CHAPTER 34
ONCE JACKSON LEFT the White House on Tuesday, March 7, 1837, there were the expected huzzas and throngs on his pilgrimage south. But the receptions were complicated—and were all the more compelling for it. In an account of Jackson’s stop in Louisville written to Reuben Lewis (brother of the explorer Meriwether Lewis), a contemporary observer noted the complexities of the town’s reaction to the traveling former president.
“In the heart of a city where I had heard him cursed with the most intense bitterness thousands of times—where many openly declared they would not begrudge millions to see him assassinated,” the observer wrote, “all was respect and reverence, and that same feeling and deportment was evinced towards him that children show a deeply loved father.”
It was a moment of unity in a world given to division. As the Louisville observer said, “I thought it was one of the most sublime moral spectacles I ever beheld or that sun perhaps ever shone upon.… Thank God it was so! It gives a patriot better hopes of his country.”
THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD was a comfort. Sarah Yorke Jackson and Andrew Jackson, Jr., lived in the Hermitage with Jackson, and Donelson, though troubled in his grief, was nearby at Poplar Grove. Jackson worried about his nephew, writing to Van Buren: “The Major is so much engaged with his little family and farm, and so depressed in spirits by his late bereavement, that he does not now appear to take any lively interest in politics—this in time will change, and I hope to see him once more himself again.”
Donelson did revive, as did Jackson, who, not surprisingly, was restless in retirement and never slowed down. The former president spent the next eight years advising his successors and aspiring successors, urging the annexation of Texas, and keeping up a stream of political correspondence. Letters were his lifeline. On a cold autumn Friday in 1838, Amos Kendall arrived at the outskirts of the Hermitage property about eleven o’clock in the morning. There he found his “good old chief” standing at the gate, waiting for the day’s mail. Despite the raw weather, Jackson wore no coat, and Kendall admired how “his face was colored by the keen air.” And Jackson always thought of his neighboring nephew, advising Donelson in 1840 to “seek out a discreet lady for a partner and marry. This can alone make you happy at home, and enable you to raise your charming little daughters and keep them under your own roof.” In 1841, Donelson married Elizabeth Martin Randolph—Emily’s niece, who had cared for her through her dying days, and whose own husband, Lewis Randolph, had died in 1837. (About this time the name of the Donelson house was changed from Poplar Grove to Tulip Grove; Hermitage legend has it that Van Buren made the suggestion on a visit to Nashville.) Politics remained a central part of Donelson’s life: in 1844 President John Tyler appointed him chargé d’affaires to the Republic of Texas at an hour when Britain and France were both maneuvering for influence on the American continent.
AT THE HERMITAGE, Jackson grew more religious as the years passed. A vigilant sentry on what Jefferson, in a New Year’s Day 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, had called the “wall of separation between church and state,” he had long avoided formally joining a church. He changed that after retiring, when, sitting in his pew in the Hermitage church, he listened to the Reverend Dr. John Todd Edgar preach a sermon on “the interposition of Providence in the affairs of men.”
As Edgar told the story to James Parton, the minister noticed Jackson listening intently. Moved by the moment, Edgar began to speak of “the career of a man who, in addition to the ordinary dangers of human life, had encountered those of the wilderness, of war, and of keen political conflict; who had escaped the tomahawk of the savage, the attack of his country’s enemies, the privations and fatigues of border warfare, and the aim of the assassin. How is it,” Edgar went on, “that a man endowed with reason and gifted with intelligence can pass through such scenes as these unharmed, and not see the hand of God in his deliverance?”
Afterward, Jackson insisted that Edgar come see him at the Hermitage. The minister had another engagement, but promised to come the next morning. Jackson was annoyed by the delay: he was unaccustomed to being put off, even for a night. Yet that evening, alone, Jackson appears to have had a kind of conversion experience. “As the day was breaking,” Parton wrote after speaking with Edgar, “light seemed to dawn upon his troubled soul, and a great peace fell upon him.” He told Edgar of the long night, and of the relief at sunrise.
