Andrew Jackson (8 page)
But business was slow. Jackson traveled many miles across the piedmont searching for clients. He hired himself out to Randolph County when it required the indictment of one Samuel Graves. Jackson described how Graves “did with force and arms affecting to act under the authority of an execution seize into his possession and expose to sale one brown mare & saddle of the price of five pounds.” What came of the indictment is unclear, but apparently the county liked the way Jackson worked, for it retained him in at least one other case. In Richmond, in Surry County, he took the other side of a criminal case, defending a man charged with theft. The accused and his lawyer were about equally hard up, and Jackson consented to take the case for a contingency: he would be paid only if he got an acquittal. He lost the case. He lived for a time in Martinsville, where some friends operated a general store, and he probably helped out there for a small wage.
But his income fell short of his expenses. He departed an inn owned by a man named John Lister, having not paid his bill. Lister halfheartedly tried to collect but then gave up—only to be reminded of the debt and the debtor after Jackson became famous fighting the British. Local tradition indicates that Lister retrieved the old bill and wrote across it: “Paid at the battle of New Orleans.”
T
hough he was slow to make his mark as a lawyer, Jackson made an impression as a young man. “I often met him at parties, balls and other social occasions,” Anne Jarret Rutherford recalled many years later. Annie Jarret was a proper young lady of Salisbury during Jackson’s residence there and in fact saw him on the day he received his law license. “We all knew that he was wild among his own sex, that he gambled and was by no means a Christian young man.” But he was far from the worst in the neighborhood. “He had no very bad habits; he was never known to be drunk or boisterous or rude even among his own associates.” The frequency of his quarrels was overstated. “But this I must say—when he did have a quarrel it was apt to be a serious matter.”
Jackson’s appearance stuck in Annie Jarret’s memory.
He always dressed neat and tidy and carried himself as if he was a rich man’s son. The day he was licensed he had on a new suit, with broadcloth coat, ruffled shirt and other garments in the best of fashion. The style of powdering the hair was still in vogue then; but he had his abundant suit of dark red hair combed carefully back from his forehead and temples and, I suspect, made to lay down smooth with bear’s oil. He was full six feet tall and very slender, but yet of such straightness of form and such proud and graceful carriage as to make him look well-proportioned.
In feature he was by no means good-looking. His face was long and narrow, his features sharp and angular and his complexion yellow and freckled. But his eyes
were
handsome. They were very large, a kind of steel-blue, and when he talked to you he always looked straight into your own eyes. I have talked with him a great many times and never saw him to avert his eyes from me for an instant. It was the same way with men. He always looked them straight in the eye, as much as to say, “I have nothing to be ashamed of and I hope you haven’t.” This and the gentle manner he had made you forget the plainness of his features.
When he was calm he talked slowly and with very good selected language. But if animated by anything, then he would talk fast and with a very marked North-Irish brogue, which he got from his mother and the Crawfords who raised him—all of whom grew to maturity in the old country. But either calm or animated, there was always something about him I cannot describe except to say that it was a
presence
, or a kind of majesty I never saw in any other young man.
E
very culture has its founding myth, its tale of how it came to be. For those peoples who fancy themselves forever in place, this often includes an account of the creation of the world. For others it involves how they got to where they are. The journeys entail hardship and loss; not everyone reaches the promised land. But those who do get there live on in the collective consciousness.
The founding myth of middle Tennessee was the story of an epic boat trip down the Holston and Tennessee rivers and then up the Ohio and Cumberland. The leader of the journey was John Donelson, a Virginian with a wife, eleven children, and a fervent belief that fortune awaited him if he only knew where to look. In 1779 Donelson guided a boat he called the
Adventure
and some thirty or forty other craft carrying perhaps sixty families, including his own, to a valley in the heart of the trans-Appalachian wilderness, hundreds of miles from anything that passed for civilization. Donelson had visited the Cumberland Valley and decided that the soil in the river bend near the Big Salt Lick was as fine as any in North America. He arranged with James Robertson, another Virginian, to establish a colony there. Robertson would take a small party overland to ready the way for the larger group, which Donelson would direct, with all their worldly possessions, by water.
The river journey began at Fort Patrick Henry, on the western slope of the Blue Ridge. The demands of the harvest had kept these farm families working till late autumn, and preparations for the journey delayed them further, so that they got off only three days before Christmas 1779, when the cold weather had already set in. “Took our departure from the fort,” Donelson wrote in his journal of the voyage, “and fell down the river to the mouth of Reedy creek, where we were stopped by the fall of water and most excessive hard frost.”
For two months the emigrant fleet struggled with the cold and the winter’s low water. Rain eventually raised the river but created problems of its own. “Rain about half the day,” Donelson recorded on March 2, 1780. “About twelve o’clock Mr. Henry’s boat, being driven on the point of an island by the force of the current, was sunk, the whole cargo much damaged, and the crew’s lives much endangered, which occasioned the whole fleet to put on shore and go to their assistance.” Vessel, crew, and cargo were rescued with difficulty. And amid the excitement one member of the expedition, a young man, wandered off and didn’t return, “though many guns were fired to fetch him in.” For three days the young man stayed missing—“to the great grief of his parents”—till Donelson felt obliged to order the flotilla on. Luckily the lad, realizing he was lost, headed downstream and caught the last boats before they disappeared into the west. Two days later the bitter cold returned, claiming the life of one of the Negro slaves. The day after that, a woman of the expedition bore a child.
