The President's Lady, page 27
“Party?”
“For two.”
“I see.” Then with a wry smile, “Welcoming home the prodigal son?”
“The prodigal husband.”
“I guess you could call me that; and it would be the kindest thing that has been said of me in quite a while.”
“You should stay home more often and listen to your wife. I can think of all sorts of nice things I would like to say if I thought you were interested.”
“I’m always interested in anything you have to say, Mrs. Jackson.”
“Not for the past few months you haven’t been, Mr. Jackson.”
He walked over to the table and selected a pickled walnut from a pewter porringer. Then, slowly, almost apologetically, he moved toward where she was standing, took her in his arms and kissed her.
“Darling, you haven’t kissed me for so very long, or taken me in your arms.”
“I know, I’ve been too unhappy; when you hate yourself and the whole world around you . . .”
“But Andrew, you’ve always been so strong, so sure of yourself.”
“I don’t know. Everything just seems to have . . .”
“Could one of the reasons be that you are quarreling so constantly with Mr. Jefferson and President Madison? What would you do if you were in their shoes? Each section of the country has its special problems, and its separate demands. With the war still going on in Europe each foreign country has its demands too.”
“I’ll admit poor Mr. Madison is beset by everyone . . . including me.” He grinned, the first sign that the good soil of Andrew Jackson was sprouting life again. “God help anyone who has to be president!” Then he waved his arms high above his head and brought his fists plunging through the air. “But by the Eternal, I’d be tougher with the British; I’d kick them out of those forts in the North . . .”
He picked up one of his clay pipes, filled it with tobacco, then crouched on the hearth, lighting it with a small live coal. “Those families over in Summner County have reports that the land is fertile in the Mississippi Territory, and that a man can own as much of it as he can survey. There’s a Federal judgeship open down there; if it paid only a thousand dollars a year, I’d take it.”
He looked up into her face. “I think we can get the appointment this time; it’s not a big enough job for Mr. Madison to bother about. Well, my dear, what do you think?”
What could she think? The last time he had wanted “to shake the dust of the Cumberland Valley from my boots,” he had thought to go in splendor as governor of the new and vast Louisiana Territory, with a governor’s mansion, and high social standing. Now, only five years later, he was content to plunge into the wilderness, swing an ax to level the fields and build himself another log cabin . . . if only he could get a thousand-dollar-a-year judgeship!
Two events, one political and one personal, brought them great pleasure: the election of their old friend Willie Blount as governor; and the marriage of John Coffee to Johnny’s daughter Mary. The wedding party at the Mansion was the happiest reunion the Donelson family had known in a long time. Rachel and Andrew were pleased to have their good friend Jax a member of the family; by way of a wedding present they took from their strongbox Jax’s notes for his portion of the store debts and tore them up.
When Severn’s Elizabeth was ready to be delivered, Rachel hired the best midwife in the neighborhood and went herself to assist in the nursing. The child got itself born without difficulty, but there was a complication which the midwife did not explain. A half hour later it resolved itself in the form of a second child, a twin boy. Elizabeth burst into tears.
“Why does it have to be two when I have barely the strength to nurse one?”
One of the twins began to cry. Rachel took the baby, wrapped him in a soft blanket and put him on her shoulder with his head nestled against her neck. She was standing this way when Severn and Andrew came into the room. Andrew stood above her, gazing down at the infant in her arms, sensing how her heart ached with the need to keep this newborn babe right where he was. Then, suddenly, Elizabeth called from the bed:
“Keep that boy. We only expected one. We wouldn’t be losing anything.”
Rachel turned her head slowly.
“Yes, Rachel, keep that boy you have in your arms,” said Severn softly; “we know how you’ve longed for a child, and he’ll be well off.”
Rachel looked about her, managing to bring Andrew’s face into focus. His eyes were bright. Weak with expectancy, she sank into a chair, still holding the child.
“You can’t be serious, Liz. This is your child. You just bore him. Wait until you recover your strength before you make such an important decision.”
“If we could bring some happiness to you, Rachel and Andrew,” said Severn, “and at the same time help Liz and the boy...”
Andrew’s expression left little doubt about how he felt.
Elizabeth asked: “Do you have a woman at home who can wet-nurse him?”
“Yes. Orange has a little one.”
“Then take him right this instant. Andrew, you go into Nashville tomorrow and file adoption papers.”
When they reached the Hermitage, Andrew drew a chair up to the fire for her. She sat holding the baby in her arms and looking down into its face. Andrew watched her silently. Her eyes were fathomless, all the mystery and magic of life reflected in them. The years had fallen away.
They named him Andrew Jackson, Jr. Andrew brought her the adoption papers, signed and approved by the court, to put into her strongbox. Jane brought her the Hays trundle, which Rachel placed beside her bed. She had trouble falling asleep at night because she was listening so intently to the child’s breathing; if a twig fell on the roof she was out of bed and leaning over the crib before she was awake. He was a long lean baby, with a thatch of black hair and pastel blue eyes; he cried little, except in the early morning when he was hungry. Rachel kept the fire roaring in the cabin to make sure he did not catch cold; Andrew could hardly breathe for the heat.