Soon Jackson stood, leaning on a cane, in the Hermitage church, declaring his faith. It was a world away from the Waxhaw meetinghouse—so many years, so much strife, so many battles, so many struggles. Yet he had returned, in a way, to the place where he had first set out.
A FINANCIAL PANIC, followed by depression, struck the country only months after Jackson left office. There is much historical debate over whether it was Jackson’s policies, crop failures, international forces, or some combination of all three that contributed to the hard times. In the middle of 1836 he had reluctantly signed a bill that increased the number of banks that received government deposits. This Deposit Bill led to the distribution of the federal surplus to banks in the states and fed speculation in the wild market for public lands. Then he issued an order called the Specie Circular, which, in an attempt to curb that speculation, directed that only gold and silver would be accepted for the purchase of public lands. (Settlers could still use paper money; the circular was aimed at speculators.) However good Jackson’s intentions, the nation experienced an economic debacle in his wake. There is plenty of blame to assign to different players in the drama, from the White House to the Whigs in Congress to the bankers and the speculators—even to British demands for specie. One lesson may be that the American economy had already reached such a level of complexity, and was already sufficiently subject to global forces, that even the most attentive of presidents would find managing it a daunting and often disappointing task.
No matter what happened after he left the White House, though, Jackson’s legend grew. In January 1840, Mrs. C. M. Stephens passed along a rumor to Stockley Donelson’s wife, Phila Ann, from Cuba. “It was reported that Gen. Jackson was expected at Havana and it created quite a sensation. There are many here who would delight to see him.” In June of that year, Leonidas Polk, now the Episcopal missionary bishop to the Southwest, wrote to his mother from Ashwood, his plantation in Maury County, Tennessee. “I was in Nashville the other day … where I met Genl. Jackson. He looks very well and is very spirited yet.” George P. A. Healy, an American artist living in Paris, had been sent to the United States to paint Jackson and others—including Henry Clay, whom the painter was to meet after finishing the image of Jackson. Healy overstayed his time at the Hermitage. When Healy at last appeared at Ashland, Clay said: “I see that you, like all who approached that man, were fascinated by him.”
TRY AS HE might, however, not even Jackson could defeat mortality. In the late spring of 1845 he began his final decline. A niece wrote to Stockley Donelson of “our poor old grey headed Uncle Jackson.” Sarah Jackson kept watch over him. “He is swollen all over, sometimes his face is out of all shape, and his sufferings are very great,” she wrote Emma Donelson, her cousin, on Wednesday, April 30, 1845. In a postscript dictated by Jackson, he added: “My health is very low. I am compelled to employ an amanuensis, not being able today to sit up much.” A few weeks later, Sarah told Emma that Jackson “still continues about the same as when I last wrote, excepting a very troublesome diarrhea, which produces at times violent pain. He is still able to sit up part of the day, but is very feeble, and very much changed.”
On Sunday, May 25, 1845, he was too sick to go to the Hermitage church, and asked that the family bring the minister back to him after services. They did, and, surrounding his bed on the first floor of the house, they watched as he took Holy Communion. Jackson was stoic about his death; he felt, Andrew Jackson, Jr., wrote, “that it was not far distant” and “he had no fears of it, let it come when it might.” The old warrior spoke of Jesus as he would have a comrade in arms; he was impressed by the Christian Messiah’s physical courage in enduring the Crucifixion. “When I have suffered sufficiently,” Andrew junior recalled Jackson saying, “the Lord will then take me to himself, but what are all my sufferings compared to those of the blessed Savior, who died upon that crossed tree for me. Mine are nothing—not a murmur was ever heard from him—all was borne with amazing fortitude.” At midnight a few days later, Sarah, at his bedside, asked how he felt, and he replied that “I cannot be long with you all,” and told her to reach out to Major Lewis to arrange the funeral. “I wish to be buried in a plain, unostentatious manner without display or pomp, or any superfluous expense,” he said, and fell asleep.
