalk to the door of the City Hotel and raised his riding whip against Thomas Benton, standing in the entrance.
At this point the story becomes confused, as often occurs in such cases. Jackson’s partisans said Benton reached for a pistol, causing Jackson to draw his own gun. Benton’s supporters asserted that Jackson drew first. All agreed that Jesse Benton, standing to the side, actually fired the first shots, at Jackson. One bullet caught Jackson squarely in the left shoulder, shattering bone and severing an artery. A second bullet hit his left arm. A third barely missed him. Jackson managed to squeeze off one shot before going down. Thomas Benton blasted away, as did John Coffee. Then the daggers came out. Stockley Hays, a nephew of Rachel Jackson, was passing by and heard the shooting. Seeing his uncle in danger, he dove upon Jesse and slashed him several times. Jesse pressed a pistol against Hays’s heart and pulled the trigger, but the gun misfired. Alexander Donelson, another Jackson in-law, waded into the melee and nicked Thomas Benton, who had escaped the bullets by accidentally falling down a flight of stairs.
Finally, lest the fracas unduly alarm the guests, the management and the neighbors compelled the combatants to cease fire and drop dirks. (By an odd coincidence, three of those guests were Charles Fremon, his wife, Anne, and their infant son, John Charles, who would grow up to add an accent and a letter to his last name and, as John C. Frémont, wed Thomas Benton’s daughter Jessie and carry Jackson’s expansionist ideas to the Pacific Coast.) The only one seriously wounded w
as Jackson, who lay on the floor in a widening pool of his blood. Coffee and others carried him back to the Nashville Inn, where he ruined two mattresses with his hemorrhaging. Doctors were summoned and delivered their opinion that the left arm had to be sacrificed to save the patient. Jackson, barely conscious and fading, refused permission to amputate, and none of the physicians cared to cross him, even in his weakened condition. The medicine men applied slippery elm and other natural poultices, knowing they had nothing better than these Indian remedies.
The bleeding finally stopped on its own. The doctors knew Jackson was out of immediate danger, although there remained the problem of infection or gangrene, which could carry him off more slowly. For weeks he could scarcely stir.
Meanwhile the Bentons were marked men. “I am literally in hell here,” Thomas Benton wrote just after the fight. “The meanest wretches under heaven to contend with: liars, affidavit-makers, and shameless cowards. All the puppies of Jackson are at work on me. . . . The scalping knife of Tecumseh is mercy compared to the affidavits of these villains. I am in the middle of hell here, and see no alternative but to kill or be killed.” Benton grew convinced that Jackson’s partisans were goading him to a duel for having wounded their hero. “My life is in danger.”
The outnumbered Bentons left town. Thomas tossed his version of the affray over his shoulder as he went, accepted a commission in the regular army, and relocated to Missouri, where he commenced a political career. A decade elapsed before he met Jackson again, in Washington. The two were then senators, and they decided that the danger to the republic from John Quincy Adams dictated burying old differences. Jesse Benton was better at holding a grudge. He went to his grave damning Jackson for a scoundrel and a poltroon.