One day George reported that Mr. Jackson would not be home to dinner. When Andrew reached the Hermitage later that evening he was excitedly leading a new filly across the yard. Rachel ran up to him and examined the little roan race horse. Her eyes sought Andrew’s, a small smile playing about her lips: could it be her husband’s nose had been put out of joint?
The filly was so small and light in weight that it hardly seemed she could last out a long race.
“That’s why I got her cheap,” said Andrew gleefully as he came in from the yard where he had been training her. “I’ve entered her in the big race on Saturday with a thousand-dollar side bet against the course champion.”
To everyone’s astonishment except Andrew’s, the little roan won handily, streaking around the course so fast her hoofs hardly seemed to touch the turf. Rachel could not tell from Andrew’s chuckles whether his pleasure came from this renewed proof of his sense of horseflesh, or the fact that he had won what would have been a year’s salary from the Mississippi judgeship . . . which had just been given to someone else.
“You know what I’m going to do with this thousand dollars?” he asked.
“No, what?”
“I heard of a stand of arms for sale in Hiwassie, and I’m going to use this money to buy them. I’m starting out tomorrow to see and talk to every militiaman who’s ever served under me; if I can’t persuade them back into the ranks, or convince them that we’ll be training for an actual war, then I’ll simply have to bribe them with whatever it is they need: a horse, or a sword, or a gun. I’ve got to build that militia from inside myself; there is no other place it can come from.”
He was gone all day now, touring the countryside. Rachel would watch him leave the Hermitage a little after dawn, when she rose to tend the baby. It’s so important that he be happy, she repeated to herself, for when he is unhappy he tears himself apart, and then the seamside of his fabric shows through.
For herself the baby had an annealing effect; a buoyancy permeated her outlook and her actions. She felt light on her feet, running the hundreds of errands needed for the child, and light of heart as she played the pianoforte after dinner. She was happy and grateful; she no longer turned inward, wondering what people knew or thought about her. She met strangers as easily as she did friends. Her sanguinity coincided with Andrew’s renewed faith in himself, his own return to patience and lightness of touch. She realized that therein lay the curse and the genius of a good marriage: that what happened to one member happened equally to both.
She was the only one who knew that Andrew was spending his own money on the militia. He told her, “We should never count pennies on this subject,” yet she was amused to see that he brought home the record of every dollar spent, asking her to post it in his militia account book.
“So you really think we’ll be paid back, Andrew?”
“If war comes, every dollar will be returned; if not, it’ll be like coming in second in a horse race.”
As a result of his new fighting spirit, and Governor Blount’s espousal, Sunday was once again open house at the Hermitage. A group of bright young aides-de-camp came for the afternoon and supper: Thomas Hart Benton, a law student, Robert Butler, recently married to Rachel Hays, John Reid, a bank clerk, William Carroll, who owned a successful hardware store in Nashville, and William B. Lewis, a neighbor. Eight years had passed since Andrew had taken command, so that he was able to draw a whole new generation of subalterns from among Rachel’s nephews. When the weather was warm she spread long tables under the catalpa trees; when it turned cool she served inside, using her cherry-wood dining table as a buffet, with some thirty men standing in groups caring and discussing military problems. Andrew, Jr., learning to walk, made the adventuresome journey from one military leg to another as though he were wandering through a forest of young trees.
For the first master muster the following spring Rachel rode in her carriage to the drill grounds. There formerly had been some two thousand members of the militia, but surely, she told herself, there could not be more than two hundred assembled here? Few of the townspeople had bothered to come, the wrestling matches had disappeared, there were only a few old women selling ginger cakes. Yet even to her inexperienced eye it was clear that there were many new guns in evidence, as well as fine horses and considerable of what Andrew called accouterments. Andrew was pleased.
“Wait till word gets around about the new spirit and the new muskets,” he told her; “the volunteers will start drifting back of their own accord.”
It seemed only a few months before a visiting officer declared General Jackson’s militia the most perfect of its kind in the country. Rachel found herself thinking, If war must come, let it come now so that Andrew can prove he has been right.
5
And so he was. On June 21, 1812, Billey Phillips, their former jockey and now a presidential courier, brought the news from Washington to Nashville: the United States had declared war on Great Britain!
Rachel was swept by a hundred inner gales. War, then, as Andrew had predicted that first night at supper at the Donelson stockade, more than twenty years before. She thought of the line he was so fond of quoting: someone had spoken to Benjamin Franklin of the Revolution as the War for Independence, and Mr. Franklin had replied, “Sir, the war for independence is yet to come!” Well, it was here now, and she knew that whatever might happen to the country, the government or the army it was a war that Andrew Jackson would never abandon until it had been won.
