Andrew Jackson (11 page)
Fagot was as subtle as Wilkinson and others of that generation of schemers. He played a Spanish game in New Orleans, an American game in the Cumberland, and an Indian game between. Talking to Jackson, he told of his esteem for the United States. “He expresses a great friendship for the welfare and harmony of this country,” Jackson told General Smith. “He wishes to become a citizen.” He also wished to promote friendship between the United States and Spain. This would benefit trade both directly, by encouraging Americans to send their produce south and the Spanish to receive it, and indirectly, by facilitating joint action against the Indians. Jackson was developing an interest in trade, and with everyone else in the Cumberland he was painfully aware of the Indian threat. Fagot wanted to speak with Smith. Jackson urged Smith to see the Frenchman and listen to his plan. “I think it the only immediate way to obtain a peace with the savage.”
Jackson was in deeper water here than he knew. Smith took Jackson’s advice and received Fagot. Smith expressed innocuous amity, which Fagot subsequently represented to Governor Miró as a desire for the Mero District to secede from the United States in favor of Spain. Some in the district did feel such a desire, but not Smith and not Jackson. Before long Jackson would embrace exactly the opposite idea: that what Spain owned should become American. At that point he would regret having had anything to do with Fagot.
T
he Fagot affair revealed something besides Jackson’s innocence of frontier diplomacy. It showed Jackson’s understanding that the militia commander—currently Daniel Smith—was the most important man in the district. This simple fact would explain much of Jackson’s career during the next thirty years, as he gravitated toward military command rather than civilian office. In the meantime it reflected the remarkably tenuous hold the inhabitants of the Cumberland settlements had on life in their new home.
A chronicler of early Tennessee tallied settlers killed by Indians, noting that during the first decade and a half of its existence, the Cumberland lost a man, woman, or child about every ten days, sometimes in the most ghastly fashion. The early summer of 1791 was especially cruel.
June 2d, 1791, the Indians killed John Thompson in his own cornfield within five miles of Nashville. June 14th, they killed John Gibson and wounded McCoon in Gibson’s field, eight miles from Nashville. They killed Benjamin Kirdendall in his own house in Summer county, and plundered his house of every thing the Indians could use. In June, 1791, three travelers from Natchez to Nashville were found dead on the trace near the mouth of the Duck river; there were eight in company, and only two came in. On the 3d of July, 1791, Thomas Fletcher and two other men were killed on the north side of the Cumberland; their heads were entirely skinned. In the same month a man was killed within a hundred and fifty yards of Major Wilson’s, on the public road, as he was riding up to his house. On the 12th, Thomas White was killed in the Cumberland mountains.
The violence colored every aspect of life for the settlers. No man traveled unarmed, even from cabin to fields. Rifles rested across plow handles throughout the valley. Children didn’t fetch water or pick berries without an escort. Widows competed for lodgers or second husbands: anyone handy with weapons. When the attacks grew especially intense, fields went unplowed and crops unharvested. Later generations of Americans, without knowing why, would discover rest for the soul in parklike vistas where open spaces separated trees with branches pruned well above the ground. The westerners of Jackson’s generation—like people of a thousand generations before them—knew perfectly well why such parks appealed to them: they allowed the hunted to see where the hunters weren’t. But until the settlers cleared the fields, every canebrake (with reeds towering to twenty feet, their stalks impenetrably close together), every oak copse (with trunks thicker than a man’s body and branches intertwined), every riverbank (with walls of sedges and curtains of willows) put them on guard. They lived in a state of siege and acted like a people under assault.
Their heroes were the men who could protect them. Every able-bodied male was expected to serve in the militia, whose members chose their own leaders. This made the election of militia officers the closest thing to democracy that existed in the West (or any other part of the country, outside the townships of New England). To be chosen commander of the militia was a great honor. The militia general was the beau ideal of the men, the protector in chief of the women and children. Most important, his position owed to merit and ability, not to wealth or connections. Westerners could tolerate incompetence in judges, prosecutors, and other officials, without jeopardizing their very existence, but incompetence in militia officers meant that lives—perhaps many lives, and farms and even whole communities—would be lost. For this reason, the westerners chose their officers very carefully.
B
y the time Jackson left the home of Katherine Donelson, upon Lewis Robards’s second abandonment of his wife, he seems to have developed romantic feelings for Rachel. They might well have been latent from the start, given her obvious attractiveness. Doubtless the misbehavior of Robards toward Rachel aroused a certain protectiveness in Jackson. And the fact that Robards accused him of unacceptable intimacies could have made him feel that if he were going to be condemned anyway, he might as well be condemned for cause.
However it happened, Jackson found himself in the grip of the same emotion that has deranged young persons, and more than a few older ones, since humans acquired wits to lose. Sometime during 1789 Jackson determined to have Rachel for his own. She was still legally bound to Robards, but the moral tie—the bond of trust and affection that makes any marriage real—had been broken by Robards’s mistreatment of her, which by now included infidelities Robards scarcely bothered to deny. And sometime during this same period, Rachel decided to have Jackson for her own.
A divorce appeared no closer than it had been, so the two lovers acted without it. Just what they did and, more to the point, when they did it have been the source of controversy ever since. John Overton and Jackson’s defenders later asserted that Mrs. Donelson, on hearing that Robards intended to return from Kentucky to claim his wife again, laid plans to escape with Rachel to Natchez, in Spanish-administered (though American-claimed) territory on the east bank of the Mississippi, where she had friends. But the journey itself, across hundreds of miles of Indian territory, would be dangerous, and Mrs. Donelson could find only one male escort. This man, a Colonel Stark, asked Jackson to join them. He agreed.
