Andrew Jackson (17 page)

Perhaps more than some other wives, Rachel missed her husband when he was gone. She worried at his travels across long stretches of wilderness, knowing of many travelers who hadn’t come home. His departure for Philadelphia to take his Senate seat apparently tested her sorely. From Knoxville, Jackson wrote Robert Hays, the husband of Rachel’s sister, requesting that he look after Rachel. “I must now beg of you to try to amuse Mrs. Jackson and prevent her from fretting. The situation in which I left her (bathed in tears) fills me with woe. Indeed, sir, it has given me more pain than any event of my life.”

Rachel’s sorrow and fear evidently evoked physical illness, which aggravated her emotional state. Jackson inquired with every letter to friends in Nashville how she was doing, and he grew impatient when the news was scanty or absent. “It is such a neglect that I feel it sensibly,” he wrote. When the news did come through, and especially when it indicated improvement, he was gratefully pleased. “I hold myself much indebted to him for his letter,” he wrote of a message from one of their friends.

Nearly all husbands feel protective toward their wives, but Jackson had special reason for feeling he needed to guard Rachel and shield her from a trying world. From the start of their relationship he had been her protector, her rescuer from an abusive and vengeful spouse. Yet the very rescue—their elopement—had created other problems, initially of law and persistently of social perception, which magnified his desire to protect her. And of course, though Nashville was more civilized and secure than it had been on his arrival a decade earlier, Indians still posed a threat. Rachel was nervous for him when he traveled; he was nervous for her when he was gone.

Had Jackson felt he was doing important work in Philadelphia, he might have pushed his worries about Rachel aside. In all probability nothing would happen to her, and she’d get over her sadness and worry at his departing. But when the politicians in Philadelphia spent their time—and his—bickering over trivia and bloviating over matters of merely personal concern, he decided he could do more good for Rachel back home than for Tennessee in Philadelphia. Let the politicians handle politics; an honest man had real work to do.

J
ackson’s work in Nashville included much that was familiar. He resumed his land dealing and the farm operations his land acquisitions entailed. And he tried his luck at commerce again, not least because his farm operations required him to buy supplies and sell his crops, both in a market short of cash. A letter from Jackson to a Philadelphia merchant explained a typical barter arrangement: “I have come to a conclusion to purchase your merchandise, if they are assorted in such a manner as will suit the market of this country. . . . I would give four or five tracts of land of 640 acres each . . . the balance of the merchandise payable in cotton.”

He also undertook something new. A few months after arriving back in Nashville Jackson received a note from John Sevier. “It has been communicated to me by several respectable characters,” the governor said, “that was you appointed by the Executive one of the judges of the Superior Court of Law and Equity, they had reasons to believe you would accept the said appointment. This information is truly satisfactory to the Executive. . . . Please consider yourself as already appointed.”

Why Sevier offered Jackson the judgeship is unclear. The governor already recognized in Jackson a rival; perhaps he hoped that by putting him on the state’s supreme court he could divert Jackson’s ambition into harmless channels.

Why Jackson accepted the job is easier to explain. His dealings in land, farming, and commerce were going well enough that he and Rachel could live on a judge’s modest salary, but not so well as to entice him away from public life. Jackson hoped to achieve a certain level of material comfort, but what he really craved was respect. A seat on the state’s highest court was quite an accomplishment for the poor boy with no parents.

What Sevier offered, and Jackson accepted, was an interim appointment. But three months later the Tennessee legislature made the appointment permanent.

Y
et if Jackson wasn’t cut out for writing laws, his talent for interpreting them was only marginally more obvious. His legal training had just sufficed to get him admitted to the bar, and since commencing his profession he had had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to delve more deeply into jurisprudence. Moreover, his temperament was all wrong. An impartial dispensing of justice would seem to require a dispassionate personality, but Jackson’s was just the opposite. His sense of right and wrong anchored his whole outlook on life; if justice pointed one way and the law another, the law would surely lose.

