1828 - Chapter Seven - UNFORTUNATLY

 

I hate to call her “The Unfortunate Rachel”, but she was. Her troubles started in the fall of 1779 when her father John Donelson, dragged his family along with about 600 other men, women and children through the 12 mile long Cumberland Gap to an outpost on the headwaters of the Tennessee River (above). From here most of the younger men set out cross country, aiming for the Cumberland River. 

Once there, they bought land from the local Shawnee Indians at the head of a trail called the Natchez Trace. By winter they were warm and snug in their new fort, which they called Nashboro (sic). 

Unfortunately, on 22 December of that same year, John loaded 12 year old Rachel, her ten siblings and her mother, along with 300 other old men, women and children onto 30 flatboats and canoes, and began floating down the Tennessee River. John Donelson thought the women and children would have an easier time on the water. Boy, was he wrong.

Almost immediately 28 people contracted small pox and had to be isolated in a single boat. Then Indians attacked, killing all the small pox victims. What was left of the expedition repeatedly ran aground, some of the boats capsized, and the women were required to help steer the ungainly rafts, while Indians kept shooting the helmsmen. 

Eventually, the desperate band reached the Ohio River, at Paduca, Kentucky. They then laboriously poled ten miles against the current to the mouth of the Cumberland River, and then 160 miles up that stream until their joyful reunion on April 24, 1780, with their men at the new fort, now called Nashville. 

Of the roughly 300 women and children who began that four month 1,500 mile river voyage, 33 had died and nine arrived wounded – that was a better than 10% causality rate  They were literally decimated. It was a tough trip.

Eventually the families each established their own little fortresses in the wilderness. Unfortunately, five years later, on 1 March, 1785, the 18 year old Rachel Donelson married a 28 year old land speculator named Captain Lewis Robards. It was to prove a tough marriage. 

He owned land 150 miles to the northeast, around Harrodsburg, Kentucky, and the couple lived there with his widowed mother, Elizabeth, who took in boarders. Then, in the fall of 1788, Lewis returned home from a business trip to find Rachel on the porch talking with a boarder, a traveling lawyer named Peyton Short. 

According to another boarder, Judge John Overton (above), Lewis accused Short of flirting with his wife, and a heated argument developed. Elizabeth Robards was drawn outside where she took Mr. Short's side. Lewis then accused his wife of encouraging Short. When his mother supported Rachel, Lewis ordered his wife to leave and never show her face in “his” house again.

So the unfortunate Rachel returned to Nashville, where she met another young lawyer recently arrived at her own widowed mother's boarding house. His name was Andrew Jackson. The next year, Lewis arrived to patch up things with Rachel, but quickly decided Andrew Jackson was now flirting with his wife. And maybe he was. 

Anyway, Lewis outweighed Jackson by about 50 pounds, and threatened to beat him up. Instead Jackson offered to meet him “on the field of honor”, but then moved to a nearby trading post. However Lewis's behavior, and his new threat to “haunt” Rachel, convinced her that unfortunately Lewis was still crazy. And as soon as Lewis had returned to Harrodsburg for a quick business trip, Rachel took a boat up the Cumberland, then down the Ohio to the Mississippi River. She didn't stop until she got to Natchez, in Spanish territory.

The following year, an announcement appeared in a Kentucky newspaper saying that through the good offices of his brother-in-law Major John Jouett, Lewis Robards had been granted a divorce by the Kentucky Legislature. Reading this Jackson immediately took off for Natchez, where in the summer of 1791, he and Rachel were married.  Unfortunately, they did not live happily ever after. Because Rachel was unfortunate - remember? Even her divorce was going to be tough.

It was not until 1793 that the Jackson's, living as man and wife on land Jackson had purchased ten miles outside of Nashville, learned the newspaper story had been incorrect. Kentucky had not granted Lewis Robards a divorce from Rachel. All that Lewis' brother-in-law had got him was a bill which authorized him to seek a divorce in court. He had quickly started that process, but legally, he and Rachel were still married, making Rachel a bigamist. But then so was Lewis Robards, since in December of 1792 he had married Miss Hannah Winn. The Robards-Donaldson nuptials would not be legally ended until a year later – as of 27 September, 1793.