The journey required several weeks during the winter of 1790–91, by the Overton account. Jackson saw Rachel and her mother safely installed with their friends, and he returned to Nashville in time to conduct the business of the prosecutor’s office in April 1791. He had been back but a short while when he learned that Robards had obtained an act from the Virginia legislature authorizing him to sue for divorce from Rachel. The grounds for the divorce suit were “that the defendant hath deserted the plaintiff, and that she hath lived in adultery with another man since such desertion.” Rachel’s alleged lover wasn’t named, but Robards certainly had Jackson in mind. Overton and the Jackson partisans asserted that the charge of adultery was unfounded, the product of the same fevered imagination that had plagued Robards’s marriage from the start. Jackson had become Rachel’s protector but nothing more.
In fact, the adultery charge was almost certainly true. Overton’s chronology, by design or forgetfulness, was off by a year on certain crucial points. Spanish and other records reveal that the Donelson-Jackson journey to Natchez occurred in the winter of 1789–90. Nor was Jackson a late addition to the traveling party. Jackson had been in Natchez earlier in the year exploring opportunities to trade. At that time he had sworn the oath of allegiance to Spain required of all Americans intending to do business or reside in the area. Quite conceivably the journey to Natchez was Jackson’s idea. If Jackson and Rachel were to be together, it couldn’t be in Nashville, at least not yet. Too many people knew that Rachel was still married to Robards. But Natchez was far away, beyond the reach of Robards should he really be intent on returning, beyond the gaze of censorious neighbors, and beyond the effective power of American law. In Natchez Jackson and Rachel could live as husband and wife, and no one would bother them. If Robards heard of the elopement, he might well divorce Rachel, which would be all the better.
Jackson’s partisans afterward asserted that their man, upon learning that Robards had indeed initiated divorce proceedings, returned to Natchez, where he and Rachel were wed. Together they traveled back to Nashville in the autumn of 1791 and presented themselves to the community as husband and wife.
Again the timing is off. Documents relating to the estate of John Donelson and drafted in January 1791 list Rachel as “Rachel Jackson.” And various evidence demonstrates that the couple were back in Nashville by that spring. The assertion that they were married in Natchez is also open to dispute, as no record of a ceremony has been found nor witness to the event.
The most likely explanation is that Jackson and Rachel, impatient at the legal impediment to their love, eloped to Natchez and simply began to cohabit. What were their long-term plans? They themselves probably didn’t know. Like many other young lovers, they couldn’t see past the moment of their infatuation. One thing is certain: Jackson didn’t know he would one day become a candidate for president and have to explain his actions to the world. He was twenty-two, had no particular prospects, and was in love. Rachel was the best thing in his life, and he would risk everything else—which wasn’t much, at this point—to be with her.
They probably guessed that any controversy would die down. Robards would divorce Rachel. If they returned to Nashville the neighbors would find other things to gossip about. Life would go on.
And so it did. Whether they arrived in Nashville in the spring or the autumn of 1791—in either case, after the news of Robards’s divorce action—they did so as husband and wife. No one asked to see a divorce decree or a marriage license. The Donelson clan closed around Rachel and her new husband, judging him a great improvement over the old one.
The union, however irregularly accomplished, provided Jackson an emotional security he had never experienced. Fatherless since birth, motherless since his early teens, with neither surviving siblings nor close cousins, Jackson made Rachel the emotional center of his universe. “My Dearest Heart,” he wrote her on one occasion when his job took him away, “It is with the greatest pleasure I sit down to write you. Though I am absent my heart rests with you. With what pleasing hopes I view the future period when I shall be restored to your arms, there to spend my days in domestic sweetness with you, the Dear Companion of my life.” Rachel became the one unchallengeable truth in Jackson’s fractious and often violent world. His many enemies leveled all manner of allegations against him in his long career in public life, but no one ever questioned his utter faithfulness and devotion to Rachel.
Consequently he was embarrassed and angered when he discovered, on a working visit to Jonesboro in late 1793, that Robards’s divorce from Rachel had only just been granted. Robards had started the process more than two years earlier but not finished it till now. This discomfiting news, besides reviving the troublesome questions of Jackson and Rachel’s elopement, revealed that even their purported marriage was illegal. Overton suggested a quiet wedding ceremony to settle the matter. “To this suggestion he replied that he had long since been married,” Overton recalled.
Yet Overton pointed out that whatever Jackson and Rachel might think, the courts had their own logic. Jackson reluctantly succumbed to Overton’s reasoning, and in January 1794 he and Rachel exchanged vows before a Nashville justice of the peace. And there the matter rested for several years, till Jackson and Rachel almost forgot it had ever been an issue.
T
he most important accomplishment of the first Congress elected under the 1787 Constitution was approval of the ten amendments that became known, after ratification by the states, as the Bill of Rights. Antifederalists had demanded these as their price for accepting the Constitution, and the federalists couldn’t figure out how to say no. A more modest feat of the first legislature was putting Andrew Jackson briefly out of work. When Congress created the Southwest Territory—bordered on the east by the states of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia; on the north by the Ohio River; on the west by the Mississippi; and on the south by Spanish Florida—it deprived North Carolina of its western half and Jackson of his job as North Carolina’s western solicitor.
Yet the work had to be done, whether by an employee of North Carolina or of the federal government. Jackson pointed this out to William Blount, the governor of the new federal territory, who thereupon named him attorney for the Mero District of the Southwest Territory.