By Christine Kreyling
In a recent November morning, under a sky the color of dirty water, I paid a visit to The Hermitage. The earth under my feet was greasy from recent rains, the grass brown from frost. The only touch of green was provided by the skeletal branches of the cedar trees that line the drive leading to the mansion’s front door, and by the boxwood in Rachel Jackson’s garden.
As I walked across the somber and silent grounds, I found it difficult to imagine that even a hint of scandal had touched The Hermitage since the days when Jackson’s political rivals resurrected the story of Rachel’s alleged adultery for one last time. Yet a member of the Ladies Hermitage Association had laughed a bit nervously when she invited me for a tour. She’d explained that the occasion was to view the restoration of the mansion’s interior. She’d said that the restored colors were “rather bright” and that they appeared in some unexpected pairings. I’d received the distinct impression that the more delicate of her fellow Ladies had been shocked when they discovered just what old Andy had originally been up to with his paints and wallpapers.
I had been to The Hermitage many times before. Visitors to our city always want to see the place, along with the State Capitol, the Parthenon, the Opryland Hotel, and other unnatural wonders of our Middle Tennessee world. After all, Andrew Jackson slept there, and so did Lafayette and a host of other important personages. The home satisfies our curiosity about the lifestyles of the rich, famous, and dead. It’s like walking into an Architectural Digest of the past. The Hermitage is history, writ large and in three dimensions.
The recent restoration presents the Hermitage lifestyle more accurately than at any time since Jackson’s death in 1845. The results of $2.2 million and 10 years of painstaking research, restoration, replication, and conservation coordinated by director of research Sharon Macpherson are now on display in glowing Technicolor.
Invoices discovered since the commencement of the Jackson Papers Project in 1971 told the researchers what Jackson bought and paid for. Scrupulous historic paint analyses by Matthew Mosca, known for his work at Mount Vernon, revealed the Jacksonian tints of walls and ceilings. The conservation of the original furnishings, fabrics, and wallpapers, overseen by curator Marsha Mullin, lightened and brightened surfaces that had been dulled by time and by the imposition of latter-day tastes. These excavations into history have established without much doubt how the interior of the house looked during Jackson’s retirement years, after the mansion was rebuilt following a fire in 1834 and after Jackson’s departure from the White House in 1837.
If the great outdoors is now wearing the monochrome of winter, inside The Hermitage, the palette is revved up to a considerably higher key. What executive director Jim Vaughan characterizes as “nice coats of colonial tan”—the genteel chroma that represented the 20th century’s idea of 19th-century presidential taste—have been replaced by more vivid hues. The historically accurate colors—startling combinations of salmon, yellow-gold, verdigris, and the notorious Prussian blue—will no doubt generate ripples of distaste among those in the approximately 300,000 annual visitors who prefer to think that the Victorians invented gaudy.
A parlor carpet has been replicated in swirling scrolls of pink, orange, brown, black, and buff. Fourteen months were required to hand-stencil a dining room floor cloth that reproduces, in busy geometrics of cobalt and salmon, white, and chocolate, a Jacksonian fragment discovered on the floor of his carriage. This floor covering is surmounted by a mahogany table and bright blue and gilt chairs, equally bright blue walls, a yellow ceiling medallion and cove molding, and green wooden blinds topped with a grape-encrusted cornice. The new/old Hermitage is not for the faint of heart. But then neither was Andrew Jackson.
Jackson was a young man on the make when he emigrated from North Carolina in 1788. What he made first was money as a lawyer, at a time when lawyers were scarce in the southwest territory. As a legal eagle he spotted good deals in land speculation. As an adventurous capitalist he also did business in a general store, a tavern, and a boatyard.
The nickname “Old Hickory” was first used to describe Jackson’s character in 1813, after he led the Tennessee Volunteers on a grueling trek up the Natchez Trace. Subsequent military expeditions against the Native Americans and the British solidified his gnarly political reputation.
I have always had a problem with the public figure Andrew Jackson carved for himself on the frontier. I commit the sin of “presentism” when I apply this age’s standards to a previous epoch, but I have difficulty marking out for hero worship the guy who more or less invented the Trail of Tears.
My problem with Jackson-as-hero was not one I had to face head-on while living in New Orleans. There Jackson is remembered because he won a battle down river at Chalmette, on a field of honor suitably remote from any possible interference with the pleasures of city life. New Orleans showed its appreciation for this thoughtful military engagement by planting a statue of the victor in the town square that the city renamed for him. In this setting the aggressive impact of Old Hickory astride a rearing steed is blunted by the soft and easy virtue of the surrounding French Quarter.
In New Orleans Andrew Jackson’s heroic pose is seen through a patina of pigeon droppings and Latin realism. Many historians now question the importance of the Battle of New Orleans in ending the War of 1812. They claim that the engagement occurred—due to the slow communication system of the day—after peace terms had already been reached in the East. The Big Easy resolves the debate in typical Creole style—with a shrug, a shake of the head, and a smile.
Arriving in Nashville with such a worldly-wise attitude toward our seventh president, I was unprepared to meet Andrew Jackson as a full-blown hero. I found on Tennessee’s Capitol Hill the same equestrian statue of Jackson that stands in the French Quarter—hat doffed to rally the troops, the flame-like hair in sharp contrast to the stark lines of the face. But here were no pigeon droppings to add shades of gray to his high contrast profile, no street vendors and musicians to distract attention from the man Thomas Jefferson described as “dangerous.”
