by H. W. Brands
Jackson and Rachel traveled from Nashville to New Orleans in the latest style, aboard a river steamboat. From New Orleans they sailed to Pensacola, arriving at their destination in the early summer of 1821. The Spanish obviously hadn’t been keeping the place up. “All the houses look in ruins, old as time,” Rachel wrote her friend. “Many squares of the town appear grown over with the thickest shrubs, weeping willows, and the Pride of China. All look neglected.” The people were a remarkable assortment. “The inhabitants all speak Spanish and French. Some speak four or five languages. Such a mixed multitude you, nor any of us, ever had an idea of. There are fewer white people far than any other, mixed with all nations under the canopy of heaven.”
At Pensacola, Rachel and the locals witnessed the last days of Spanish rule in Florida. “Three weeks the transports were bringing the troops from St. Marks in order that they should all sail to Cuba at the same time,” she recounted. Jackson remained outside the city during this period, communicating with the Spanish governor, José Maria Callava, by note. Rachel and some of the American officers tried to talk him into town, but he refused to enter till the transfer became official. “He said that when he came in, it should be under his own standard, and that would be the third time he had planted that flag on that wall.” So he waited, with his small entourage. “At length, last Tuesday was the day. At seven o’clock, at the precise moment, they hove in view under the American flag and a full band of music. The whole town was in motion. . . . They marched by to the government house, where the two Generals met in the manner prescribed. Then his Catholic majesty’s flag was lowered, and the American hoisted high in air, not less than one hundred feet.”
It was with great satisfaction that Jackson accepted the surrender from Colonel Callava. “Yesterday I received possession of this place with the whole of West Florida and its dependencies,” he wrote John Coffee. “I will have the pleasure to be enabled to lay the foundation of permanent happiness to the people and lasting prosperity to the city.” And then, for himself, sweet freedom from public life. “I am contented that this will terminate my political career, and that I will have the pleasure to see you at your house in all the month of October next, fully satisfied with the Hermitage to spend the rest of my days.”
Yet Jackson’s hair-trigger sense of propriety kept him from leaving Florida quietly. Even after the formal transfer of authority, closing the Spanish accounts required considerable back-and-forth between Jackson and Callava, neither of whom was suited to the task. Jackson distrusted the Spanish and despised bureaucratic detail; Callava scorned Americans and resented their disregard for international law. It didn’t help that Jackson spoke no Spanish and Callava no English. They depended on others to translate and interpret, and this dependence injected a note of uncertainty into their communications. From uncertainty to suspicion was a short step.
The origins of the explosion between the two were innocuous, almost ludicrously so. A woman resident of Pensacola filed a lawsuit involving an inheritance of land near the town. To make her case she required access to papers in the possession of Callava’s subordinate, Domingo Sousa. She applied to Henry Brackenridge, whom Jackson had just appointed alcalde, or mayor. The request seemed reasonable to Brackenridge, and he carried it to Jackson, who agreed. Jackson sent Brackenridge and two helpers to Sousa to fetch the papers. Sousa declined to surrender them, saying he worked for Callava and couldn’t turn anything over without an order from the colonel.
Brackenridge and the others returned to Jackson’s office. Jackson’s anger began to rise as he heard their story. The Spanish, he judged, were playing their games once more. Spanish authority—including Callava’s over Sousa—had terminated with the transfer of authority. The only one who gave orders in Florida now was American governor Jackson. He ordered Sousa arrested and the papers seized. Jackson’s men attempted to carry out the order, but by the time they got back to Sousa’s, he had given the papers to Callava’s steward, Antoine Fullarat. Upon his arrest and interrogation, Sousa told Jackson what he had done. Jackson became convinced that he was being played for a fool.
He sent Sousa under guard to Callava’s to retrieve the papers. En route the group discovered Callava having dinner with several Spanish officers, some Americans, and their wives. Sousa and his guards entered the dining room, where Sousa explained his predicament. Callava said he’d handle it, and dispatched an aide to Jackson, requesting a written application for the papers. Callava seems at this point to have been inclined to surrender the papers. He just needed the paperwork to show his own superiors.