He died as he had lived, fighting the world’s battles. In the days before his death he spoke of things close to his heart. Texas remained a question, and there were tensions between London and Washington over the Oregon territory. “He conversed generally about his farm and business and talked much of his beloved country,” Andrew junior recalled. He was sure Texas would come into the Union and hoped the Oregon matter would be settled peaceably. But if not, his son recalled Jackson saying, “let war come. There would be patriots enough in the land found to repel foreign invasion come from whatsoever source.”
HE SENT VALEDICTORIES to his old friends. “My dear Andrew,” he wrote Andrew Donelson, who was in Texas as chargé, “you have my blessing and prayers for your welfare and happiness in this world.” To Blair, Jackson wrote: “This may be the last letter I may be able to write you. But live or [die I am your] friend.… As far as justice is due to my fame, I know you will shield it. I ask no more. I rest upon truth, and require nothing but what truth can mete to me.” To Kendall, he said: “On the subject of my papers: You are to retain them so long as you think necessary to use them. Should you die they are to pass forthwith into Mr. Blair’s hands. I have full and unlimited confidence in you, both that my papers will be safe in your hands and that they never will be permitted to be used but for a proper use.… Here, my friend, I must for the present close, tendering you with my prayers for your health, long life and prosperity, and that we may at last meet in a blissful immortality.” On Friday, June 6, he wrote President Polk, who had won the White House in 1844, a letter with advice about the Treasury Department; the next evening, Saturday, the seventh, he finished and franked his last letter, a note to Thomas F. Marshall, a congressman from Kentucky. At one point Jackson broke into what Andrew junior called “cold, clammy perspiration, an evidence of death approaching,” and the attending doctor thought Jackson was gone. The sad word spread through the household, only to have the old man revive after ten minutes.
The next day, Lewis arrived. “Major, I am glad to see you,” Jackson said. “You had like to have been too late.”
He continued to defy expectations. Andrew Donelson’s wife, Elizabeth, had hurried over from the Hermitage church, expecting to find Jackson dead. Instead, he looked up at her and asked how everyone was at home. She said all was well. “I am glad to hear it,” Jackson replied.
John Samuel Donelson, who had been born in the White House in 1832, approached his uncle to say farewell. “Johnny went and kissed him,” his stepmother wrote his father, and Jackson told the boy “to be a good boy and obey his parents, to remember the Sabbath and to keep it.”
Unable to make out the faces of those in the bedroom in the late afternoon light, Jackson asked for his spectacles, which were on his bureau. He licked the lenses, dried them on his sheet, and put them on. Seeing the children and grandchildren in tears, he said, “God will take care of you for me.” He was speaking not only to his relations and the children, but to the slaves who had gathered in the room to mark the end. Jackson said: “Do not cry; I hope to meet you all in Heaven—yes, all in Heaven, white and black.”
Near death, Jackson sought comfort in the promises of the faith he had embraced in retirement. “My conversation is for you all,” he said, and then renewed his talk of the world to come. “Christ has no respect to color,” Jackson said. “I am in God and God is in me. He dwelleth in me and I dwell in him.”
The emotion in the room grew thicker. “What is the matter with my dear children?” Jackson asked. “Have I alarmed you? Oh, do not cry. Be good children and we will all meet in Heaven.”
He asked one of the slaves, George, to remove two of the three pillows beneath his head: having said all that he had to say, he was ready. The room was still. “Just then,” Hannah said, “Master gave one breath, hunched up his shoulders and all was over. There was no struggle.”
It was six o’clock in the evening, on Sunday, June 8, 1845, and Andrew Jackson, seventy-eight years old, older even than the nation, was dead.
SARAH SUFFERED WHAT Elizabeth Donelson called “spasms,” fainted, and had to be carried out to be bathed in camphor while Andrew junior “seemed bewildered.” Hannah, in grief, would not leave the room.
“Although it was looked for, the shock is great, and grief universal,” Elizabeth Donelson wrote her husband. She told him, too, that she would hold on to a note he had written Jackson that arrived after the end—the last of so many, through so many years, through so much. “Yours to the Genl I will keep,” Elizabeth wrote. “He will never see it.”
