course after course of superbly prepared delicacies, speaks of a gracious world of both refinement and honest pleasures.
Across the hall tourists are invited to view the President's private sitting room/office with its leather bound copies of the newspapers Jackson would read avidly throughout his life. Even here, and perhaps even more so in the President's nearby first floor bedroom with its elegant draperies surrounding the bed and the beloved portrait of Rachel hanging on the wall as the first sight that would greet President Jackson when rising, one senses a world made more ideal, more perfect through the efforts of its tireless builders and conservators.
And as a kind of architectural coup de grace, when visitors leave the Mansion House from the rear door, one particularly notable feature of the building becomes immediately apparent: its front display of white columns is a beautiful façade, not a structural component of the largely brick pediment-crowned home visible from behind the Mansion House. To the adversaries of President Jackson, here would appear to be proof positive of his vaulting ego and imperial ambitions. One can almost hear them observing, “Yes, that’s King Andrew for you, always wanting to look better than he really is—lording it over everyone else.” But the actual meaning of this architectural detail may be more subtle and ultimately more significant in coming to a full understanding of our seventh President.
Of course, the docents here at the Hermitage would be quick to note that this façade addition had been added to the home after the fire of 1834, but Jackson had approved the changes and had enjoyed the setting after returning to Nashville subsequent to his presidential years. The point, I believe, is that, like the wallpaper in the entrance hall, like the expansive garden with its Greco-Roman grave markers, like the manicured grounds surrounding the Mansion House, Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage stands as a monument to the possibilities he conceived for the nation he had led—what the United States could become as well as what it was. The grand entrance to the Mansion House was that vision made visible and fashioned in no small part from the character of the woman he loved. The Hermitage, like Rachel, stands today as a “prosperous ornament” both to the city of Nashville and to the President whose home it was and whose aspirations it embodied.
Without question, Andrew Jackson was a frontier fighter, a man well acquainted with the dangers and challenges of pioneer life. He regarded with contempt those forces that made more difficult the task of transforming and refashioning the wilderness, whether they came in the form of indigenous natives or Eastern bankers whose fiscal policies had worked against western interests. Jackson would oppose—and ignore--even a Supreme Court ruling if it placed the intrepid men and women of the western regions into a purgatory of territorial indecision.
But as much as any of his predecessors in office, Andrew Jackson was also possessed of a prophetic image of what this new nation might become, a vision he had fought his entire life to bring to pass. He had bled twice in helping to establish his country’s independence from England, and he had risen from a state of rustic poverty which he had chosen never to forget. But his ultimate dream, the promise realized most fully, perhaps, here at the Mansion House Hermitage, was the possibility of a people’s republic where any man, with tireless effort and adamant resolve, could create a world for himself more beautiful and more prosperous than anywhere else on the globe. The combination of Old Hickory and Rachel’s Lane defined for him the necessary ingredients of American success.
Martin Van Buren: Winning
Martin Van Buren was not the first President to face the problem. Nor would he be the last. John Adams had already experienced it. Andrew Johnson, later in the 19th century, would come to understand as completely as anyone ever could the full weight of its challenge. In the 20th century, the careers of Presidents William Howard Taft and the first George Bush would illustrate that the problem had lost none of its daunting difficulty over the years. Why, all these men would come to question, was it virtually impossible to successfully follow in the footsteps of a charismatic leader who had become a political icon?
George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan. As uniquely individual as these men were, and as diverse as were the challenges they faced, each one of them had assumed a larger-than-life persona that had helped him guide the ship of state in the direction he believed would yield the greatest benefit to the nation. But these Presidents would have to be followed in office. There is a compelling logic in the assumption that the men whom such dynamic Presidents had specifically chosen to be their successors would be excellent candidates for the office of Chief Executive. Why, then, had it turned out to be so hard for these successors to govern well? Not one of them, from John Adams to the first George Bush, would be re-elected to a second term of presidential service. History would conclude that, in some way, all of them failed to provide the leadership necessary to effectively solve the problems which had arisen during their administrations.
In the case of Martin Van Buren, such a conclusion appears unduly harsh, both as an assessment of his historical significance and as a measure of his personal success. His home, Lindenwald, which he had acquired during his years as President, tells a much more positive story. Still it is a different tale than the one Van Buren must have envisioned for himself as a young lawyer looking for ways to get ahead in the world of state and, eventually, national politics.
One lesson he had learned early on, as he had served customers in his father's tavern and listened to the political banter that had attracted his interest from the start: in politics, everything came down to winning. A winner was revered; a loser was forgotten. It was a truth that he took to heart—a truth that ultimately would explain his own place in history.
Lindenwald, now run by the National Park Service, is a beautiful country estate surrounded by over two hundred acres of cultivated farmland. Ray, the park guide to whom I first spoke upon entering the Visitor's Center, made special note of that: “I love the fact that, after his Presidency, Mr. Van Buren returned here and became a simple farmer. It's like what Thomas Jefferson did, and it's particularly appropriate because Mr. Jefferson was the first presidential candidate that Mr. Van Buren had supported as a young man."
Well, yes and no. While still a teenager Van Buren had enthusiastically campaigned for Thomas Jefferson. And, like Jefferson, after leaving the Presidency, Van Buren had returned to this pastoral estate in the Hudson River Valley. But Martin Van Buren had never intended to remain here. After losing his bid for re-election in 1840, the ex-President had lobbied energetically to recapture his party's nomination for the Presidency in 1844. Failing that, he had gone so far as to team up with Charles Francis Adams, the son of his old adversary John Quincy Adams, and aligned himself with a new political entity, the Free Soil Party, to make a then unprecedented fourth run for the Presidency in 1848. But the political tide had turned against him. Van Buren was unable to win a single vote in the Electoral College that year. The only real impact of his Free Soil Party candidacy was to split the Democratic votes in such a way as to insure the election of the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor. It was a bitter defeat, and Van Buren would never again run for political office.
The Lindenwald estate stands as a kind of memorial to all this: to Van Buren's aspirations and successes as well as to his final losses. As Carol and I have often found, the house illustrated the President's story most compellingly.
Our site guide was a pleasant young college student named Rachel. We had arrived early and were the only guests for the 11:00 tour. We began toward the front of the house where Rachel recounted the tale of a youthful Martin Van Buren wending his way up to the porch where Peter Van Ness, the family patriarch who had built Lindenwald in the closing years of the 18th century, was reading.
“Mr. Van Ness," Rachel