Jackson’s day had been a long one, his bowels had been griping, and he was looking forward to bed. But Callava’s insistence on a written request banished thoughts of sleep even as they twisted his guts the more. Would there be no end to Spanish procrastination? Now he ordered Callava to turn over the papers. “It is further ordered,” he continued, “that if the said late Governor Don José Callava or his steward Fullarat, when the above described papers are demanded of them, should fail or refuse to deliver the same, that the said Don José Callava and his steward Fullarat be forthwith brought before me at my office, then and there to answer such interrogatories as may be put to them.”
Callava had digestive trouble of his own, which the confrontation with Jackson wasn’t improving. He left the dinner party early. He was at home when a company of American soldiers arrived to carry out Jackson’s order. Accounts of the confrontation that ensued differed, reflecting the prejudices, allegiances, and native languages of those involved. An American colonel described Callava as belligerent in words, albeit less so in deed. “Colonel Callava repeatedly asserted that he would not be taken out of his house alive, but he seemed to act without much difficulty when the guard was ordered to prime and load.” Callava considered the Americans abusive. “A party of troops, with the commissioners, assaulted the house, breaking the fence (notwithstanding the door was open), and the commissioners entered my apartment,” he testified. “They surrounded my bed with soldiers with drawn bayonets in their hands. They removed the mosquito net; they made me sit up, and demanded the papers, or they would use the arms against my person.”
Callava was taken to Jackson’s office. The American general’s temper had burned to the nub. The Spanish colonel’s wasn’t much longer. The two shouted at each other, Jackson in English, Callava in Spanish, with the interpreters vainly trying to keep up and pondering, on the fly, how literally to render the insults. A Spanish officer present described Jackson as beside himself. “The Governor, Don Andrew Jackson, with turbulent and violent actions, with disjointed reasonings, blows on the table, his mouth foaming, and possessed of the furies, told the Spanish commissary to deliver the papers.” Callava refused, according to Jackson out of “pompous arrogance and ignorance.” Jackson ordered Callava imprisoned. Callava, hearing the translation, called the order unjust and dishonorable. “Rising to his feet,” recalled the Spanish officer present, “he addressed himself to the secretary, whom the Governor kept on his right hand, and said, in a loud voice, that he protested solemnly, before the government of the United States, against the author of the violations of justice against his person and public character. The Governor, Don Andrew Jackson, answered to the protest that for his actions he was responsible to no other than to his government, and that it was of little importance to him whatever might be the result, and that he might even protest before God himself.”
Callava was still in detention the next day when Jackson’s men seized the papers from his house. The matter might have ended there had not an American judge, recently appointed to the territory, been found to serve Jackson a writ of habeas corpus regarding Callava. Jackson ignored the writ, telling the judge, Eligius Fromentin, that it deserved nothing but “indignation and contempt.”
The whole affair made Jackson more enemies. Callava sailed away, mooting Fromentin’s habeas writ, but the judge remained behind to spread lurid stories of Jackson’s uncontrollable ambition. “The f
irst time the authority of General Jackson is contested,” Fromentin predicted, “I should not be surprised if, to all the pompous titles by him enumerated in his order to me, he should superadd that of grand inquisitor, and if, finding in my library many books formerly prohibited in Spain, and among others the Constitution of the United States, he should send me to the stake.”
Jackson brushed the carping aside. He had worked too long securing America’s southern border to let the scruples of a foolish judge diminish the satisfaction he felt on finally achieving his goal. He had fought Indians on the frontier, the British at New Orleans, and the Spanish in Florida, all to preserve the American way of life—in his part of the country, at least. At last his work was done. If personal enemies were the price of American liberty, he was happy to strike the bargain.