With those five words—“he will never see it”—the long connection between Andrew Jackson and one of his many namesakes, Andrew Jackson Donelson, ended, coming to a close in the heat of an early summer Sunday in Tennessee. Donelson could not make the funeral in time. He remained in Texas, at work to fulfill the old dream of his uncle’s, that Texas would one day join the Union. Sam Houston, who had just left Donelson, arrived at the Hermitage on the night Jackson died. He had brought his wife and son, and, after kneeling at the bed where Jackson lay, Houston turned to his boy.
“My son,” he said, “try to remember that you have looked on the face of Andrew Jackson.”
JACKSON’S FUNERAL DREW a reported three thousand people to the Hermitage. The Reverend John Todd Edgar conducted the service from the front portico, looking out over the twin rows of native Tennessee Eastern red cedar trees that Jackson had planted along the carriage drive. He preached on a verse from the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, “These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” The Ninetieth Psalm was read, and hymns were sung, including “How Firm a Foundation, Ye Saints of the Lord,” a favorite of Rachel’s:
Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed,
For I am thy God and will still give thee aid;
I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand
Upheld by My righteous, omnipotent hand.
When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of woe shall not thee overflow;
For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.
IN KENTUCKY, Thomas Marshall returned home from traveling in his former congressional district to find Jackson’s letter to him. Marshall was moved, he wrote Andrew Jackson, Jr., to see “the last characters his hand ever drew,” as Marshall put it. Recalling this souvenir of “the dying Hero,” Marshall promised to visit the grave in the autumn. “He knew how deeply he had impressed himself upon my whole soul,” Marshall wrote of Jackson.
In Washington, the historian and statesman George Bancroft painted him as an epic figure. “Before the nation, before the world, before coming ages, he stands forth the representative, for his generation, of the American mind.”
In New York City, Benjamin Butler, the former attorney general, said, “Sleep sweetly, aged soldier, statesman, sage, in the grave of kindred and affection.”
In Nashville, according to legend, a visitor to the Hermitage asked a slave on the place whether he thought Jackson had gone to heaven. “If the General wants to go,” the slave replied, “who’s going to stop him?”
FROM STATE TO state, courthouse square to courthouse square, Jackson’s eulogizers loved the theme of the childless hero who rose to project paternal authority over a nation. “Washington was the father of his country, Jackson its defender and savior,” said Hugh A. Garland, a lawyer, author, and legislator, in a Petersburg, Virginia, address a month after Jackson was buried. “Neither having natural children of their own, they embrace[d] the whole country in the arms of their affection.” And what became of those whom Jackson embraced more intimately even than the country—the advisers and friends who saw him through?
Francis Preston Blair remained a crucial figure in the capital for decades after Jackson’s death. Blair gave up the Globe in 1845, shortly before Jackson’s death, after President Polk decided he wanted his own editor in charge of the party organ. (The paper closed in April 1845, and Polk’s cause was taken up by the Washington Union, which Andrew Donelson edited for a time.) Always generous with the Jackson family financially, Blair had loaned Jackson $10,000 in 1842, and continued to try to help the perennially hapless Andrew Jackson, Jr., eventually playing a key role in the sale of the Hermitage to the state of Tennessee. Blair’s son James brought three cedar chests full of Jackson’s papers from the Hermitage for safekeeping, but Blair did not produce the Jacksonian tome he had hoped. In politics, Blair became a great Unionist, ultimately coming to believe that the slavoc-racy embodied by the old Jacksonian enemy Calhoun was going to destroy the nation. In 1848 Blair helped engineer the Free Soil nomination of Van Buren for president, in hopes of ending the extension of slavery as new states were added to the Union. In 1860, Blair supported Lincoln as the Republican nominee; the next year, he urged the new president to stand strong at Fort Sumter.
