sgmrt: tennessee

[ljplicease]

My second presidential stop on my road trip is The Hermitage, the home of President Andrew Jackson, or as his friends called him “The General”. That the tyrant had any friends at all is remarkable, and that a man who fought so hard to disregard the constitution it may seem surprising that he is celebrated prominently on the $20 bill. The man made his reputation in defeating the Brits at the Battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812, a month after the war between Britain and the United States was officially over. The engagement was a tiny footnote compared to contemporary battles such as at Waterloo, and the whole North American campaign was for the Brits a peripheral and secondary dispute, while they were more worried about Napoleon.

As a park, the place is lovely. The grounds are well maintained, there are short walks to go on, and lots of informational plaques and signs. The staff in period costume are friendly and happy to answer questions. One guy asked if Jesse Jackson’s ancestors had been enslaved by Andrew Jackson, but the staff didn’t know the answer. Is it a faux pas to ask who ones ancestors were owned by? There are lots of signage devoted to the “enslaved” (we avoid calling them slaves now), although we don’t really know much about them other than what we find by digging up their trash, seeing as how, as property most of the documentation on them was in the nature of inventories.

Apparently Jackson may be the most painted American President in history, when he left office two new states had been added to make 26, but aside from this, Andrew Jackson the President is hardly touched on at all, but then this was his beloved home when he was not living in the White House.

That being said the park tries hard, but doesn’t paint a very pretty picture of the Jacksons. On one sign it is mentioned that most of the fortune of the family was tied up in the slaves themselves, and that there were about 150 slaves living on the plantation. Jackson was a Unionist (although he died before the Civil War), his children sided with the Confederacy, and the family fell on hard times after the war. It’s hard for me to feel sorry for people who are leading exceptionally privileged lives on the backs of slave labor though. According to one sign, Jackson didn’t even pay his overseers very well, and turn over for the position was high.

Their favorite “enslaved African” is Alfred, who was honored with a Christian burial next to Jackson and his wife in the garden. It would be hard not to notice that his final resting place is segregated from the whites also in the garden. He may be their favorite former slave to talk about because he was one of the only part of the “workforce” that decided to stick around after the Civil War when they were free to go. He became one of the first tour guides for the Plantation, and sold post cards of himself, demonstrating his skill as a budding capitalist.

They had part of a PBS video at the start of things to give you an overview of Jackson and includes some things that he actually did as President. I should say that I had mostly made up my mind about Jackson, although I am willing and interested in seeing what his defenders will say in the modern context. In the museum and park itself I found only one mention of the Trail of Tears, although not called that by name. In a lonely corner I found a small card that said:

“Indian Removal

In Jackson’s first years as president, the question of Indians living on land that white settlers strongly desired for growing cotton came to the fore. Jackson signed the Indian Removal Bill, believing it was better for the Indians to move west rather than have continued warfare as settlers forced their way onto Indian land. As Jackson said in his message to congress on Indian Removal in 1830:

It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with the settlements of whites; free them from the power of the states; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers and, and perhaps cause them, gradually under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized and Christian community…”

It is either highly charitable or highly diluted to think that Jackson even believed that what he was doing was “better for the Indians”, and not simply that he was doing it so that white settlers could steal their land. Which part of the government’s protection was the forced removal of the Cherokee to Oklahoma, for example, where human beings were forced to leave their homes with only the clothes on their back, and in which at least 4,000 people died, to say nothing of the other tribes that were moved.

I didn’t care for the neo-Greco-Roman-American architecture of the main house. It’s all slave made brick and columns of ugly. The innards were not anything to write home about either, although here I am writing about it. The afore mentioned friendly tour guides in period costume play zone defense passing the us off to each other as we see the insides.

All of the streets around the Hermitage seem to be named after Jackson. You will see Andrew Jackson Blvd. crossing Old Hickory Dr. Then there was also the oddly named Old Lebanon Dirt Rd., although it was paved.

On Friday I drove 451.0 miles for a grand total of 2179.9 miles.