CHAPTER 32
ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 2, 1836, Jackson paid a Philadelphia merchant named George W. South for a shipment of furnishings for the rebuilt Hermitage. Included in an order for crimson silk curtains, brass andirons, and marble-topped washstands were three sets of wallpaper depicting scenes from the French philosopher Fénelon’s work Telemachus, a favorite of Jackson’s. The paper was to hang in the grand entry hall of the new house.
Written in 1699, the book chronicles the political education of Odysseus’s son by the tutor Mentor. “The whole world has its eyes upon him who is highly elevated above others, watching his conduct and criticizing it with the utmost severity,” the book notes. “Those who judge him are unacquainted with his situation. They know nothing of his difficulties, they will not allow him to have any human weaknesses and failings, but expect he should be altogether perfect. A king, however wise and good he may be, is still only a man.”
The saga of Telemachus—a child left without a father—had innate appeal to Jackson, and Fénelon’s treatise, with its grasp of the subtleties of power and of the complexities of marrying monarchism with republicanism, was an engaging and resonant text for a man in the arena. At one point in the narrative, when Telemachus has complained of the burdens of office, Fénelon writes: “ ‘True it is,’ replied Mentor, ‘a king is only king in order to take care of his people, as a shepherd tends his flock, or a father superintends his family.… The wicked he punishes, and the good he rewards, and thus represents the gods in leading the whole human race to virtue.’ ”
Telemachus broods on the injustices and difficulties a ruler faces. “Mentor replied to him patiently: ‘You must count on the ingratitude of mankind, and yet not be discouraged by it from doing good: you must study their welfare, not so much for their own sakes, as for the sake of the gods, who have commanded it. The good that one does is never lost; if men forget it, the gods will remember and reward it. Further, if the bulk of mankind are ungrateful, there are always some good men who will have a due sense of your virtue. Even the multitude, though fickle and capricious, does not fail sooner or later to do justice, in some measure, to true virtue.’ ”
To some extent and to some degree, in other words, leadership is tragic. There will be disappointments and injustices and failures of imagination or of will. Jackson understood that governing was provisional—no single bill or single election would ever bring about the perfection of all things—but his experience suggested that the American people, if given world enough and time, would come to a right conclusion.
Jackson was elegiac as he began his last full year in office. He was, in Fénelon’s terms, a shepherd and a father looking both forward and backward, musing on the past and the future. “You are assembled at a period of profound interest to the American patriot,” Jackson had told Congress in his annual message in December 1835. “The unexampled growth and prosperity of our country having given us a rank in the scale of nations which removes all apprehension of danger to our integrity and independence from external foes, the career of freedom is before us.”
It was a message, however, that alternated between hope and fear. Jackson had, in his view, triumphed over sundry sources of dissension, from South Carolina’s nullification movement to the purported corrupting influence of the Bank. But there were always enemies, always forces that threatened the essential structure of the country, and Jackson remained concerned about abolitionists who were determined to be heard through the distribution of pamphlets.
He denounced abolitionists’ “inflammatory appeals.” Worried that anti-slavery forces were about to destroy the country, Jackson said: “There is doubtless no respectable portion of our countrymen who can be so far misled as to feel any other sentiment than that of indignant regret at conduct so destructive of the harmony and peace of the country, and so repugnant to the principles of our national compact and to the dictates of humanity and religion.”
This was a widespread sentiment in the Jackson years. “Our happiness and prosperity essentially depend upon peace within our borders,” he wrote, “and peace depends upon the maintenance in good faith of those compromises of the Constitution upon which the Union is founded.” For Jackson and many others—including many Northerners—slavery was such a compromise, and abolition was seen as a threat to the Republic’s precarious political balance.
Still, Southerners feared history was not on their side. “The moral power of the world is against us,” Congressman Francis Pickens of South Carolina told the House in January 1836. Angelina Grimké, a native South Carolinian who had moved to the North and was, with her sister, an emerging force in the abolition movement, published an Appeal to the Christian Women of the South in 1836, holding up Esther and the women around Jesus as models of reform. On Friday, March 11, 1836, Calhoun acknowledged the high price of the flow of abolitionist appeals, whether by mail at home or by petition in the capital. “We must ultimately be not only degraded … but be exhausted and worn out on such a contest.”