On Lincoln’s authority, Blair invited Robert E. Lee to his family home across from the White House to offer the Virginian the Union command. “Mr. Blair,” Lee said to Jackson’s ancient lieutenant, “I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four million of slaves at the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?” Blair’s Silver Spring, Maryland, country house was occupied by Confederate troops. One of his sons, Montgomery Blair, served as Lincoln’s postmaster general, and is depicted with Lincoln and the rest of the Cabinet in Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s painting of Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation; a portrait of Jackson hangs in the background. In the last days of 1864, in part at the suggestion of the Republican newspaperman Horace Greeley, Blair asked Lincoln for permission to travel to the Confederacy on a secret peace mission. On Wednesday, December 28, Lincoln authorized the journey with a card: “Allow the bearer, F. P. Blair, Sr., to pass our lines, go South, and return.” Blair reached Richmond through the good offices of General U. S. Grant and met with Jefferson Davis. Slavery, Blair told Davis, had been “the cause of all our woes,” and that argument was settled. It was, Blair said, “the sin offering required to absolve us and put an end to the terrible retribution” of the war. Back in Washington, Blair reported on his meeting, and Lincoln told Blair that he would “receive any agent whom [Davis], or any other influential person now resisting the national authority, may informally send to me, with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.” The result was a Friday, February 3, 1865, conversation between Lincoln, Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, and others aboard a ship at Hampton Roads. Nothing came of the effort, but it was a noble one.
Blair and his daughter Lizzie were constant in their attentions to Mary Todd Lincoln in the aftermath of the assassination at Ford’s Theatre, and Blair was present when Andrew Johnson was sworn in as the seventeenth president of the United States. In 1872 Blair asked to be baptized, and an Episcopal bishop performed the rite at Silver Spring—and then the baptismal party dined on ducks, oysters, and ice cream. Blair died four years later, on Wednesday, October 18, 1876. The New York Times noted that he had been “slashing and fierce upon occasion, and his whole political training had been aggressive and belligerent”—yet, the Times added, he was “in character amiable, affectionate, and grateful. The man and the editor were as dissimilar as possible.”
Martin Van Buren served a single term as president of the United States. The architect of so much in the years of Jackson and beyond, he was a terrific tactician and embodied the notion that politics is the art of the possible. After leaving the White House he returned to Kinderhook, New York, retiring to Lindenwald, a richly furnished estate with large lawns and a farm. Van Buren twice sought to regain the presidency, once as the candidate for the Free Soil Party. He supported President Lincoln’s fight to save the Union, and died after a long illness in the second summer of the Civil War, on Friday, July 24, 1862. “The grief of his patriotic friends will measurably be assuaged by the consciousness that while suffering with disease and seeing his end approaching,” said Lincoln, “his prayers were for the restoration of the authority of the government of which he had been head, and for peace and good will among his fellow citizens.”
Amos Kendall stayed on as Van Buren’s postmaster general, leaving office in 1840. He remained in close contact with Jackson and published a biography of the general in 1843. In 1845 Kendall went to work for Samuel F. B. Morse, the pioneer of the electromagnetic telegraph in the United States. A Unionist, Kendall supported President Lincoln during the Civil War; he was a generous donor to Calvary Baptist Church in Washington and a founder of Gallaudet University, the school for the deaf (and, initially, for the blind) in the capital. He died on Friday, November 12, 1869, and was buried at Glenwood Cemetery in Washington.
After losing the Senate election in Tennessee in the wake of his resignation from the War Department and returning to Washington with his wife, John Henry Eaton was briefly president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company before accepting an appointment from Jackson to serve as governor of the Florida territory. Margaret remained Margaret. “Our friend John Eaton is harassed to death by a very sick hypochondriac wife,” a friend told Martin Van Buren. In 1836 Eaton was dispatched as the minister to Spain. The man he was replacing, Cornelius Van Ness, was harsh about the Eatons in his reports home, writing that “he and she together regularly dispose of two bottles of rum of the strongest kind in the spirit every three days; this is, four glasses each and every day, besides wine; and while they are taking it and he chewing, she smokes her cigars.” Eaton’s years at Madrid—President Van Buren left him in the post until April 1840—were undistinguished. When Eaton returned to the United States, he committed the greatest sin in the Jacksonian universe: he betrayed an old friend, Van Buren, by campaigning for Van Buren’s 1840 opponent, William Henry Harrison. The primary cause, Jackson believed, was bitterness. “My friend Maj. Eaton comes home not in good humor, he says he has been dismissed,” Jackson told Kendall.