Now, Rachel (above) was a devout Presbyterian, and would never have lived with a man without believing she was in a sanctified marriage. After all, marriage was the only financial security a woman had in 18^th century. And as soon as the Jacksons could verify the Robards divorce, they remarried, in January of 1794, in Nashville. After that, they settled down to live happily ever after - not. Because Rachel's unfortunate divorce was going to be very, very tough, especially on Andrew.

It is figured that Andrew Jackson fought at least 13 duels to “defend his wife's honor”. It wasn't that people did not understand the confusion distance and shoddy records could generate along the frontier. But it was common knowledge that if you were ticked off with the hot headed Jackson, just mentioning Rachel would instantly get his goat. In 1806 Tennessee Governor John Sevier and head of the state militia Andrew Jackson got into an argument in front of the courthouse in Knoxville. Jackson began to list his extensive record of service, and when Sevier got feed up he interjected, “I know of no great service you have rendered, except taking a trip with another man's wife.”

The duel with Governor Sevier ended with both men shooting into the air. But there was also the 1806 duel with Charles Dickinson, which started as an argument over a horse race, but came to a head when Dickinson called Rachel a bigamist. Dickinson was a well known duelist, a crack shot, who proceeded to lodge a musket ball in Jackson's lung. But Jackson's single minded fury kept him on his feet, and he put a bullet in Dickerson’s chest, killing him. Which is why Charles Hammond decided to bring up the tardy divorce as well.

Charles Hammond (above) had been a Virginia lawyer, who had even argued before the Supreme Court - where he earned Chief Justice John Marshall's praise for his losing arguments. In 1826 Charles moved to Cincinnati, Ohio and bought the failing Gazette weekly newspaper. He immediately turned it into a successful daily. Daniel Webster called him “the greatest genius who ever wielded the political pen”.  And in March of that year, Hammond produced a classic editorial about Presidential candidate Andrew Jackson, asking, “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?”

On 23 March, 1827, Hammond returned to the subject, informing the 15,000 residence of Cincinnati that “In the summer of 1790, General Jackson prevailed upon the wife of Lewis Robards...to desert her husband and live with himself in the character of a wife.” It wasn't true, at least not entirely. After all, Lewis had ordered the unfortunate Rachel out of his house, before she even met Jackson. In fact they never would have met, except Lewis was behaving like a jerk. But then the purpose of Hammond's insults was not to prove that Rachel had no honor, but to prove that Jackson had no sense - that he was a hot head, not to be trusted with the nation.

Jackson (above) did challenge Hammond to a duel after that first insult, but Hammond refused to even respond. And then Jackson was told that Hammond had met that summer with Henry Clay, of “the corrupt bargain” fame, and that it was Clay who had encouraged Hammond to write about Rachel. So Jackson challenged Clay, who answered by insisting he had never mentioned Rachel to Hammond. But Old Hickory decided he didn't believe Clay. From that day forward Jackson was “determined to...lay the perfidy, meanness and wickedness of Clay, naked before the American people...he is certainly the basest, meanest scoundrel that ever disgraced the image of God...nothing is too low for him to condescend to.”

In public Jackson remained calm, so Hammond decided to step up the attacks. He wouldn't fight to defend his wife's honor, then maybe he would reveal his real self to defend his mother. Wrote Hammond now, “General Jackson’s mother was a “COMMON PROSTITUTE” brought to this country by the British soldiers! She afterward married a MULATTO MAN, with whom she had several children, of which number General JACKSON IS ONE!!!”

In reality, the only one who was prostituting himself in this affair, was Hammond.

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1828 - AN ENDING

I can imagine what it was like to wake up every morning as a slave. Can you? Each dawn mocked you with a false promise of hope. Every evening, your future died again in darkness. Should your gaze fall upon your children you could not help but wonder if this day they would be sold away, because “masa'” lost a bet, or wanted to buy his child a present. Modern apologists for slavery may want to believe beatings were uncommon. But we know from personal letters by her master that for 30 years a woman named Betty was Rachel Jackson's personal slave, and that in the General's words, she “must be ruled with the cowhide” - meaning she was periodically whipped. What kind of a woman was this white slave master, Rachel Jackson, who could live every day with an intimate, and then coldly countenance her being beating?

On November 3, 1813, militia under General Andrew Jackson attacked the Creek Indian village of Talulshatche, and in the words of participant David Crockett, “We shot them down like dogs.” A child of eight months was found alive in the burning village, and was delivered to the General, evidently as a trophy. But the orphaned Jackson felt what he called “an unusual sympathy” for the orphaned child. Andrew sent the baby to his home, instructing Rachel, “I...want him well taken care of, (as) he may have been given to me for some valuable purpose.”

