Historical Weirdness at The Hermitage - a Battle Anniversary

This is the kind of town where you might spot an odd pair of bumper stickers on the same Chevy sedan, as I did last week in east Nashville. One said "Trust Jesus" & the other read "I Don't Suffer from Insanity, I Enjoy Every Minute of It." So, in anticipation of some historical weirdness, I drove out Lebanon Pike on a frigid Friday afternoon in order to take advantage of a free-admission offer by The Hermitage, former plantation home of the semi-democratic genocidal slaveholder General & later President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845). [See a $20 American banknote for a heroic portrait of the man nicknamed "Old Hickory".]

The occasion for this act of public generosity by the caretakers of that national historic landmark was the 195th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans (Jan. 8, 1815). On that date U.S. Army regulars under the command of Gen. Jackson, aided by Jean Lafitte's pirate band as well as some local Indians, defeated the numerically superior British invaders near Chalmette, Louisiana. Due to the slow spread of news in those pre-telegraph days, the men who fought & died there didn't realize that the War of 1812 had already officially ended by the terms of the Treaty of Ghent, signed on Christmas Eve 1814. At least the battle later proved useful to Gen. Jackson, whose victory at New Orleans vaulted him to such national prominence that he won election to the White House in 1828.

Jackson's first biographer, the British-born James Parton (apparently no relation to Dolly), visited The Hermitage in 1859 & was struck by a stern painting of the President. It inspired Parton to describe Jackson paradoxically but memorably as a "democratic autocrat, urbane savage, atrocious saint." After quitting Congress in 1798, just one year into his only term in that corrupt club of blowhards & master schmoozers, Jackson said: "I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me." Instead of pursuing electoral politics, he became a lawyer & land speculator in Nashville. He eventually built his 100-slave cotton plantation & quasi-classical mansion 10 miles away, very close to my pals Yuri & Gypsy's house in suburban Hermitage, Tennessee.

Styling himself a "Great White Father" to besieged native Americans, Jackson came to be called "devil" by the Cherokee & other tribes upon the Trail of Tears, which led those poor people from Georgia to Oklahoma circa 1831. Pres. Jackson ordered that death-march relocation (on the heels of Congress's infamous Indian Removal Act of 1830) so that white folks could grab more arable land. Jackson then maneuvered for re-election in 1832 by co-founding the so-called Democratic Party, long-time home of Southern segragationists & their spineless Northern liberal allies. End of history lesson.

My favorite part of the visit, aside from the cafe's free hot chocolate & the fine linen-cotton postcards with black & white historic photos on sale in the museum giftshop, was the elderly "interpreters" in period costume who guided us through the mansion, tossing off facts like faded confetti. I posed several questions in order to break their boredom at the rote recitation of antebellum life at the beautifully preserved Hermitage with its 175-year-old French mural wallpaper. I also dug the large brick smokehouse, built perilously close to the kitchen -- the original mansion burned to the ground in 1834. And I especially appreciated the show & tell demonstration by Mr. Meyers Brown, Curator of History at the Tennessee State Museum, in the Hermitage museum's window-lit lobby.

Dressed in a sharp 1812-era blue woolen US Army uniform (complete with high leather boots, white breeches, fancy black shako hat, big silver buckles, leather chest straps & cool old wire-rimmed spectacles), Myers stood beside a table groaning with military supplies of the time from his personal collection: hard-tack biscuits in a tin pan, dried salt pork, rope tobacco, cotton fatigues for summer wear, a metal specs-case and, of course, much weaponry (bayonet, smooth-bore rifle with ball-and-buckshot cartridges, rifled hunting gun & a deer-horn pocket-knife). His enthusiastic account of the battle, fought on a marshy barren plain alongside the Mississippi River (I visited the site when I lived in New Orleans 20 years ago), as well as some military tactics of the time provoked many queries from me & a bearded gun afficianado with his fascinated young son.

This brief trip backwards in time almost made me regret having missed the morning wreath-laying ceremony at the sheltered Grecian tomb shared by Old Hickory & his beloved wife Rachel, who didn't quite live long enough to assume the role of First Lady. Not being militaristically inclined, I wondered whether I'd have joined in the Pledge of Allegiance as the Tennessee Army National Guard posted the colors. I just have too many qualms about the US government's past & present policies abroad to feel very patriotic anymore. Afghanistan looks too much like the Vietnam of my boyhood television horror.

Nevertheless, I do recommend that you visit The Hermitage the next time you're near Music City USA (adult admission fee: $17). The grounds are gorgeous & peaceful, and an architectural restoration of the mansion's facade & columns is progressing nicely. There are aslo several outbuildings that I didn't explore, on account of the 20-degree cold.