Moving to Washington, where the couple lived with Margaret’s mother, Eaton practiced law before the Supreme Court and served as president of the Washington Bar Association. His old friends, though, found that he drank too much and seemed unstable. He even accepted a case against Kendall, his old ally and defender. “Never did I so much regret the ingratitude and depravity of man more than I have the course of Major Eaton in his conduct towards you.… He is a lost man … trying to destroy the fame of those who had risked much in the time of his need to save him and his family from degradation and infamy.… O tempora, O mores!” Jackson told Kendall. His brother-in-law from his first marriage, William Lewis, also gave up on him. “I have thought ever since he returned from Spain that he would kill himself drinking or perhaps blow his brains out,” Lewis said in 1846. In the summer of 1844, in a moment of reconciliation, Jackson and the Eatons had dined together at the Hermitage, but the fervor of the friendship had long faded, a relic of distant wars. Eaton died on Monday, November 17, 1856, and was buried in Washington’s Oak Hill Cemetery.
Margaret O’Neale Timberlake Eaton had yet more lives to lead after her husband’s death. “We had been honored as the intimates of the grandest man who had ever sat in the chair of American President,” Margaret wrote in a memoir. “I bore the name of one who as United States Senator, Cabinet officer and minister plenipotentiary to a foreign court had lived and died in honor among his fellow men. But alas! Alas! For the perversity of human nature and my own frailty.” She married a third time—an Italian dancing master named Antonio Buchignani. She was fifty-nine; he was nineteen. They moved to New York City, settling in Gramercy Park, until the groom ran off with Margaret’s granddaughter. Margaret divorced Buchignani, returned to Washington. She had, a Washington observer recalled, “a carriage with four horses and liveried servants.… There was nothing in Washington to compare with her equipage, not even the president’s own.… I have never seen anyone so beautiful.” Margaret died at age seventy-nine on Sunday, November 9, 1879. President and Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes sent flowers to the funeral. She was buried next to John Eaton at Oak Hill Cemetery in an unmarked grave. “She belonged to the women of restless heart whose lives are always stormy, sometimes great, and rarely happy,” wrote a journalist who had known her.
Politically, John C. Calhoun never recovered from the Jackson years. His presidential ambitions, once so strong, were to lead nowhere. Thwarted in the cause of nullification, he grew more strident in his defense of slavery. With the exception of a year as secretary of state in John Tyler’s Cabinet (1844–45), Calhoun remained in the Senate, where he fought for the rights of slave owners. He died in Washington on Saturday, March 30, 1850. Floride was en route but arrived too late. Clay and Webster mourned him, as did much of the South. Clay saluted Calhoun’s oratorical gifts, recalling his “torrent of mighty rhetoric, which always won our admiration even if it did not bring conviction to our understandings.” Calhoun was buried in the churchyard of St. Philip’s in Charleston, not far from Fort Sumter.
Henry Clay served in the Senate until 1842, seeking the presidency again in 1844 (Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey was his running mate on the Whig ticket). Clay was defeated by James K. Polk, a Tennessean who was hailed as “Young Hickory.” The hostility between Clay and Jackson endured. In the spring of 1842, Van Buren visited the Hermitage and Ashland. Clay asked after Jackson’s health “respectfully and kindly,” but that was all. Jackson never relented in the slightest. On hearing of Polk’s victory over Clay in the 1844 race for the White House, Jackson wrote to Andrew Donelson: “The glorious result of the presidential election has rejoiced every democratic bosom in the United States, and as to myself I can say in the language of Simeon of old, ‘Let thy servant depart in peace, as I have seen the solution of the liberty of my country and the perpetuity of our Glorious Union.’ ” Clay returned to the Senate, where he created the Compromise of 1850, the complex legislative achievement that attempted to balance interests among slave states, free states, and territories, delaying war for a decade. A firm Unionist, Clay reconciled with Francis Preston Blair. “Tell Clay for me,” Van Buren wrote Blair, that the Compromise of 1850 was “more honorable and durable than his election to the Presidency could possibly have been.” Clay died on Tuesday, June 29, 1852, in Washington, where he was the first man to lie in state in the Capitol. He was buried in Lexington.