THE WAR OVER slavery continued to be fought by proxy. In the early years of the administration, the pretext had been the tariff. The year before, in 1835, it had been the right of states to tell postmasters to suppress abolitionist mailings. Now, in the last full year of the Jackson presidency, the question became one of the right of American citizens to petition the Congress in favor of emancipation, particularly within the District of Columbia.
To curtail the debate and avoid having to decide on the future of slavery, Congress employed what was called the gag rule, which represented the slaveholders’ attempt to pretend as though—at least in the halls of Congress—there was no dispute over the question in America. In a practice devised by South Carolina congressman Henry Pinckney, the House would “table”—the parliamentary term for ignoring—abolitionist petitions, effectively denying constituents the right to be heard on arguably the most consequential issue in American life. (The Senate did the same, though it did not officially vote to “gag” abolitionists. It just did so.)
As 1836 wore on, several Jackson imperatives came into conflict with one another. There was his support, however tacit, for the Texas Revolution against Mexico; he hoped that an independent Texas would become part of the United States, frustrating any lingering British or European imperial designs. There was Indian removal, which was proving bloody and expensive and, if the Seminole case was any indication, could grow even bloodier.
John Quincy Adams saw the inherent tensions. “Mr. Chairman, are you ready for all these wars? A Mexican war? A war with Great Britain, if not with France? A general Indian war? A servile war? And, as an inevitable consequence of them all, a civil war?” Adams demanded in the House in May 1836. “From the instant that your slaveholding states become the theater of war, civil, servile, or foreign, from that instant the war powers of Congress extend to interference with the institution of slavery in every way by which it can be interfered with.”
AN APPEAL FOR help from Stephen Austin came to Jackson in the middle of April 1836. It had been a dizzying few weeks for Texas. On Wednesday, March 2, Texas declared its independence at the town of Washington, on the Brazos River. Then, on Sunday, March 6, Santa Anna’s Mexican troops stormed the Alamo, a fort being defended by David Crockett, James Bowie, William Barret Travis, and roughly 185 others. The Texans refused to give in, and in an hour and a half of brutal combat, Santa Anna massacred every man in the fort. Two weeks later, at Goliad, the Mexican dictator executed 330 soldiers. Then, on April 20 and 21, 1836, at the junction of Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River, Sam Houston rallied his men for what became a final victory. “Victory is certain! Trust in God and fear not! And remember the Alamo! Remember the Alamo!” A Texas force of nearly one thousand defeated Santa Anna’s fourteen hundred men—and the general was brought to Houston as a prisoner.
For official purposes, Jackson had maintained the appearance of neutrality in the Texas conflict. When Austin wrote asking for help in what he told Jackson was “a war of barbarism against civilization, of despotism against liberty, of Mexicans against Americans,” Jackson demurred, noting on the letter: “The writer does not reflect that we have a treaty with Mexico, and our national faith is pledged to support it. The Texans, before they took the step to declare themselves independent, which has aroused and united all Mexico against them, ought to have pondered well.”
But to young Jackson Donelson, Emily and Andrew’s nine-year-old son, the president expressed his true feelings on the subject in a letter about the story of the Alamo. From boarding school in Chantilly, Virginia, young Donelson had written Jackson about the Alamo, and on Friday, April 22, 1836, Jackson replied: “Your sympathies expressed on hearing of the death of those brave men who fell in defense of the Alamo displays a proper feeling of patriotism and sympathy for the gallant defenders of the rights of freemen, which I trust will grow with your growth … and find you always a strong votary in the cause of freedom.”
ON TUESDAY, MAY 10, 1836, the spring racing season began in Washington; Andrew Donelson was to try his luck with a filly named Emily. According to Blair’s Globe, “To give variety to the amusement of the turf a splendid ball is to be given by the members of the Jockey Club … at Carusi’s rooms which no doubt will be graced by the beauty and the fashion of the City.”
Such glamorous hours—Carusi’s had been the scene of the first inaugural party, all those years ago—were growing short for Emily, who was to return to Tennessee in June. She lost a sister in April, and in May Edward Livingston died—news that shook Emily, who was herself never in the best of health. Her letter to Louise Livingston suggests that the subject of mortality was uncomfortable, and it was only with effort that she was able to express her sympathy to the family that had been so kind to her.