He was given the name of Lyncoya and raised in the main house at the Hermitage, along with Jackson's nephew, Andrew Jackson, Jr. He was the closest thing to her own child Rachel Jackson would ever have. At the age of five Lyncoya made himself a bow and arrows, and in full war paint would descend, issuing high pitched battle screams without warning on unwary visitors. At eight he began attending a local school, but rebelled, and ran away several times. His third year Lyncoya began to apply himself, and showed an aptitude for mechanical devices. He also began to spend much of his time alone. His academic improvements were so great that General Jackson began to think about sending his adopted son to West Point. But it was not to be.

It seems likely that after the General's loss in the Presidential election of 1824, the boy was seen as a political liability: Perhaps. But for whatever reason Lyncoya Jackson never applied to the military academy. Instead, in 1827, he became an indentured servant to a saddle maker in Nashville, Tennessee. For a child with understandable abandonment issues, his first time away from the only security he knew must have been stressful. The next winter Lyconia came down with a cold, which settled in his lungs. He told his employer he wanted to “go home” to the Hermitage (above). That winter and spring Rachel nursed him and was often seen with the 16 year old in her carriage, seeing he got fresh air. But the boy died on June 17, 1827. He was buried somewhere on the grounds of the Hermitage, in an unmarked grave. Perhaps his resting place would have been remembered if his adoptive mother, Rachel, had lived.

On the morning of Wednesday, December 17^th,  Rachel Jackson (above) was overseeing the slaves packing up her life for the move to Washington, when she suddenly issued a “horrible shriek” and grabbed at her heart. A slave woman known only as Old Hanna rushed to Rachel's side and found her struggling for breath. Hanna lowered her mistress into a chair, and began to desperately rub Rachel's side “till she was black and blue”. The General was sent for, and he sent for the family doctor. For the next three days and nights Andrew never left her side.

On the third day Rachel seemed to recover, and she urged Andrew to go to bed and get some sleep. Five minutes after he left her room, the slaves lifted Rachel up while they changed the sheets. And while sitting in a chair, in the arms of Old Hanna, Rachel Jackson suffered another heart attack. She issued a long, loud cry, followed by “a rattling in her throat”, and died in the arms of a slave, December 22, 1828.

It is an insight into generations of slave masters and mistress in the antebellum south, that their first human touch in their life was usually the rough working hands of slave women, and their last conscious touch with humanity was in the exact same way. They had no control over that first contact. But they did have control over the last.

Rachel was buried in the gown she had made for the inaugural ball. And on her tombstone, Andrew had caved the words, “A being so gentle and so virtuous slander might wound, but could not dishonor.”

Even in the words on his wife's memorial, Andrew Jackson managed to bury his own pain, beneath his hatred for those he held responsible. Many historians have suggested that Jackson's  anger over Rachel's death changed the man.  He wrote, “I can and do forgive all my enemies. But those vile wretches who have slandered her must look to God for mercy.” But Jackson was a hater long before he ever met Rachel. He was even a hater before his mother died while tending to others, rather than her own son. It almost seems Andrew Jackson was born hating.

On March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson became President.  In a bit of stage drama, President. John Quincy Adams did not attend the ceremony, as Jackson had refused to visit him in the White House, despite having arrived in Washington days earlier. And so began the Presidency of Andrew Jackson: angry.  Henry Clay compared Jackson's administration to a tornado, destroying everything in his path. Well, not everything. When he left the White House eight years later, Andrew Jackson said two things of real import. One was purely personal, the other purely public. When asked if there was anything he regretted about his time as President, he admitted to two, “That I have not shot Henry Clay or hanged John C. Calhoun.”

But in his farewell address to the nation in December of 1837, the original small government revolutionary, warned the American public, “...unless you become more watchful...and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given...away, and the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations.” That remark proved that whatever his personal failings, Andrew Jackson was ideologically a lot closer to Henry Clay than he would have dared to admit.

And closer to Johnny Q, as well. Three months after Jackson took the oath of office, at about one on the afternoon of June 8, 1829, in Providence, Rhode Island, John Quincy Adam's 28 year old eldest son, the handsome George Washington Adams (above), boarded the double wheeled steam ship, Benjamin Franklin. 