In Nashville, the statue of Jackson as man-of-action faces defiantly northeast, and for a reason. His entire career was an in-your-face gesture to the North and the East, a proclamation that the new country to the southwest was a power to be reckoned with. Jackson put Nashville on the map. In gratitude, Nashville placed Jackson on the sacred grounds of its acropolis.
The sculptor Clark Mills fashioned his equestrian portrait of Jackson in 1853 for Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Park. New Orleans and Nashville acquired later recastings. The writer Henry James admired the sculpture as “the most prodigious of presidential effigies, Andrew Jackson, as archaic as a Ninevite king, prancing and rocking through the ages.”
It is fitting that a self-taught artist crafted the dominant image of a president who had little formal education. Like Jackson, an orphan who left home at an early age, Mills acquired the skill of sculpting to avoid a lifetime of the frozen feet he had known while working as a common laborer in a lumbering operation.
Jackson was a self-taught agrarian. Unlike earlier presidents such as Washington and Jefferson, Jackson was an entrepreneur whose wealth was rooted in the public arena. He became an agrarian only when he could afford that estate. He had already farmed two tracts of land—the second of which he was forced to sell to pay off debts—before he purchased the 425 acres that would ultimately grow to 1,000. He called his plantation The Hermitage, not because he was slipping into an ascetic retirement, but because that was the name on the deed of sale, supplied by the previous owner.
But when Jackson decided to study the art of gentrification, he went to the right sources. As president, Jackson often took the steamboat from the District of Columbia to Mount Vernon. There he visited with Washington’s family and admired the serenity of the grounds and the large two-story portico of the house, the first of its kind in the nation.
That Jackson came to equate monumental columns with a particularly presidential lifestyle is proved by the fact that he added this architectural gesture to the two houses he lived in as chief executive. He supplied the grand north portico to the White House during his tenure there. The Hermitage fire of 1834, which destroyed all but one of the wings of the existing house, provided Jackson with the opportunity to have a presidential portico all his own.
With the final version of the Hermitage mansion, Jackson made a home, not just for himself, but for the nation. The contract with the builders indicates that his original intention was to rebuild the 1831 Hermitage, with its slender one-story columns, unchanged. When all was finished, however, a monumentally scaled portico of six fluted columns topped with acanthus leaves stood out front. Jackson had made a Mount Vernon for Tennessee.
When viewed from the side, the front portico of the Hermitage seems pasted on. It’s as if we were on a movie set and someone had just yelled for the plantation scene. The large columns—and the bright colors of the restored interior—are not, however, examples of Jacksonian vulgarity. These columns and pigments were the best that money could buy at the time. Jackson used them because he could afford them, and because they were for him symbolic gestures. Architecture and interior design were to stand for his presidency, a presidency that bound the southwest to the nation. If the columns and colors now seem self-consciously splendid—the gesture of a preening peacock—that tells us that we Tennesseans are still a bit insecure about our national image, still desirous of erring on the side of gentility if it will make us respectable.
Jackson had no such compunctions. In his book The Age of Jackson, Arthur Schlesinger compares Andrew Jackson’s presidency with the presidency of an old Virginian. “Jeffersonian democracy looked wistfully back toward a past slipping further every minute into the mists of memory,” Schlesinger writes, “while Jacksonian democracy came straightforwardly to grips with a rough and unlovely present.”
After my visit with Andy, I headed into our own rough and unlovely present. I journeyed to town by the same road Andrew Jackson used to travel to Nashville. I turned from Rachel’s Lane onto Lebanon Pike and was greeted by the visual cacophony of a typical American roadway suffering from an excess of laissez faire. The big box of Wal-Mart jostles for attention with signs advertising Granny’s Donuts and McFrugal Auto Rental. Crossing the Stones River, I saw in the distance a new Target under construction, surrounded by a sea of mud that, one blessed day, will be asphalt.
There are signs, however, that Jackson once passed through this place. The local bowling alley is Hermitage Lanes, and the apartment complex is Hermitage Pointe. Nourishment is provided by the Hermitage House Smorgasbord. The hollow that once was the haunt of the Clover Bottom Jockey Club, where Jackson raced and gambled on his thoroughbreds, now is the site of a driving range called Duffer’s Downs—“Rain or Shine/Bucket or Time.” Just beyond is Jackson Downs Boulevard, which is across Lebanon Road from a suburban street called Downeymeade.
As the skyline of downtown Nashville came into view from the ridge to the south, I mused on just what Andrew Jackson would have made of all this untamed commerce.
As a man whose house idealized an aristocratic agrarian order, he would undoubtedly have been appalled by a spectacle so clearly less than ideal. Yet Jackson in his public career faced squarely the realities of the capitalism of his age. He stood for “the people” as he knew them, the white Anglo-Saxons who were trying to get ahead. In this context, the columns of the Hermitage portico and the bold colors inside seem just right. Rock on, Andrew Jackson, rock on.
As a man whose house idealized an aristocratic agrarian order, he would undoubtedly have been appalled by a spectacle so clearly less than ideal. Yet Jackson in his public career faced squarely the realities of the capitalism of his age. He stood for “the people” as he knew them, the white Anglo-Saxons who were trying to get ahead. In this context, the columns of the Hermitage portico and the bold colors inside seem just right. Rock on, Andrew Jackson, rock on.