On the other hand, although Jackson’s personality didn’t fit the judge’s traditional mold, it suited his time and place. Most westerners had little patience for law per se, which often struck them as pettifoggery. Like Jackson they believed justice was something any honest man could discern. And they appreciated Jackson’s decisiveness. The duties of a superior court judge included riding a circuit of several towns and villages. A story was told how one day Jackson was dispensing justice at a crossroads when the proceedings were interrupted by a local rowdy. This man, either drunk or belligerent by nature, brandished a pistol and a sheath knife and threatened homicide against Judge Jackson, against the jury, and against everyone else associated with that morning’s dispensation of justice. Jackson ordered the sheriff to arrest the rowdy for contempt of court. The sheriff tried but failed. The man was too violent to be apprehended, he said. Jackson then ordered the sheriff to summon a posse. The sheriff did so but had no better luck. The bully intimidated the posse and remained at large.

Jackson by now was thoroughly irked at both the bully’s bad manners and the paralysis of local law enforcement. He ordered the sheriff to summon him—Jackson—as a member of the posse. The sheriff was skeptical, but Jackson insisted and was duly enlisted to bring the bad man in.

Jackson declared a ten-minute recess in the trial. He doffed his judicial robe, took up his pistol, and strode out the door. The rowdy was ranting amid a crowd of people not far from the courtroom door. Jackson parted the crowd and approached the man, who had worked himself into a full lather. Jackson showed his gun and said, “Surrender, you infernal villain, this very instant, or I’ll blow you through.”

Everyone gasped, wondering how the bully would respond. To general amazement he meekly handed over his weapons and allowed himself to be led away. When the onlookers recovered their breath, one inquired why the ruffian had surrendered to a single man after holding an entire posse at bay.

“Why, when he came up, I looked him in the eye,” the prisoner said, “and I saw shoot. There wasn’t shoot in nary other eye in the crowd. So I says to myself, says I: Hoss, it’s about time to sing small, and so I did.”

Maybe things happened this way. Likely the story grew better with the telling. Whatever its strict accuracy, it captured an impression of Jackson that spread around Tennessee. Here was a man to watch, and respect.

T
he judgeship was Jackson’s for life, if he wanted it. His commission said he held the post “during good behavior,” which meant he could be removed only by impeachment. But though he valued the respect that came with the position, in other ways the job was less than ideal. He had underestimated the cost of the travel the job required. “I am in possession of a very independent office,” he wrote a friend, “but I sink money—the salary is too low. . . . The judiciary scarcely bears my expence.” And though he himself was no Blackstone, his partners on the court were even shorter on legal training. “I cannot expect much beneficial aid from the talents of Judge [David] Campbell, although an agreeable companion.” A seat was coming open. Jackson hoped it would be filled by someone who knew the law. “Should one be appointed whose legal abilities were not superior to ours, the responsibility on me would be too great.”

The saving grace of the judgeship was that it didn’t monopolize his time. He continued to pursue his speculative and mercantile ventures, albeit with partners who conducted most of the day-to-day operations. Even so, he regularly considered retiring from the bench. But as often as he did, his friends and supporters urged him to think again, declaring that he was more qualified than anyone else available. James Robertson recounted traveling about Tennessee and hearing the people express their “general wish and opinion” that Jackson remain on the court. Robertson added, “It is likewise the hearty wish of your friend and humble servant”—Robertson himself. Almost the entire Tennessee house of representatives and several state senators sent Jackson a statement registering their “peculiar concern” at rumors that Jackson might step down. “Talents like yours were given for public good,” the petitioners asserted. “We hope at this momentous crisis, when party is raging in a most extraordinary manner”—actually, party was raging in a rather ordinary manner—“you will not retire from the service of your country and leave them to struggle with the loss.”

Jackson acceded to the popular will. “Retirement to private life has been, for some time, to me a very desirable event,” he explained in a public response to the appeal from the legislators. “But you have said my further services as a judge would be useful. When my services are thus called for, they belong to my country, and your voice is obeyed.”