Our place looks like it had been deserted for a season, but we have a cheerful fire for our friends and a prospect of living at it for the balance of our lives,” Jackson wrote upon his and Rachel’s return to Nashville. Jackson was fifty-four, and Rachel the same age. His health was neither good nor improving, and he was already considerably older than his parents had been at the times of their deaths. He had little reason to expect many more years of life, and every reason to hope to spend those in the bosom of his home and family. His conscience had chronically nagged him regarding Rachel, who suffered, not always in silence, during his long departures. When his country called—when the Indians or British or Spanish threatened—he could justify placing duty to country above his duty to Rachel. But lesser chores—the administration of Florida, for example—he could leave to others. “I am truly wearied of public life,” he wrote Monroe in tendering his resignation from the governorship. “I want rest, and my private concerns imperiously demand my attention. . . . My duties have been laborious and my situation exposed me to heavy expense, which makes it more necessary that I should retire to resuscitate my declining fortune to enable it to support me in my declining years.”
Domestic life didn’t improve his health. As before, the richer food of home aggravated his digestive troubles, and the absence of pressing responsibilities allowed him to focus on how bad he was feeling. “For four months I have been oppressed with a violent cough and costiveness,” he wrote James Gadsden in the spring of 1822. Gadsden had suggested a tour of the North and East, to keep the general’s name before the public and to allow his cordial presence to allay concerns about his martial past. Jackson said his health wouldn’t allow it. “I have been recently visited by my old bowel complaint, which has weakened me very much, having a constant flow, in the last twelve hours, upwards of twenty passages.” Of late his lungs had improved but were far from clear. “I continue to throw up great quantities of phlegm.” He wrote to Monroe, “My health is not good, nor have I much hope of regaining it. Retirement and ease may prolong my life, but I fear never can restore my broken constitution.”
Jackson’s finances were healthier than his body, but not by much. A second reason compelling him to decline Gadsden’s offer of a northern tour was a kink in his finances. Especially after the panic of 1819, the western states were like a separate country from the East with respect to the money supply. In the summer of 1822 the exchange rate between West and East—that is, the discount demanded for notes drawn on western banks—distinctly disadvantaged the former. “The state of our paper money would preclude the possibility of procuring Eastern funds”—which he would require to travel in the East—“without a great sacrifice,” Jackson told Gadsden. In regular letters to Andrew Donelson, he warned his nephew to mind expenses. He had sent the young man some money but might not be able to send much more. “I remitted you two hundred dollars, one hundred in each letter, Nashville paper, which I hope has reached you and which will cover your present wants. It will at all times afford me pleasure to remit to you such sums as will be necessary to finish your education. But, my young friend, you must now reflect that I have no means by which I can be in the receipt of money but from the product of my farm or the sale of my negroes. I name this to you that you may adopt economy . . . that your expences may be within my means.”
The product of the Hermitage was chiefly cotton and corn. The corn fed the slaves and the livestock; the cotton went to market. Like every other commercial farmer, Jackson watched the price of his market crop as closely as he watched the weather. It fluctuated wildly, sometimes doubling or halving within months. He was better off in this respect than producers of such perishable crops as wheat, for if the cotton price fell too far he could store his bales and hope for better. But storage cost money, and he couldn’t pay his bills with warehoused cotton. The coming of the steamboat improved transportation and communication in the West, but distance from markets remained a problem. During the autumn of 1822 Jackson asked his agents in New Orleans about the market there. “The very best selections from choice prime Louisiana cotton will not command over 14 or 141/2 cents,” they said. Tennessee cotton couldn’t expect to do that well. “ The prime and best put of the new crop would not now (if in market) command over 10 cents . . . and common crops not more than from 6 to 8 cents.”
Jackson’s operation was modest as cotton farms went. The acreage he had in cotton varied from year to year, as did the yield. But in 1825, a fairly typical year, he planted 131 acres and harvested 71 bales of about five hundred pounds of cleaned, deseeded cotton each. Which was to say, of course, that Jackson’s slaves planted those acres and harvested those bales. An inventory at the beginning of 1825 counted eighty slaves at the Hermitage. All lived with their families: some large (“Tom, wife, and nine children,” “Old Sampson, wife, and nine children”), some small (“Polydore, wife, and two children,” “Big Sampson, wife, and child”). Seven were over fifty years of age (and hence not taxable, which was why their ages were recorded), and thirty-two were under thirteen (same reason).
