Read Ebook: Trotwood's Monthly Vol. II No. 1 April 1906 by Various Moore John Trotwood Editor

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HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF THE SOUTH John Trotwood Moore

LORENA, AND HOW IT CAME TO BE WRITTEN Susie Gentry

A POEM THAT WILL LIVE Ex-Gov. Hogg of Texas

AGRICULTURE THE BASIS OF ALL WEALTH William Dennison

THE WOOING OF BESSY L. M. Montgomery

I John Trotwood Moore

HISTORY OF THE HALS Trotwood

CONTENT Sarah D. Hobart

THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF BIRDS John H. Wallace, Jr.

LUTHER BURBANK E. E. Sweetland

LADY CORNELIA'S SPINET Mary Polk Wynn

OLD COTTON GIN John Trotwood Moore

WITH OUR WRITERS

WITH TROTWOOD

BUSINESS DEPARTMENT

Copyright 1906 by Trotwood Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Entered as second-class matter Sept. 8, 1905, at the Postoffice at Nashville, Tenn., under the Act of Congress of March 3, 1879.

Historic Highways of the South

PAPER IV--THE ROAD TO THE HERMITAGE

BY JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE

The story of Andrew Jackson and his famous home. And if the telling of it take more than one paper, be not surprised, for after an hundred and thirty years of the Republic--and a thousand of progress--this man stands one in the great trilogy--Washington, Jackson and Lincoln.

The others have been mostly figureheads with the usual sprinkling of fools.

To know a man we must first know the dirt he digs into. To grasp his character, the secret influences of his life, we must see the trees that grew above him, the flowers at his feet, the pictures God made for him, in hill and river, in the storm cloud, in the thunder shaking his fields at night, in the grass and grain which came, the fruit of his hand.

For these go into the man.

When we shall have seen the Hermitage and the breadth of its fields and hills we shall begin to understand the broadness of the man, for a man's home is the effect of the cause of that which is in him.

When we shall have seen this country he lived and died in, so bountifully endowed, lying between the Cumberland and the Stone, fit for a king to fight for, we shall understand why Jackson loved it, fought for it--why patriotism burned as a religion in his soul.

To him it was the Union--of the home he killed Dickinson for, that he might live there untouched by slander; of the country he killed the British for, that it might be the great republic of all ages. And so, when John C. Calhoun shouted nullification he might as well have nailed a red flag to the horn of the bull of the valley.

When we shall have seen the simplicity of his home, the rugged, brave purity of his mind, as shown in everything around him, from the wall paper in his halls, telling the story of Ulysses and Telemachus, to the few really great books he owned and loved, we can form some idea of the man who, in an age of strong speech and strong passions and free whiskey and free fights, loved only one woman, was pure in a day of impurity, was brave in a day of bluster, was far-sighted in a wilderness, and a gentleman of his word always and all the time.

Seeing it all here and knowing it, we may understand the very religion of holiness in the eye that could take such deliberate aim down the pistol barrel that put out of business the head of the set of political opponents, who, for a chance to kill him, ruthlessly touched the only raw spot Fate's finger had blistered in the mould of his life.

And he killed them--those who would destroy his home--as religiously as he did those who would destroy his country--that long, red, quadruple-massed line of British bullies, foul-mouthed and flame-touched, marching on the South shouting: "Beauty and booty."

No life story of this man has been truly told, because the Thackerays do not write biographies; and the men who write the hard things of history, by a strange rule of their craft's ethics, seem to think it womanly to write of the sweeter things of the soul. And so the lives of Jackson have all been, more or less, partisan political histories of his times. As if we did not have enough of it in our own day, that we must wince under the brutal, bruising things Jackson had to cut through in fighting the battles of the common people.

He did It and did it well. It was a thing placed on him by Fate and he shirked not. But I love to look at the other and that greater side of the man--the home side, the husband side, the man side, the farmer and horseman and friend and neighbor--a picture which should live when his politics are forgotten. For the story of the politician is ever like the high tide that comes with its wave of splutters in the bay of Fundy and then goes back again to oblivion and with much noise.

But the Man is the sea into which it has flown, and in their great depths have become silent and been forgotten.

And so the picture which clings to me always of Jackson is this told by Senator Benton of him many years ago:

It was a cold, raw March day, and Jackson, the Fighter and Doer of Great Deeds, was old and tired. The woman he worshiped had died and his heart was broken. His children and the friends of his youth had gone too. And so this neighbor saw the picture I want some great master to paint for the coming ages--the most beautiful, soul-telling picture that could be painted for the world. The old warrior sitting by the big hickory fire of the Hermitage. He loved little children and a little child, an adopted grandchild, had climbed up on his knee. But the little fellow had found a half-frozen, motherless lamb in the meadow and he would not "be good" unless the old fighter took his playmate, the lamb, too. And there he sat with both of them in his arms and up against his big, great, game, kind heart, that loved so the fields and the farm and the sweet, quiet things of life, but whom God had sent to fight the bullets and the bullies of his day and generation.

For Greatness is a hermit that must suffer and be sacrificed. And the burden placed on it to do, is not the thing it would love to do.

Let us look now at Jackson's land. Let us see it as it was to a raw boy when he came over the mountains of North Carolina to make his home here.

Aeons and ages ago, when the earth was young, there burst upon the banks of the Cumberland one of the many thousands of sulphur springs which an All-wise Physician said would be good for the health of beings, both beast and human, who should, through countless ages, inhabit the land.

The pioneers called it "The Great Salt Lick," the "French Lick," because before ever the American hunter and trapper had arrived the French had been there.

They all called it a lick because all wild animals licked it. Pioneers have a quick way of naming things and a way that went to the heart of things.