John Quincy Adams remained in the House of Representatives for three years after Jackson’s death. Adams carried on as he had set out, arguing for the rights of abolitionists to petition the Congress and becoming, through the years, what Henry Wise called “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.” Before the Supreme Court, he defended the African captives who had been arrested for rebellion aboard the Amistad, and won. Adams collapsed on the floor of the House on Monday, February 21, 1848, and died two days later. His casket was taken to Boston and then on to Quincy. Louisa survived him by four years, and ultimately they were interred beside Abigail and John Adams at the First Parish Church.
Andrew Jackson Donelson never came to “preside over the destinies” of America. After being considered for Van Buren’s Cabinet, he briefly weighed a bid for Congress from Nashville, but decided against it and, in 1844, accepted President Tyler’s appointment to Texas. Jackson died believing Donelson had done the job well, and that Texas would come into the Union: “All is safe and Donelson will have the honor of this important deed,” Jackson wrote President Polk, Tyler’s successor, as the shadows lengthened. From 1846 to 1849, Donelson served as the American envoy to Prussia, then returned to the United States and edited the Washington Union, the successor to Blair’s Globe, from 1851 to 1852. By 1856 he had swerved into anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic politics, and ran for vice president on the Know Nothing ticket (so called because of the air of secrecy around its membership). As the Civil War approached, Donelson’s woes compounded, both in politics and in farming.
Writing in the mid-1850s from Cleveland Hall, a Donelson family house near the Hermitage, Stockley’s daughter Laura recorded the slow but steady crumbling of the world Jackson had known. “A great change” was about to come to “our old neighborhood,” she wrote to a brother. “Cousin Andrew Jackson has sold the rest of the Hermitage and has purchased a large place in Mississippi, on the St. Louis Bay.… To hear Cousin Andrew’s description of this place—the magnolia and orange groves, fertile soil and balmy breezes—you would think it some enchanted spot.” One suspects Andrew junior’s effusiveness was in part intended to mask his unease about breaking up his father’s house, but he comforted himself, too, with the idea that the state, which bought the land, might be able to convince Washington to use it for a southern branch of West Point. But that was not to be. Always hapless in business affairs, Andrew junior killed himself in a hunting accident, shooting himself in the hand while climbing over a fence. The wound became infected, and he died of what was called lockjaw.
Meanwhile, Andrew Donelson’s luck continued to deteriorate as he journeyed by river between Mississippi and Tennessee. “Uncle Andrew met with quite a loss on his way early one morning,” Laura wrote. “The boat stopped for freight, Uncle Andrew left his berth for a few moments and in the meantime some daring robber stole his watch and chain which he valued at $250…. He is offering his place [now called Tulip Grove] for sale. If he sells, he will move to Memphis.”
The decision to go west did not turn out well. In a letter from one Donelson relative to another in 1859, the family lamented Andrew Donelson’s troubles: “Uncle Andrew [Donelson] was up here about three weeks since. He is in lower spirits than I ever saw him. His place in Bolivar County is all under water, so that he will make another failure this year, and a hurricane blew the roof of his house off in Memphis. He is decidedly unfortunate.” During the war, like many Tennesseans, he moved from support for the Union to sympathy for the Confederacy, and was trusted by neither. He died on Monday, June 26, 1871, at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, and was buried in that city’s Elmwood Cemetery—far from Emily, and far from Jackson.