While Captain Eliuh S. Bunker guided the 144 foot long, 419 ton double deck packet boat down Narraganset Bay, the retired two term Congressman remained in his cabin, complaining of illness. As the sun set the Franklin slipped passed Block Island and entered Long Island Sound. They missed George in the forward bar that night, as he was a regular on every trip between the family home south of Boston, and New York City.

George did not leave his cabin until just about two in the morning of June 9, and was seen walking on the open deck wearing a hat and cloak. He was heard pacing for some little time, and then somewhere in the lonely dark, George lost his way. At about four in the morning,his outer garments were found lying on the deck. If he left a note of explanation, it was not found. Four days later his corpse washed ashore on Long Island. To compare the grief that now befell the John Quincy and Louisa Adams, against that felt earlier by Andrew and Rachel Jackson is pointless, and yet to the point. One of the things that binds all humans together is grief and its companion, love. We dream of the one, knowing it never arrives alone. It is our commonality, our shared heritage, which, it seems, we spend a lifetime denying.

And thus ended the campaign of 1828.

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1828 - UNFORTUNATLY

I hate to call her “The Unfortunate Rachel”, but she was. Her troubles started in the fall of 1779 when her father John Donelson, dragged his family along with about 600 men, women and children through the 12 mile long Cumberland Gap to an outpost on the headwaters of the Tennessee River. From here most of the younger men set out cross country, aiming for the Cumberland River. Once there, they bought land from the local Shawnee Indians at the head of a trail called the Natchez Trace. By winter they were warm and snug in their new fort, which they called Nashboro (sic). Unfortunately, on December 22 of that same year, John loaded 12 year old Rachel, her ten siblings and her mother, along with 300 other old men, women and children onto 30 flatboats and canoes, and began floating down the Tennessee River. John Donelson thought the women and children would have an easier time on the water. Boy, was he wrong.

Almost immediately 28 people contracted small pox and had to be isolated in a single boat. Then Indians attacked, killing all the small pox victims. What was left of the expedition repeatedly ran aground, some of the boats capsized, and the women were required to help steer the ungainly rafts, while Indians kept shooting the helmsmen. Eventually, the desperate band reached the Ohio River, at Paduca, Kentucky. They then laboriously poled ten miles against the current to the mouth of the Cumberland River, and then 160 miles up that stream until their joyful reunion on April 24, 1780, with their men at the new fort, now called Nashville. Of the roughly 300 women and children who began that four month 1,500 mile river voyage, 33 had died and nine arrived wounded – that was a better than 10% causality rate  They were literally decimated. It was a tough trip.

Eventually the families each established their own little fortresses in the wilderness. Unfortunately, five years later, on March 1, 1785, the 18 year old Rachel Donelson married a 28 year old land speculator named Captain Lewis Robards. It was to prove a tough marriage. He owned land 150 miles to the northeast, around Harrodsburg, Kentucky, and the couple lived there with his widowed mother, Elizabeth, who took in boarders. Then, in the fall of 1788, Lewis returned home from a business trip to find Rachel on the porch talking with a boarder, a traveling lawyer named Peyton Short. According to another boarder, Judge John Overton, Lewis accused Short of flirting with his wife, and a heated argument developed. Elizabeth Robards was drawn outside where she took Mr. Short's side. Lewis then accused his wife of encouraging Short. When his mother supported Rachel, Lewis ordered his wife to leave and never show her face in “his” house again.

So the unfortunate Rachel returned to Nashville, where she met another young lawyer recently arrived at her own widowed mother's boarding house. His name was Andrew Jackson. The next year, Lewis arrived to patch up things with Rachel, but quickly decided Andrew Jackson was now flirting with his wife. And maybe he was. Anyway, Lewis outweighed Jackson by about 50 pounds, and threatened to beat him up. Instead Jackson offered to meet him “on the field of honor”, but then moved to a nearby trading post. However Lewis's behavior, and his new threat to “haunt” Rachel, convinced her that unfortunately Lewis was still crazy. And as soon as Lewis had returned to Harrodsburg for a quick business trip, Rachel took a boat up the Cumberland, then down the Ohio to the Mississippi River. She didn't stop until she got to Natchez..

The following year, an announcement appeared in a Kentucky newspaper saying that through the good offices of his brother-in-law Major John Jouett, Lewis Robards had been granted a divorce by the Kentucky Legislature. Reading this Jackson immediately took off for Natchez, where in the summer of 1791, he and Rachel were married.  Unfortunately, they did not live happily ever after. Because Rachel was unfortunate - remember? Even her divorce was going to be tough.