Countless herds of bison and deer had claimed the lick as theirs long before ever the sound of a human voice had been heard in the great forests which towered above it, or echoed from the canoe on the beautiful river that flowed by it. For animals were on the earth before man; and untold generations of buffalo, elk and deer told it, in their own way, to untold generations which came after them, of the health-giving salty-sulphurous water which bubbled from the low bottom, amid the cane and beneath the big, cool trees on the river banks.

And it became history and tradition to them.

It flows to-day in the same low bottom, in the heart of a city man has made out of half-baked bricks and called Nashville. And it is no longer the Great Salt Lick for the hunter and the hunted have passed and both have become dust upon the surface of things. To-day men call it the Sulphur Spring, and true to the laws of the land men have walled it in and piped it up and shut out all other animals, both of his kind and the others; and that which the Great Physician made to be free for all the countless sweet animals of the earth, man and woman and the chubby child, links which make life worth the living, and the beautiful deer, kine, elk and caribou, this greedy little tribe of animals called men, of whom you and I are one, not satisfied with having killed off all the other beautiful, sweet animals for their hides and tallow, and not satisfied in having felled all the cool, sweet trees which grew on the river, that the land might parch and burn, and unborn men might forever have to buy more water as the land grew more barren and more thirsty.

The greatest tragedy of the centuries is not the killing of the Innocents or the massacre of St. Bartholomew or the disasters of war or flame or famine, but it is the butchery by man of the trees of the earth--those stately messengers between the clouds and the land, the felling of which breaks the covenant of great laws invisible and blight the earth as with fire.

It is that and the accursed Spirit, which, for a few dollars given, claims the right to monopolize the things God made for all men.

When one drives down the first dozen miles of the Lebanon pike one has a quiet, reverent feeling if he has a spark of patriotism in him. It is a typical road of Middle Tennessee--for all of Middle Tennessee is a rich loam lying on limestone. The rocks have been beaten into pikes and the gray-white roads pencil the distant slope or fade away into the gentle valleys. Around, everywhere, is the typical Southern home, the Southern farm of the grain and stock raising kind.

This sketch is not a story of the life of Andrew Jackson. That were impossible in a short article. We have books and books on his life and character. Every school boy knows his history, the poverty of its beginning, the honor of its end. This is merely intended to be a quick picture of the man and his home as it was then--as it is to-day.

Home in the South means more than it does anywhere else in the world, for the entire law and religion of the South is based on the idea of local self government--the home idea. Throughout Jackson's life every plantation was a self-governing institution, a little government in itself. And in this home the woman was the queen and the real ruler. In no other country in the world has this idea been so clearly cultivated. It is all through the South to-day. Ask any child in the South: "Who lives yonder?" and it will always answer with the woman's name. A visitor to the South to-day would think it was widowed.

And so I am going out of the usual line in this story, and to tell the real story of Andrew Jackson and his home, I am going to tell the story of his wife and the great influence which she had on all his life. For when it is studied and sifted everything that Jackson did is closely bound with the twine of this woman's love and influence.

Middle Tennessee was so rich and fertile and so full of game the Indians would not permit any one tribe to own it. It was their common hunting ground. One may imagine how they would regard its occupancy by the whites. Mr. Charlville, a French trapper, stopped at the Big Lick and lived in the old deserted Shawnee fort on the bluff in 1714. Later, Boone and other hunters passed, but not until 1779, during the war with England, did James Robertson and his company of nine from the old settlement of Jonesboro, in North Carolina, come to stay, building their fort and log cabins on the bluff near the Big Lick. When he left the settlement it had been agreed that his friend and neighbor, Colonel John Donelson, would follow, bringing a number of others, among them the family of James Robertson. This Donelson did, in boats, over a route that would stagger a sane man of to-day, down the Holston to the Tennessee, down the Tennessee to the Ohio, up the Ohio to the Cumberland, up the Cumberland to the Big Lick two thousand miles by water, and the route infested with hostile savages. The story of this four months' journey reads as nothing else does in early American pioneer history. "Among those who shared the dangers of this voyage," writes the biographer Parton, "was Rachel Donelson, the leader's daughter, a black-eyed, black-haired brunette, as gay, bold and handsome a lass as ever danced on the deck of a flatboat or took the helm while her father took a shot at the Indians." They reached their destination April 24, 1780. Later, Rachel married Lewis Robards, a Kentuckian and was living there when her brave old pioneer father, John Donelson, was killed in a field near Nashville by Indians several years afterwards.

Jackson came to the settlement a young lawyer from Salisbury, N. C., in 1788. Of his early life every one knows--his poverty, his patriotism, his grit, his wildness. I have studied that wildness. It was the wildness of nervous energy that must do something. It was the same thing that put Theodore Roosevelt to living the cowboy and hunting grizzlies. For there is much in common in the characters of these two remarkable men.

Jackson arrived in Nashville in 1788 with scarcely more than a horse and his saddlebags. In ten years he was a rich man and had laid the foundation for his large estate including the land around the Hermitage. He was a fighter and a worker by nature. He jumped at once into a large law practice, "and in those days a lawyer's fee for conducting a suit of no great importance," says an old historian, "might be a square mile of land or, in Western phrase, a six-forty." Jackson appears frequently in the records as the purchaser of wild lands. He bought the 640 acres which afterwards formed the nucleus of the Hermitage for 0, a high price for those days. In 1797 he sold more than ,000 worth of land to a gentleman in Philadelphia and had several thousand acres left. The secret of his wealth is that he bought large tracts of land when they could be bought for a horse or a cow bell and held them until the torrent of immigration made them valuable.

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