Andrew Jackson (10 page)

Conditions of travel had improved in the eight years since the Donelson party’s voyage but not by much. Though the Cumberland had been settled, the two hundred miles of wilderness that separated it from Jonesboro remained almost as howling as ever. Wild animals roamed freely, and Indians attacked those intruders for whom they had no use. McNairy and Jackson reached Jonesboro without incident, but they waited there for reinforcements before pushing farther west.

Perhaps his impatience to be at his new post made Jackson touchy. Perhaps he felt that a prosecutor needed to establish a reputation for brooking no slights. Perhaps the sensitivity of the skinny, fatherless child who had to battle for everything in life simply pushed to the surface. Whatever the reason, Jackson in Jonesboro precipitated his first duel. Waightstill Avery was a graduate of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), a distinguished veteran of the Revolutionary War, and one of the most respected attorneys in North Carolina. In fact, Jackson had applied to apprentice with Avery but been turned down. At Jonesboro the two men—the dean of the North Carolina bar and the rank novice—took opposite sides in a civil suit. Unsurprisingly, Jackson found himself overmatched. “The cause was going against him, and he became irritable,” Avery’s son recalled later. “My father rather exultingly ridiculed some legal position taken by Jackson, using, as he afterwards admitted, language more sarcastic than was called for. It stung Jackson, who snatched up a pen, and on the blank leaf of a law book wrote a peremptory challenge, which he delivered there and then.”

Avery didn’t take the courtroom challenge seriously, so Jackson reiterated it the next day. “When a man’s feelings and character are injured he ought to seek a speedy redress,” he wrote Avery. “You received a few lines from me yesterday, and undoubtedly you understand me. My character you have injured, and further you have insulted me in the presence of a court and a large audience. I therefore call upon you as a gentleman to give me satisfaction.” Lest he be brushed off again, Jackson specified the time and place: “This evening after court adjourned.”

“My father was no duelist,” Avery’s son said. “In fact, he was opposed to the principle, but with his antecedents, in that age and country, to have declined would have been to have lost caste.” Avery said nothing to Jackson in court about the challenge, yet as soon as the trial went to the jury, he sought a man to act as his second. This fellow arranged the details with a man Jackson had engaged for the same purpose. The parties met in a low-lying area north of Jonesboro after sunset. By now Jackson’s anger had cooled, and he apparently acceded to the advice of the seconds that honor would be assuaged even if no blood flowed. At any rate, after Jackson and Avery stepped off the agreed-upon distance, they fired and both deliberately missed. “General Jackson acknowledged himself satisfied,” Avery’s son concluded. “They shook hands, and were friendly ever after.”

B
y early October 1788 enough emigrants had gathered at Jonesboro to risk the journey west. The state of North Carolina, hoping to demonstrate its concern for the Mero District (and thereby neutralize some of the secessionist sentiment), had enlisted a special squadron of armed guards to travel with the emigrants through the most dangerous stretches of the wilderness. The guards had particular instructions to ensure the safe arrival at Nashville of Judge McNairy and Solicitor Jackson. To lose the court’s charter officers to Indians would have been very bad for civic morale.

Sixty families made the trek. The road was too narrow and stump-strewn to accommodate four-wheeled vehicles, and even the two-wheeled oxcarts a few of the emigrants drove had a difficult time. Most of the travelers’ goods were packed on horses, mules, or the travelers themselves. “I had my saddlehorse—a fine young stallion—and a stout pack-mare carrying my personal effects,” Jackson recalled. “These were my spare clothes, blankets, etc., half a dozen books, with small quantities of ammunition, tea, tobacco, liquor, and salt.” For arms he carried a pair of pistols in saddle holsters, a pistol worn on his belt, and a new rifle.

Jackson almost had occasion to use his guns. On guard one night he heard owls in the forest beyond the halo of light cast by the campfire. He listened carefully, for he had heard owls before, but none quite like these. Suddenly he decided they weren’t owls at all, but Indians preparing to attack. He awoke some members of the party who had local knowledge, and they agreed that the birds sounded suspicious. Quietly but quickly the party broke camp and took to the road. Later Jackson and the others learned that a group of hunters had occupied their camp shortly after Jackson’s party left, and been attacked by Indians, with fatal results.