“I have intended to write to you for some days past but have felt so much distressed at the loss we have all sustained [that I] have not been able to do so until today,” Emily wrote on June 8; by contrast, Jackson’s letter to Mrs. Livingston was dated May 26. “I expect to leave the city for our home in Tennessee in a few days and cannot bear to set off until assuring you and my dear Cora of my sincere and affectionate sympathy.… No one was more beloved by all who knew him and more regretted than Mr. Livingston and we may hope [he] has only exchanged this for a better world and we must all sooner or later expect to follow.” Having at last rallied her energies to write, Emily forced herself to look ahead to the autumn with confidence and made a noble effort at good cheer, anticipating a journey to the Livingstons’ in New York. “I hope … to return early in the fall and unless something should happen to prevent will see you on the North River and pay to you the long promised visit.”
Yet she remained unwell as she prepared for the trip to Tennessee. She was to take three of the four children. Jackson Donelson was to stay with his father and uncle until Congress adjourned, and then come south. She was worried about her son being left in the White House. Andrew had to reassure her that he would “have nothing to do but to care for” Jackson “when I am not in my office.”
EMILY’S EMOTIONAL AGITATION—a breakdown in her usual sense of orderliness and of domestic command—foreshadowed a breakdown in her physical health. She reached Nashville on Sunday, June 26, and was at work at Poplar Grove through July and much of August, awaiting her husband and her eldest son. They left Washington with the president on Sunday, July 10, but were slowed by terrible rains that turned the roads into muddy bogs. Jackson’s horses’ feet were “torn to the quick and left almost without hoofs.” From Salem, Virginia (Jackson usually spelled it “Salum”), a week later, Andrew told Emily: “We reached here today … after a severe drive over the most intolerable roads that were ever travelled. It is as much as we can do to make nigh 18 miles a day and are in constant danger of breaking some part of our carriage or gear. You must not therefore be disappointed if it is the 4th or 5th of August before we reach home.” He added a reassuring report about their son: “Jackson is in fine health and makes a fine traveler.” For Emily, though, the spring and summer of death continued apace: the third week of July brought word that Mrs. Mary Ann McLemore, an old family friend and member of the large Donelson clan, had died. Meanwhile, her own two-year-old daughter, Rachel, was “not so well,” adding to the strain.
Jackson and Andrew finally arrived at the Hermitage on Thursday, August 4. For all his talk about being tired, however, Jackson, like most politicians, could not rest for long. Three weeks later he was working a huge picnic, campaigning for Van Buren, “shaking hands,” he said, “with at least 4,000 people—many from my old friends both male and female.” Andrew had come along, but chose to return home to Poplar Grove rather than traveling on with Jackson to a visit with Mrs. Coffee in Florence, Alabama. It turned out to be a wise decision. He did not have much time to spend with his wife, who was now demonstrably sick. It was, it would turn out, tuberculosis.
ONCE THE BLEEDING began, it seemed to last forever. Hemorrhaging from her lungs, Emily scared those around her. The attack was of a different magnitude than anything she had suffered before. Andrew was terrified and prepared for the worst, remaining with her and the children when Jackson had to return to Washington. From a stop twelve miles south of Louisville on Saturday, September 17, 1836, Jackson wrote Andrew junior, who had also stayed in Nashville, “I will be uneasy until I hear from you—I fear Major Donelson will not be able to leave Emily—indeed I fear Emily will not recover.” Six days later, from Wheeling, at nine in the evening, Jackson found himself without word from Nashville, and the silence exacerbated his fears about Emily. Was she dead already?
“My mind is sorely oppressed by not hearing from you at Louisville or this place—my fears of the situation of our dear Emily have been much heightened from not hearing from you,” Jackson wrote Donelson. “Should this reach you at home I pray you to write me and let me hear how Emily and the dear little children are—I shall not rest until I hear from you.”
Touching as it was, the letter ranged from personal concern for Emily to the politician’s inevitable reports of how he seemed to be playing with the public as he canvassed for Van Buren. “I reached Wheeling about sunset and there was an immense crowd—such a one I have never seen there before,” Jackson told Donelson. “At Cincinnati and everywhere I landed there were immense crowds so that I am nearly worn down with fatigue.” He could not help wondering, too, whether Emily’s illness would keep his private secretary from the White House indefinitely. “Pray write me soon how our dear Emily is and when you will be in the City—present my ardent prayers to her for her speedy recovery.”