Most of Jackson’s slaves accepted their lot without complaint that rose to the level of his notice. Successful resistance to the will of a master was next to impossible in Jackson’s part of the country. A slave might escape supervision momentarily but, so far from foreign or free territory, couldn’t expect to elude capture for long. Gilbert was a slave brought to Tennessee from the East in 1820 or 1821. Jackson purchased him at about that time and installed him on a plantation he had purchased in Alabama, which he called the Big Spring farm. Gilbert married a woman from the area but in April 1822 ran away. “If he has left the neighborhood of his wife,” Jackson conjectured to Egbert Harris, who had just been given responsibility for managing the Big Spring place, “he has attempted to go back to Carolina or Virginia, from whence he was brought.” Jackson told Harris to print notices of the escape in the surrounding papers. “I still hope he is lurking about his wife’s house.” Jackson assumed Gilbert would be captured, and he told Harris what to do when he was. “If he can be got, I wish him well secured with irons until an opportunity may offer to send him down the river, as I will not keep a negro in the habit of running away.” Jackson went on to explain his philosophy of disciplining slaves. “My dear sir, although you will find some of my negroes at first hard to manage, still I hope you will be able to govern them without much difficulty. I have only to say, you know my disposition, and as far as lenity can be extended to these unfortunate creatures, I wish you to do so.” But lenity supposed obedience. “Subordination must be obtained first, and then good treatment.”
(As it happened, Jackson didn’t sell Gilbert down the river, despite at least two more escapes. But after the third flight and apprehension, in 1827, the desperate bondsman resisted the whipping Jackson’s overseer, Ira Walton, attempted to administer, and was killed. Jackson’s political rivals argued that Gilbert’s death revealed Jackson’s cruelty as a master. Most of that majority which voted for Jackson in 1828 apparently judged it no worse than a regrettable incident in an imperfect world.)
Like every other farmer, Jackson complained about the weather. It was either too dry or too wet. “I regret the dro
ught with you,” he wrote one summer to John Coffee, his old comrade in arms and currently fellow farmer. But in the same sentence he declared, “It has rained constantly here since my return. Cumberland up, and also Stone’s River, and the fodder much injured by the continued rains.”
Bad weather made the crops vulnerable to pests. Sometimes the damage occurred almost overnight. “I had sat down to write you about two weeks ago,” Jackson told Coffee in May 1823. “I commenced my letter with the information of my fine prospect of my cotton crop. This was on Saturday. Whilst writing I was interrupted by company who remained with me until Tuesday, which days were cool and cloudy. I resumed my letter on Tuesday, but thought before I would conclude my flattering prospects of a cotton crop I would view it. . . . I never saw such ravages committed as had been on my cotton for those three days.” The culprit was a worm that feasted on the new leaves. Fortunately the pests hadn’t killed the crop, which was recovering slowly. Jackson added that his corn was knee high but was attracting pests of its own. “The crows, squirrels, and pigeons has been very bad.”
Yet for all the troubles, Jackson got the Hermitage in a condition that caught the attention of the neighbors. Willie Blount visited Jackson and described to a friend what he saw.
Although I have ever considered him to be among the most industrious men of my acquaintance, both in public and private life, I was really surprised to find his farm in such excellent order, and so very productive, under all circumstances relating to his absence from home, attending the public relations during the late war and since. His farming land is, as you know, very fertile, very beautiful, and eligibly situated for comfort. It is largely improved, handsomely arranged with gratifying appearance to the visitors at his most hospitable house, open to all who have the pleasure of his acquaintance, and who travel through his neighborhood, none of whom pass that way without calling on him for social intercourse, viewing him to be the polite gentleman at home and abroad and the friend of man everywhere. His every arrangement for farming on an extensive scale delights the man of observation; his fields are extensive and nicely cultivated as a garden; his meadows and pastures are extensive and neatly kept; his stock of horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs are of the best kind, and all in excellent order.