Indians were a constant danger. They threatened the main body of the fleet and preyed on those who became separated. Donelson described the “tragical misfortune of poor Stuart, his family and friends, to the number of twenty-eight persons.” A member of the Stuart group had come down with smallpox, whereupon Donelson decreed that they should follow the main body at a distance, keeping a kind of floating quarantine. This turned out to be their death sentence. “The Indians, . . . observing his helpless situation, singled him off from the rest of the fleet, intercepted him, killed and took prisoners the whole crew.” Others in the expedition shuddered in helpless horror. “Their cries were distinctly heard by the boats in the rear.”
In mid-March the expedition reached the Muscle Shoals of the Tennessee River, an infamous stretch of rapids. “The water being high made a terrible roaring, which could be heard at some distance among the driftwood heaped frightfully upon the points of the island, the current running in every possible direction. Here we did not know how soon we should be dashed to pieces, and all our troubles ended at once. Our boats frequently dragged on the bottom, and appeared constantly in danger of striking; they warped as much as in a rough sea.” When, to the amazement of all, the expedition passed this trial without loss of life, Donelson thanked “the hand of Providence.”
They reached the Ohio in late March. “Our situation here is truly disagreeable,” Donelson wrote from the banks of the larger river. “The river is very high, and the current rapid, our boats not constructed for the purpose of stemming a rapid stream, our provision exhausted, the crews almost worn down with hunger and fatigue.” Donelson’s plan was to ascend the Ohio to the mouth of the Cumberland, and the Cumberland to the Big Salt Lick. But some of those who had traveled downstream so many weeks couldn’t bear the thought of pushing their way up, against the Ohio’s spring torrent, and so chose to continue down the Ohio to the Mississippi. Donelson stuck to the original plan. “I am determined to pursue my course, come what will.”
The distance to the Cumberland’s mouth was only fifteen miles, but it consumed four hard days of rowing, poling, and picking their way through the eddies close to the Ohio’s shore. When they reached the Cumberland, some in the group thought it looked too small to be that river. Donelson couldn’t be certain. “But I never heard of any river running in between the Cumberland and Tennessee,” and so he ordered the fleet to enter the stream. Within a day it broadened, suggesting that they were indeed on the right river. They assuaged their hunger by shooting buffalo that came down to the stream to drink. The beasts had had a hard winter; their flesh was edible but poor. By contrast a swan, having wintered in the south, “was very delicious.” Yet the swan meat didn’t go far, and the food situation grew more dire. “We are without bread, and are compelled to hunt the buffalo to preserve life. Worn out with fatigue, our progress at present is slow.”
Progress continued to be slow for three more agonizing weeks. The travelers supplemented their buffalo diet with greens they called “Shawnee salad.” Several of the travelers decided they could go no farther and dropped out along the river. But on April 24, after four months on the water, the resolute core of the expedition reached its goal. “This day we arrived at our journey’s end at the Big Salt Lick, where we have the pleasure of finding Captain Robertson and his company. It is a source of satisfaction to us to be enabled to restore to him and others their families and friends, who were entrusted to our care and who, some time since perhaps, despaired of ever meeting again. Though our prospects at present are dreary, we have found a few log cabins which have been built on a cedar bluff above the lick by Capt. Robertson and his company.”
T
he remarkable thing about the Donelson voyage was not the hardship the emigrants survived, which, though daunting, differed in degree rather than kind from the trials men and women in the West endured every day. Rather, the remarkable thing was the little distance the voyagers netted for all their time and effort. Their river miles amounted to nearly a thousand, but they ended up barely a fifth that far from the place they started. A crow might have completed the journey in a day, humans walking on a decent road in a week. But there was no such road, making the roundabout trip by water the only feasible way to transport families and their belongings.
Transportation wasn’t a problem for the people of the frontier alone. During the 1780s the difficulty of distance was a rock on which the Union nearly broke—although whether it was more dangerous than other submerged boulders was a matter of interpretation. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, the United States were decidedly plural, having united for the purpose of fending off the British, a purpose that vanished upon the peace. The Articles of Confederation continued to link them, but because the articles had been drafted deliberately weak, the links bound no state to do much it didn’t want to do. The national government could requisition operating funds from each state but couldn’t compel payment, which meant that it often didn’t get paid. It could preach amity and cooperation to the states but couldn’t prevent their waging economic war on one another. It could urge the states to keep their defenses strong but couldn’t support a decent army or conscript anyone to fight.
The weaknesses of the Confederation caused many Americans to worry that their republican experiment was coming undone. When domestic unrest broke out in Massachusetts, led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, the worries mounted. When the British refused to relinquish control of forts in the Ohio Valley, which they had promised in the Paris treaty to do, the weakness at the center became a source of national embarrassment. Those most worried and embarrassed mobilized in favor of a stronger central government. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton organized a convention at Annapolis in 1786. When the turnout proved disappointing, they rescheduled for Philadelphia the following summer.
The Philadelphia convention initially confronted what seemed an insurmountable barrier: the requirement under the Articles of Confederation that amendments receive the unanimous endorsement of the states. But what Madison, Hamilton, and the others couldn’t climb over they skirted, proposing not to amend the Articles but to write an entirely new constitution. It was a bold gambit, one that risked angry disavowal by those who had sent the delegates to Philadelphia. Yet it was a move they considered necessary in view of the current crisis. The delegates aimed to craft a stronger union, one with the energy and power to accomplish the purposes of a proud and growing nation. They worked through the hot Pennsylvania summer, meeting in closed session in the same hall where the Continental Congress had approved independence eleven years earlier. In September they revealed their blueprint to the world, asking the states to ratify the new charter and put the old, weak government out of its—and their—misery.