It was not until 1793 that the Jackson's, living as man and wife on land Jackson had purchased ten miles outside of Nashville, learned the newspaper story had been incorrect. Kentucky had not granted Lewis Robards a divorce from Rachel. All that Lewis' brother-in-law had got him was a bill authorized him to seek a divorce in court. He had quickly started that process, but legally, he and Rachel were still married, making Rachel a bigamist. But then so was Lewis Robards, since in December of 1792 he had married Miss Hannah Winn. The Robards-Donaldson nuptials would not be legally ended until a year later – as of September 27, 1793.

Now, Rachel (above) was a devout Presbyterian, and would never have lived with a man without believing she was in a sanctified marriage. After all, marriage was usually the only financial security a woman had in 18^th century America. And as soon as the Jacksons could verify the divorce, they remarried, in January of 1794, in Nashville. After that, they settled down to live happily ever after - not. Because Rachel's unfortunate divorce was going to be very, very tough, especially on Andrew.

It is figured that Andrew Jackson fought at least 13 duels to “defend his wife's honor”. It wasn't that people did not understand the confusion distance and shoddy records could generate along the frontier. But it was common knowledge that if you were ticked off with the hot headed Jackson, just mentioning Rachel would instantly get his goat. In 1806 Tennessee Governor John Sevier and head of the state militia Andrew Jackson got into an argument in front of the courthouse in Knoxville. Jackson began to list his extensive record of service, and when Sevier got feed up he interjected, “I know of no great service you have rendered, except taking a trip with another man's wife.”

The duel with Governor Sevier ended with both men shooting into the air. But there was also the 1806 duel with Charles Dickinson, which started as an argument over a horse race, but came to a head when Dickinson called Rachel a bigamist. Dickinson was a well known duelist, a crack shot, who proceeded to lodge a musket ball in Jackson's lung. But Jackson's single minded fury kept him on his feet, and he put a bullet in Dickerson’s chest, killing him. Which is why Charles Hammond decided to bring up the tardy divorce as well.

Charles Hammond (above) had been a Virginia lawyer, who had even argued before the Supreme Court - where he earned Chief Justice John Marshall's praise for his losing arguments. In 1826 Charles moved to Cincinnati, Ohio and bought the failing Gazette weekly newspaper. He immediately turned it into a successful daily. Daniel Webster called him “the greatest genius who ever wielded the political pen” for his editorials. And in March of that year, Hammond produced a classic editorial about Presidential candidate Andrew Jackson, asking, “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?”

On March 23, 1827, Hammond returned to the subject, informing the 15,000 residence of Cincinnati that “In the summer of 1790, General Jackson prevailed upon the wife of Lewis Robards of Mercer County Kentucky, to desert her husband and live with himself in the character of a wife.” It wasn't true, at least not entirely. After all, Lewis had ordered the unfortunate Rachel out of his house, before she even met Jackson. In fact they never would have met, except Lewis was behaving like a jerk. But then the purpose of Hammond's insults was not to prove that Rachel had no honor, but to prove that Jackson had no sense - that he was a hot head, not to be trusted with the nation.

Jackson (above) did challenge Hammond to a duel after the first insult, but Hammond refused to even respond. And then Jackson was told that Hammond had met that summer with Henry Clay, of “the corrupt bargain” fame, and that it was Clay who had encouraged Hammond to write about Rachel. So Jackson challenged Clay, who answered by insisting he had never mentioned Rachel to Hammond. But Old Hickory decided he didn't believe Clay. From that day forward Jackson was “determined to...lay the perfidy, meanness and wickedness of Clay, naked before the American people...he is certainly the basest, meanest scoundrel that ever disgraced the image of God...nothing is too low for him to condescend to.”

In public Jackson remained calm, so Hammond decided to step up the attacks. He wouldn't fight to defend his wife's honor, then maybe he would reveal his real self to defend his mother. Wrote Hammond now, “General Jackson’s mother was a “COMMON PROSTITUTE” brought to this country by the British soldiers! She afterward married a MULATTO MAN, with whom she had several children, of which number General JACKSON IS ONE!!!”

In reality, the only one who was prostituting himself in this affair, was Hammond.

- 30 -