So it had always been for Emily and Andrew: their lives depended on Jackson’s, and Jackson depended on them. In his old age, in the last months of a trying presidency, with an Indian war in Florida, plans for the removal of the Cherokees—a chancy business—under way, and Van Buren facing the voters, he had to have the Donelsons as he had had them from the beginning, and while he loved them without question, he also needed them to be able to serve him as they always had. Writing Van Buren, Jackson said, “I pity the Major’s situation—her loss would unman him, and be a lamentable bereavement to her family.” And yet there were the practical considerations, too: “I find much business has accumulated, and if Major Donelson does not come on soon I will find myself greatly oppressed with business.”
In Nashville, Andrew seemed to lose hope. Emily was no longer running a fever, but there were signs, he wrote, of lung disease, and she was, her husband said, in “a kind of stupor.”
Reaching the White House on Saturday, October 1, 1836, Jackson spent the evening, he wrote Andrew, “in melancholy gloom and in forebodings of unpleasant information from our dear Emily.” The next morning he finally received the depressing word from Donelson that Emily was worse. It was “with painful sensations,” Jackson replied to Andrew, that he “read the melancholy information of her continued ill health and forebodings of the result of her disease.” Drawing on his own experience with losing Rachel, Jackson tried to reassure his nephew while preparing the young husband for the end. “I trust in the mercy of a kind superintending providence that He will restore her to health and bless her dear little children … and prolong her life to be a comfort to you in your declining years,” Jackson said. The world, however, had a way of failing to conform to our warmest wishes.
“But my dear Andrew,” Jackson went on, “should providence will it and call her hence you must summon up all your fortitude to meet the melancholy event, keeping in mind how necessary your life becomes to your dear children.…” In conclusion, Jackson tried to strike a more cheerful note: “Still I have a hope that as the hemorrhage has ceased and the fever checked she will soon recover, for which present to her my affectionate regards with my prayer for her speedy recovery and your safe arrival soon here, with all your dear little ones.”
YET EVEN NOW, in a dark personal hour, Jackson could not stay away from politics. “I have no doubt of every republican state in the union going for Van Buren,” Jackson told Andrew; Jackson so yearned for vindication through the election of his chosen successor that he willed himself into an optimistic frame of mind. To Van Buren himself, Jackson wrote, “I can say to you that the political horizon is bright and cheering.” The facts were rather different. The election was close, and Jackson was simultaneously anxious for Emily and for Van Buren. He would have seen little distinction between the two concerns, for to him the country was family, too.
Andrew, who had despaired of Emily in the letter Jackson had read on October 2, nevertheless decided to leave her alone with her mother and children ten days later. The pull of Washington, and of Jackson, was too great. The president’s neediness was evident to those around him. He made no effort to hide it. Mulling a farewell address, he asked Roger Taney for help: “I am so harassed with business and company, and deprived as I am of the aid of Major Donelson that I am compelled to ask the aid of friends in maturing the address I have in contemplation.” As these words were written, Donelson was already on the road to Washington, and he was already trying to assuage his own guilt with assertions of good cheer.
“Words cannot express the pain which the separation from you at this time has occasioned me,” Andrew wrote Emily—though the pain was not so significant that it prevented him from returning to Jackson’s service. “Be assured my dear Emily that not a moment will be lost that can hasten my return.… From what Dr. Laurence told me I feel the strongest hopes that your strength will be gradually recovered.… Remember me affectionately to your Mother who is so good and kind to you and our dear children. Her remaining with you places me under obligations which I can never forget.”
According to family tradition, Emily approved of Andrew’s return to the White House, and perhaps she did. She had been feeling better since the terror of the long hemorrhage. She understood the claim Jackson had on her and her husband, and for her, as for Andrew, Washington remained irresistible. Still, when Andrew suggested that he might not be back at Poplar Grove until Congress met in March 1837—five months hence—Emily reacted badly. Family tradition has her “in tears” at the thought that Andrew would not return in December; in a letter to Andrew, her brother William said, “I would judge it would be best for you to be back at the time appointed.”