At the end of October 1788, Jackson’s train reached the bend in the Cumberland where Donelson had ordered his boats ashore. Nashville by this time boasted a handful of stores and taverns, a distillery, and an eclectic array of log cabins, horse sheds, and chicken coops. Jackson didn’t record his first impressions. Possibly he compared it with the towns farther east and wondered what he had got himself into. Perhaps, on the other hand, he detected opportunity in the very rawness of the place. He had turned twenty-one the previous spring, and he was commencing his majority with no advantages but his native intelligence and his ambition. Nashville was half his age, but it too relied on wit and drive, in this case of its few hundred inhabitants. The young man and the younger community made a likely couple.

J
ohn Donelson was dead by the time Andrew Jackson reached Nashville, but no one could say quite how he had died. He had planted his family on a Cumberland farm they called Clover Bottom for the lush meadow that sprang from the black, flood-deposited earth. Yet Donelson and his boys had only just got their first corn crop in the ground when the river made another deposit, burying the crop and forcing the family to higher elevation. Subsequent Indian troubles discouraged a return to Clover Bottom, and the Donelsons beat a temporary retreat into Kentucky. They were back on the Cumberland by 1785, when Donelson installed his wife, Katherine, and the children who hadn’t yet left home in a log house ten miles from Nashville. He farmed during the summer and took odd jobs during the winter. Among those jobs was surveying for speculators hoping to turn a profit on western lands. He was surveying in the woods not far from Nashville when he met a violent death. As Indians were still very active in the area, they initially appeared the likely culprits. Yet examination of the corpse revealed that it retained its scalp but not its wallet, and suspicion fell on white highwaymen. They were never found, though, and the mystery was never solved.

During the next few years the Donelson children continued to scatter. But one returned to the nest. Rachel Donelson was described by a contemporary as possessing a “beautifully molded form, lustrous black eyes, dark glossy hair, full red lips, brunette complexion, though of brilliant coloring, a sweet oval face rippling with smiles and dimples.” She must have been alluring, for she had no trouble attracting admirers, starting with Lewis Robards. Rachel and Robards (apparently pronounced “Roberts,” to judge by the frequent misspellings to that effect) met during the Donelsons’ sojourn in Kentucky. They married not long after her seventeenth birthday and stayed behind when John and Katherine took the other children back to the Cumberland. For a time the young couple got on well, living with Robards’s widowed mother, who grew attached to her daughter-in-law. But when the widow Robards took in a boarder named Peyton Short, trouble developed. Short found Rachel attractive, and she appreciated his gallantries. Probably these were mere flirtations, but Robards became jealous. He accused Rachel of unfaithfulness and Short of cuckolding him. Rachel protested her innocence, and Robards’s mother told him to calm down. But he refused to be mollified. He cast his wife from his—or rather his mother’s—house and sent her packing for the Cumberland.

Rachel reached Nashville about the same time Andrew Jackson did. The new solicitor required housing and upon inquiry learned that Mrs. Donelson would be happy for a lodger. She could use the money, but, more important, she wanted the protection a male would provide. In Indian country every gun helped.

Jackson bunked in a small cabin a short distance from the main house on the Donelson property. Before long he acquired a roommate, John Overton. Like Jackson, Overton was a lawyer; he would go on to a distinguished career at the Tennessee bar. He had been a boarder at the widow Robards’s house in Kentucky when Rachel and Lewis Robards were living there. He saw the rift develop between husband and wife, and after Rachel returned to her mother’s home, he watched Robards grow lonely and remorseful. The widow Robards, upset at the loss of her daughter-in-law and convinced that her son had seen his error, asked Overton to intercede. “The old lady told me he regretted what had taken place, and wished to be reconciled to his wife,” Overton recalled. Overton insisted on hearing it from Robards. “He assured me of his regret respecting what had passed; that he was convinced his suspicions were unfounded; that he wished to live with his wife, and requested that I would use my exertions to restore harmony.” Overton then set out for Nashville and reached the Donelson place a few weeks after Jackson moved in.