The weeks of July 1812 passed in a fever. Andrew rose at dawn and tried to supervise the farming of the Hermitage, but he was so preoccupied with military affairs that the effort was galling to him. Once again she made her way into the fields, releasing him for the thousand tasks involved in getting his troops armed and trained: for there was no help forthcoming from either the state or the Federal government, and he had to send out his own purchasing agents to places like Newport in Kentucky to bring back the necessary muskets and ammunition. To Rachel, who had watched him drawing up his maps, he explained:
“If President Madison approves, I can move my militia to Canada within ninety days and take Quebec. The British forces there are still feeble. We could sweep straight through Canada before they’d have a chance to reinforce their garrisons.”
Since the Creeks, now heavily armed and incited by British agents, had already begun their war at the Tennessee border, Andrew stood poised with his men, ready to move in either direction upon receipt of an order. Then, late in July, the message arrived. Andrew was away, so Rachel tore open the sealed envelope. She read:
The tender of Service by Genl. Jackson and the volunteers under his command is Received by the President with peculiar satisfaction and in accepting their services, he cannot withhold an expression of his admiration of the zeal and ardour by which they are animated.
WILLIAM EUSTIS
Secretary of War
The news of Secretary of War Eustis’s note had been released by Governor Blount, and with it the announcement that a general of the United States Army was to be appointed from the West and dispatched at once to Canada. When Andrew reached home he barely glanced at the note which she stood waving at him as he came across the yard to the house.
“The War Department has accepted my plan for a march on Quebec!” he exclaimed. “Rachel, remember at Hunter’s Hill, when you said to me, ‘Why Andrew, I do believe you would like to be a regular officer in the United States Army’? Well, my dear, it has come to pass.”
“You’ve received the appointment?”
“It should be here on the next dispatch. I’ve alerted the militia. We’ll be ready to move within a few hours.”
The appointment came through the very next day, but it was for James Winchester, Andrew’s second-in-command, who was made a brigadier general in the regular army and ordered to leave at once with Kentucky troops to join General William H. Harrison in Canada. Andrew sat on a bench outside their cabin, his face an earth-red in color, a dazed expression in his eyes, looking straight through Rachel.
“Perhaps it’s because General Winchester had such a fine record in the Revolution?” she offered. When he did not answer, she continued, “Or it may be that they want you for the southern campaign? You’ve been telling the War Department for years that when the British struck they’d come in through Louisiana.”
This helped a little; he gulped a few times and moved his head as though searching for the early August stars through the trees.
The first news of the war in the North was catastrophic: General Hull, who commanded the largest part of the American troops in Canada, had surrendered Detroit and his entire army. For days Andrew wandered about the Hermitage, unable to eat or sleep or discuss anything else. This time she did not try to bring him out of his gloom: it was too deep to be dissipated by any comforting word.
He did not find release from his lethargy for almost a full week, and then only because he learned that four hundred first-class rifles, of a better caliber than anything his militia had ever owned, were available on the Indian frontier. He secured twenty-eight hundred dollars from Governor Blount, signed his own personal paper for another thirty-two hundred dollars and sent the swiftest scouts in Tennessee to buy the rifles before anyone else could stumble across them.
At long last, in October, Governor Blount received seventy blank commissions from the War Department. Andrew assured Rachel that this was the authorization for which they had been waiting: if they could not push the British out of Canada, at least they would now be able to reach Louisiana before the British fleet could transport its victorious northern troops to New Orleans. She and Andrew were having a late supper after having taken Andy back to the Cumberland Academy, which had formerly been the Davidson Academy, when General Robertson came in from Knoxville. They could tell he was angry by the way he kept pushing back his bang of pure-white hair.
“I got bad news for you, son: the President and Secretary of War are ignorin’ your militia. Governor Blount has been ordered to call out and equip fifteen hundred new volunteers.”
Andrew sat stunned, his extraordinarily large mouth open and out of control, foam working in one corner. Rachel asked:
“But how can that be? They know that Andrew has twenty-seven hundred men trained and ready. They already accepted . . .”
General Robertson answered softly, as one does in the presence of a stricken man.
“Governor Blount is convinced that the President and the War Department don’t want Andrew in their army.”
“No,” Andrew shot back, finding speech at last, “they want General Hull, who surrenders without a shot. I might fight, and embarrass them.”
“Confidentially, son, the governor is afraid you won’t take a subordinate position under General Wilkinson. But maybe I can find some way . . .”
“All I ask is a chance to fight; but to have to sneak into the war through the back door . . .”
Rachel sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap, half listening to the discussion, half hearing her own inner voices. The War Department had made it mercilessly clear that they were afraid of Andrew and mistrusted him. Why? Because of the Burr affair? Because of his early political quarrels with Sevier and Jefferson? Because he had had no real war experience? She would not let herself think what would happen to her husband if he were denied the right to participate in this war of which he had kept Tennessee aware these many years.