It was about eleven o’clock on the evening of Thursday, October 20, 1836, when Andrew arrived at the White House, and as he sat down to write Emily the next day he knew what she would want to hear: “Your numerous friends in the City inquire with the greatest affection and solicitude about your health and express an earnest hope that it will be in your power to come on here in the course of the winter.” Warm words, and calculated, for he had had little opportunity to field a large number of inquiries about her. To his credit, he tried to be reassuring. “I will see that all your dresses and other articles are properly attended to,” he said. “You shall hear from me again in a few days. In the meantime I trust I shall receive a letter from you and that the inquietude of mind which I have [had] since I left you may be less afflicting.”
Andrew had two duties at hand. Though he served as the president’s private secretary, he earned a salary signing public land warrants for the General Land Office, and he had forty thousand documents awaiting him. Jackson, meanwhile, needed him to work on his annual message. Trapped between duty to his wife and his White House obligations, Andrew struck pleading notes in his letters home:
I trust, my dear Emily, that you will not allow my necessary absence from you at this time to prey on your spirits. The business which made it incumbent upon me to come here I am dispatching as fast as possible, and I shall certainly be able to join you in the course of the first week of December.… There is nothing, my dear, that I possess that will not be fully given to secure the recovery of your health, for without you neither life nor property can be worth anything to me.
Summoning her strength, Emily wrote to Andrew and, struggling to act as though things were normal, enclosed a list of clothes the children needed purchased in Washington.
Perhaps prodded by Donelson, Jackson wrote Emily, too, emphasizing the significance of Donelson’s mission in the White House, arguing that Donelson would have been subject to attack if he had not come on to Washington—an appeal that had a good chance of resonating with the politically sensitive Emily. “The Major is working night and day to get his work in signing patents so that he may return to you—he had upwards of 40,000 when he reached here to sign all prepared for his signature. He will be with you the first moment after he can close this absolutely necessary duty, and my dear Emily you must bear his absence with patience as it is a very necessary … one … as these grants without his signature would have been entirely lost to the public and he subject to the censure of a vindictive world for the same.” Andrew, meanwhile, wrote with more straightforward sympathy and love: “I am constantly filled with apprehension lest something untoward should arise to lessen your comforts and interrupt the recovery of your health,” he told her. Perhaps most important, a date of departure for Andrew was fixed: he was to leave Washington for Nashville on Tuesday, November 22.
IN HER SICKROOM in Tennessee, Emily, between bouts of coughing and worries about fever, was sentimental about the flow of good wishes and prayers from Washington. Writing to Andrew on Friday, November 11, she “was so filled with gratitude for your constant attention and the solicitude and anxiety you all feel about me” that she said she “could not help crying.” She had been strong all autumn, refusing to succumb to self-pity.
Now, with these tears and with the promise of Andrew’s return, she indulged herself a bit. “I believe it is the first time I’ve been so foolish since you went away,” she said, and gave herself credit for her own steeliness: “Indeed I have borne your absence like a heroine [and] have not been low-spirited unless it was a very gloomy day.” She took her mind off her illness with activity, knitting stockings. The prognosis was mixed. “I have no pain, no night sweats, no flushing, but still I get my strength very slowly,” she said, though on a particularly good early November day she “did not lay down all day and rode out twice.”
In the White House, Donelson at last finished signing the patents, only to discover that Jackson “has made but little progress with his message”—and then, on the evening of Saturday, November 19, Jackson suffered his own hemorrhage attack. “Under the circumstances considering the near approach of Congress, and the great public responsibility resting upon him at this juncture, it would have been inexcusable for me to have left him,” Donelson told Emily on November 20. “My dear Emily do not allow yourself to be disturbed by the delay.… It will only be a few days of increased pain and anxiety to me—but if my prayers can avail anything—they will be days of returning power and strength to you.” Jackson came first. He always had.
From his own sickbed, Jackson reassured Emily on November 27 that all would be well: “You are young, and with care and good treatment, will outgrow your disease.” He then fell back on religious imagery, linking his own illness with hers:
My dear Emily—this chastisement by our Maker we ought to receive as a rebuke from Him, and thank him for the mildness of it—which was to bring to our view … that we are mere tenants at will here. And we ought to live daily so as to be prepared to die; for we know not when we may be called home. Then let us receive our chastisements as blessings from God, and let us so live that we can say with the sacred poet:
What though the Father’s rod
Drop a chastising stroke,
Yet, lest it wound their souls too deep,
Its fury shall be broke.