His mediation worked. Rachel was almost as unhappy at the separation as Robards was. She may have still loved him, but in addition she confronted a dismal future as an abandoned wife. Divorce was difficult to obtain in those days, requiring a special act of the legislature, which in turn required having, or cultivating, influential friends. As her wedding had taken place in Kentucky, which was still a part of Virginia, freedom from Robards necessitated traveling across the mountains to Richmond or hiring someone to make the trip. At a minimum the process would consume years and more money than Rachel could easily spare. As events would prove, Rachel didn’t know all the details of obtaining a divorce. But she knew it wouldn’t be easy, and it might well be impossible, especially if Robards fought it. So when he related, through Overton, that he wanted a reconciliation, she consented. He traveled from Kentucky to join her.

Robards owned a piece of land on the south bank of the Cumberland, several miles from the Donelson home. He intended that he and Rachel should make their home there, but in the meantime he lived with Rachel in Mrs. Donelson’s house. He came to know Andrew Jackson, as Jackson and Overton took their meals with Robards, Rachel, and Mrs. Donelson.

But Robards’s old suspicions resurfaced. “Not many months elapsed before Robards became jealous of Jackson,” Overton remembered. Overton thought the jealousy reflected the fevered state of Robards’s mind rather than anything objective—and objectionable—between Jackson and Rachel. Overton wasn’t unbiased between Robards and Jackson; at the time he told his story he and Jackson had been friends for almost forty years. But their friendship was grounded in his assessment of Jackson’s character, which Overton knew as well as anyone, starting with their time at Mrs. Donelson’s, where they “lived in the cabin room and slept in the same bed,” as Overton put it. “As young men of the same pursuits and profession, with but few others in the county with whom to associate, besides sharing, as we frequently did, common dangers, such an intimacy ensued as might reasonably be expected.”

At first Jackson was unaware of Robards’s suspicions. But before long they became unmistakable. Overton suggested that he and Jackson find other lodgings. Jackson assented yet didn’t wish to leave with his integrity impugned. He went to talk to Robards.

This compounded the trouble. Tact would never be Jackson’s strong suit; he almost always spoke from the heart and to the point. He did so to Robards. Just what he said is unknown, but it doubtless began with a defense of his own character and probably escalated to aspersions on Robards’s. Robards grew livid. He hurled insults at Jackson and threatened to beat him.

When Jackson was mildly angry, it typically showed in his face and voice. But when something really provoked him, his manner calmed. It did so now. He quietly challenged Robards to a duel.

Robards refused. Instead he damned Jackson and Rachel in the same breath and vowed to have nothing more to do with either. He returned to Kentucky, leaving his wife with her mother. Jackson carried out his intention of departing the Donelson home and found lodgings elsewhere.

I
had the pleasure of seeing Capt. Fargo yesterday, who put me under obligations of seeing you this day,” Jackson wrote in February 1789 to Daniel Smith, the brigadier general of the militia of the Mero District. “But as the weather seems dull and heavy it prevents my coming up.” Consequently Jackson committed to a letter what he would have told Smith in person, starting with an account of his conversation with this most intriguing visitor.

Anthony Fagot (not “Fargo”) was a merchant operating out of St. Louis who, like many in that neighborhood, traced his roots to France, which had owned the Louisiana territory till it passed to Spanish control at the end of the French and Indian War. And like other traders along the Mississippi, he was trying to negotiate his way among the various claimants to the region: the Spanish, who claimed all of the west bank of the river and parts of the east; the Americans, who claimed most of the east bank; and the Indians, who claimed both banks. At the time he met Jackson, Fagot was attempting to open a regular trade between the Americans on the Cumberland and the Spanish at New Orleans. James Wilkinson had shown that such trade was possible; Fagot wanted to make it profitable. Commerce required the cooperation of the Spanish at New Orleans, who consistently taxed produce sent down the river from the American settlements and occasionally banned it. It also required the cooperation, or at least the acquiescence, of the Indians, who often harried traders crossing their lands and not infrequently killed them.