H
e did add a condition: “if health will permit me.” This wasn’t a rhetorical flourish. Though generally hale so far in his life, Jackson encountered the same afflictions nearly everyone else did in that medical stone age. The causes of infectious disease still stumped the experts; smallpox, typhoid fever, cholera, and yellow fever ravaged the populated districts of the United States with disheartening frequency. A yellow fever epidemic decimated Philadelphia in 1793 and another did nearly as much damage in 1797. Disease disrupted traffic on the Mississippi almost every summer, as crews heard of people dying in New Orleans and refused to drop down the river to that infamous zone of infection.

The lesser density of population on the frontier attenuated some of the epidemics, but the frontier posed its own set of challenges to personal health. Long journeys on horseback overworked the spine; Jackson periodically complained of what he identified as rheumatism. In the winter of 1798 he slipped on an icy road and wrenched his knee, which “confined me for some days.” Once a stable caught fire at Jonesboro, causing Jackson to leap out of bed to help save the horses. “During this distressing scene I was a great deal exposed, having nothing on but my shirt,” he told Rachel. “I have caught a very bad cold which has settled on my lungs, occasioned a bad cough and pain in my breast.” The worrisome thing about colds in those days was that no one knew if they were simply colds or the harbingers of something more serious. Pneumonia threatened travelers especially, who could be caught far from shelter by snow or, what was worse, soaking and chilling rain. Tuberculosis—“consumption”—carried away men and women otherwise in their prime and could be transmitted easily in the close quarters of carriages and roadside inns.

Life expectancies in Jackson’s day were much lower than they would be two centuries later. To a considerable degree this reflected higher infant and childhood mortality: the first five years were the most lethal. Anyone tough enough to survive that stretch had a fair expectation of reasonable tenure on earth. But accidents did happen, and epidemics did occur. And even healthy people were infested by parasites of one sort or another. Malaria was endemic in much of the United States. In America the malaria parasite didn’t often kill, but the “ague and fever,” as the disease was called, was as unremarkable as the common cold. Intestinal parasites came and went. Lice and bedbugs were the travelers’ bane, causing the fastidious to carry their own bedding and use it, even when they paid for a bed at an inn. The sexually adventurous risked venereal disease. If the disease was treated, with mercury typically, the cure might be as dangerous as the disease. If untreated, certain forms—syphilis, notoriously—could seem to subside only to return with harrowing symptoms later.

Given that his father and mother had died relatively young, and his brothers even younger, Andrew Jackson at thirty-five had reason to watch his health. His wrenched knee in fact got better, though it tended to stiffen in cold weather, and the cough he incurred rescuing the horses eventually subsided. But good health was a gift, not a guarantee.

T
hough Jackson agreed to remain a judge, the troubles that made him want to quit persisted. The travel kept him away from Rachel, and the expense caused them both to wonder how long their finances could bear the drain. Jackson’s philosophy of serving the will of the people would become his guiding star, but for now it threatened to bankrupt him. On his rides around the circuit he pondered how to escape his predicament.

He discovered an exit in early 1802, when the command of the Tennessee militia came open. To one like Jackson, valuing respect above all, the position was the true prize of Tennessee politics. No one, not even the governor, was held in higher esteem than the major general of the militia. The pay was higher than that of a judge, a welcome point but not crucial, as, by Jackson’s reading of the Tennessee constitution, he could keep his judgeship even while serving as militia commander. A judge couldn’t become governor or a member of the state legislature without violating the separation of powers, but the militia was different. Or so Jackson, who had helped write the state constitution, contended. And no one effectively contradicted him.

Which was not to say no one challenged him. John Sevier did, albeit at the polls rather than in court. Sevier completed three consecutive terms as Tennessee governor in 1801 and was constitutionally required to sit out a term before running again. When Major General George Conway died and an election to succeed him was slated for February 1802, Sevier sought to parlay his reputation as an Indian fighter into gainful employment at the head of the Tennessee militia.