Deal gently, Lord, with those
Whose faith and pious fear,
Whose hope, and love, and every grace,
Proclaim their hearts sincere.
I must close with my blessing to you and the children. May God bless you all. Emily, farewell.
Emily waited, but still Andrew did not come. There was always something to detain him. On Thursday, December 1, Jackson wrote in a note to young Jackson Donelson, “Your dear papa … was to have left this morning, but owing to my debility remains today and tomorrow to have my Message copied well and prepared for transmission to Congress next Tuesday—say to your dear Mama that I regret that he should be thus one moment detained from her.” In this difficult moment another ancient dynamic was at work: the avuncular encouragement of great ambitions for a young Donelson by Andrew Jackson. While Andrew Donelson the father worked on the presidential message, while Emily Donelson the mother lay ill, possibly dying, Andrew Jackson the uncle was urging their son to think of high station. “I wish you to attend to your education … recollect that you never can become a great man (which I wish you, and fondly hope you will become) without a good and liberal education.… I hope you will become a great good and enlightened man.”
In a few lines jotted to Emily, Jackson added: “Your dear husband is well—was to have left us this morning but on yesterday it was determined to abridge part of my Message and from my debilitated state he has determined to wait until Saturday [December 3]…. I am slowly mending—take care of yourself and I am sure you will outgrow your attacks, which may God grant is the prayer of your affectionate uncle.”
Andrew left for Nashville on that Saturday, December 3, but Emily had already begun to fail. “Emily grows worse and worse, weaker and weaker daily, and to hope is almost hopeless,” wrote her relative James Glasgow Martin. “Major Donelson is not at home, which is a matter of regret to us all, tho’ expected by the 15th of this month, this may be in time to see his beloved once more, but is uncertain.”
As Andrew drew closer to Nashville, Emily slipped ever further away. The story is told that a small bird flew into Emily’s room at sunset one December day, and she stopped the children from trying to capture it. “Don’t disturb it, darling,” Emily said. “Maybe it comes to bid me prepare for my flight to another world.… Don’t forget mama; love her always and try to live so that we may all meet again in heaven.” On Friday, December 16, she thought the end had come, and she said good-bye to the children. She asked to be settled in bed with a view of the road.
She would wait, she said, until her husband reached home.
EMILY’S DEATH CAME to Jackson in a dream. Asleep in his bedroom in the White House on that winter Friday, he awoke from a vision of Emily in heaven, and he quickly wrote Andrew, who was still en route to Nashville. “I grow more anxious about the fate of our dear Emily—I had an extraordinary dream last night,” Jackson said, “that adds to my anxiety on her account.” He wrote these words on the eighth anniversary of Rachel’s initial collapse inside the Hermitage in 1828—the collapse that marked the beginning of her final days. His message to Donelson is virtually breathless with his fright at the vision of Emily’s death: “If Providence has called her home I am persuaded she has a happy immortality—still I hope our … redeemer has spared her for the benefit of her dear children, and a comfort and consolation to you—we all join in prayers for her speedy recovery.”
The sleeping Jackson, however, was closer to the truth than the waking one. On Monday, December 19, 1836, her husband still on his way to Nashville, Emily Donelson died. She was twenty-nine years old.
HER MOTHER DELAYED the burial, and finally, two days later, on the morning of Wednesday, December 21, Andrew Donelson arrived. “I thanked her from the bottom of my heart, for it was some relief to its desolation to have the privilege of beholding once more the being it had loved almost to idolatry,” Donelson wrote Jackson.
At almost midnight on that evening, Donelson recommitted himself to the old man’s service. Emily was gone, but his duty remained. “Let me hear from you often, for now that my dear wife is withdrawn from me, my greatest solicitude is to know that your health will last until you can reach the Hermitage once more,” Donelson said.
The news did not reach the White House until New Year’s Eve. “Would to God I had been there,” Jackson told Donelson. “I was fearful from my dream that her God had called her hence, and … my forebodings increased, and are now realized.” Ten days after that, he joined Andrew in taking charge of the now motherless brood: “We must summon up all that fortitude we can, to preserve our healths, and to live for their benefit.” They were in this together, Jackson said: “Peace to her manes, and consolation to you and your dear children, is my prayer.”