September 3, 2019 - Nashville, TN
Andrew Jackson's Hermitage
We started off by touring the Andrew Jackson museum.
Here are Andrew and Rachel Jackson. They had no children together but adopted Andrew Jackson Jr., the son of Rachel's brother Severn Donelson. The couple legally married in January 1794. She had been under stress throughout her husband's presidential campaign -- it was a particularly vicious presidential race, "Those who believe present-day American politics are becoming a dirty game cannot have read the history of the 1828 election" - Paul Johnson -- and just as Jackson was preparing to head to Washington for his inauguration, she fell ill. She did not live to see her husband become president, dying of a stroke or heart attack a few days later.
Andrew Jackson was not a friend of native Americans, to put it mildly. Jackson destroyed Indian and Spanish power in the lower Mississippi Valley. "The Treaty of Fort Jackson -- the turning point in the destruction of the Indians east of the Mississippi -- was only the first of five in which the Indians were deprived of virtually all the land they had in the whole of this vast area. ... Most people in the West and South wanted war because it would 'solve the Indian problem.' The new republic was ambivalent about Indians. The Constitution ignored them.... The prevailing American view was that the Indians must assimilate or move west."
The Old South -- the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia -- was not suited to growing cotton on a large scale; if anything it was tobacco country. The new states Jackson's ruthlessness brought into being, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, now constituted the Deep South where cotton was king." -- Paul Johnson: A History of the American People.
For ladies and gentlemen of society, the carriage was a mark of distinction. For its day, it represented the ultimate in comfort and status.
We went on a guided tour of the house. For some reason I did not take any photos. But the Hermitage website has excellent photos and descriptions of all the rooms here.
We exited at the rear of the house.
That's Andrew Jackson's grave stone on the left, and Rachel's on the right.
The site today covers 1,120 acres, which includes the original 1,050-acre tract of Jackson's land. It is overseen and managed by The Andrew Jackson Foundation, formerly called the Ladies' Hermitage Association.
The Hermitage was a slave plantation. Throughout his life, Jackson expanded the site to an operation of 1,000 acres, with 200 acres used for cotton, the commodity crop, and the remainder for food production and breeding and training racehorses.
Here is a closer look at the two slave cabins.
Cotton close-up.
"Religion would have swept away slavery in America without difficulty early in the 19th century but for one thing: cotton. It was this little, two-syllable word which turned American slave-holding into a mighty political force and so made the Civil War inevitable. And cotton, in terms of humanity and its needs, was an unmitigated good. Thus do the workers of mysterious providence balance good with evil.
Until the end of the 18th century, the human race had always been unsuitably clothed in garments which were difficult to wash and therefore filthy. Cotton offered an escape from this misery, worn next to the skin in cold countries, as a complete garment in hot ones. The trouble with cotton was its expense. Until the industrialization of the cotton industry, to produce a pound of cotton thread took 12 to 14 man-days, as against six for silk, two to five for linen, and one to two for wool. This acted as a spur to mechanical invention. The arrival of the Arkwright spinning-machine and the Hargreaves jenny in the England of the 1770s meant that, whereas in 1765 half a million pounds of cotton had been spun in England, all of it by hand, by 1784 the total was 12 million, all by machine. Next year the big Boulton & Watt steam engines were introduced to power the cotton-spinning machines. This was the Big Bang of the first Industrial Revolution. By 1812 the cost of cotton yarn had fallen by 90 percent. then came a second wave of mechanical innovation. By the early 1860s the price of cotton cloth, in terms of gold bullion, was less than one percent of what it had been in 1784, when the industry was already mechanized. There is no instance in world history of the price of a product in potentially universal demand coming down so fast. As a result, hundreds of millions of people, all over the world, were able to dress confortably and cleanly at last.
But there was a price to be paid, and the black slaves paid it."
-- Paul Johnson, A History of the American People.
Andrew Jackson's grandson, Andrew Jackson III, and his family were the last to occupy the Hermitage. The family moved out in 1893, and it ceased being a family residence. The Hermitage was opened to the public by the Ladies' Hermitage Association, who had been deeded the property by the state of Tennessee for use as a museum of both Jackson's life and the antebellum South in general. The Association restored the mansion to its 1837 appearance. Over time, the organization bought back all the land that had been sold, taking ownership of the last parcel that restored the site boundaries in 2003.
Lynnette sad to leave The Hermitage.
