The Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s Home, Teaches History and Citizenship

A look at a leader, his elegant home, and his cussing pet parrot 

O n my swing through Tennessee and Alabama I made the time to visit two presidential museums. Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, a stately plantation house, is outside Nashville. About 50 miles south is James Knox Polk’s home in Columbia, not far from the Alabama line. Both are house museums, and both interpret the men and women who lived there as well as their eras. I’ll write about the Hermitage today and about Polk’s house when I write about my visit to the Tennessee State Museum.

Art historians are, first and foremost, historians. Artists, whom we study, are creatures of a time and place, and part of our work is to develop their story in these contexts. Beyond that, history is our invisible mover and shaker. None of us is an Adam or an Eve. Call it baggage, call it legacy, call it priceless example, but history is part of us.

Jackson (1767–1845) alchemized the country. His legacy is our egalitarian democracy. He was the hero of the Battle of New Orleans. He crushed both the Bank of the United States and an emerging cult of elites in Washington. An age is named for him.

PC loonies who believe that they’re perfect and, by the by, hate the country tend to look askance at Jackson these days. Once the icon of the Democratic Party, along with Jefferson, he’s not erased. He owned slaves, treated the Indians badly, despised highfalutin swells, and, horror of horrors, broke norms. At least he didn’t send mean tweets.

Poll, his pet parrot, was, however, expelled from Jackson’s funeral after “a perfect gust of cuss words,” the presiding minister wrote, leaving mourners “horrified and awed at the bird’s lack of reverence.” Clearly Poll spent too much time with the man said to have been “born to storm.” My point is that there’s plenty of bad to take with the good in Jackson.

In his lifetime, Jackson was America’s most loved and most hated man. He’s called a populist, a nebulous word. From 1804 to 1824, presidential elections were consensus affairs. Jackson, always a bull in a china shop, was a very popular bull appealing to the unconnected and unlettered, people the palatine few deplore. That’s triggering. Cue the screeches and screams from the school scene in The Birds.

Like almost all museums, the Hermitage has a mission. It exists “to preserve the home place of Andrew Jackson, create learning opportunities, and inspire citizenship through experiencing the life and unique impact of Jackson.” Does it work?

Jackson bought the farmland, which grew into a 1,100-acre plantation, in 1804. He and his wife, Rachel, lived there until her death in 1828, weeks after Jackson’s election as president. After his term ended in 1837, Jackson moved to the Hermitage for the rest of his life.

The house, built between 1819 and 1821 and rebuilt after a fire in 1837, has eight rooms on the first floor and four on the second, excluding servant areas.

An impressive colonnade and portico greet us. Jackson’s parents were Scots-Irish immigrants. He was a frontier orphan and, more or less, raised himself. He’s the last president to have fought in the Revolution. He put on a good show at being rich but was always in deep debt to the day he died.

The entrance hall’s grand, with a cantilevered staircase heading upstairs, a 20-foot ceiling, and the original Joseph Dufour & Co. wallpaper made in Paris. It depicts the life of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus. The front and back parlors, on one side of the hall, are filled with the Jacksons’ furniture, which is decent Second Empire. Jackson’s and his adopted son’s bedrooms are on the other side. Andrew Jr. sold the house and plantation land to the State of Tennessee in 1856, but the family lived there until the 1890s.

The Ladies Hermitage Society, now the Andrew Jackson Foundation, runs the place as a nonprofit organization. The group has been heroic in finding Jackson’s possessions and arranging the interior as he left it. His opulent bedroom, anchored by his deathbed, looks like he just left. His slippers — Jackson had tiny, size 7 1/2 feet — are there, as are his glasses and the art and carpeting that he saw.

The back two rooms are Jackson’s library and the plantation office. Political and farm business happened there. The dining room, next to the parlor, is elegant. The table is set with Jackson’s Wedgwood china and English silver. Upstairs are four bedrooms for family and guests.

Visitors are led on a tour by young, well-informed costumed guides. I didn’t like the plexiglass screens separating rooms from the public, who are kept in the entrance hall, the hallway running through the house, the back hall, and the upstairs hall. Plexiglass, even the good, reduced-reflection stuff, acts as an annoying intermediary. Guides talk about things in the rooms we can’t see. We’re left on our own to peek into the dining room, through plexiglass, along with Jackson’s bedroom — the spaces I wanted to study closely.

The Hermitage is installing a new HVAC system. This isn’t a bad thing but, unlike an art museum, the house is a house, and not a big one. With so many people entering and leaving, climate control will be a challenge. Neither the art nor the furniture are museum-quality. I’d treat the house like a home, or use that standard as the overarching philosophy. Visitors miss a lot from the “look, don’t enter” policy. I know there’s security, but numbers can be controlled. This would affect admissions-paying numbers and mean smaller group sizes.

I read the 2021 Annual Report. Production values throughout the Hermitage are high. The annual report is beautifully done, as are the graphics in the museum.

What used to be a plantation is now a spacious park. The Jackson family tomb is near the house. Landscaping and preservation are big priorities.

The place is very revenue-focused. Group tours, a beer-tasting bar, a partnership with a winery, ghost tours, and upgraded and VIP tours make money. Basic admission to the mansion and the grounds is $26 a head. Even active military pay $23 a head. A family pass for two adults and two kids is $80.

“What the duck,” Poll would ask. That’s pricey, when it comes to servicemen and women and families. Not quite of “10 percent for the Big Guy” Biden proportions, Poll thinks, but still hefty. I also read the Hermitage’s 2019 tax return, its last normal year. About 60 percent of its income is earned. Almost all the rest comes from fundraising. It gets no government money. The annual budget is around $6 million.

The annual report is mostly about fundraising. The report and the website have too much baby talk for my taste when it comes to history. That’s a shame since the Hermitage has an in-house curator and, in its museum, does history very well. I’d make both more intellectual and a bit less about money and entertainment.

There’s a good museum in the visitor center. It’s by the admissions booth. I loved it. Using graphics and meaningful artifacts such as his dueling pistols, clothes, carriage, and letters, it helps us learn who Jackson was as a man, leader, and hero. A tall, unnaturally thin, angular, blue-eyed redhead, Jackson was wild, fearless, and playful, with a cauldron for a temper.

Jackson’s first brush with disputation came when he was a teenage prisoner of war during the Revolution. A British officer ordered him to polish his boots. “Go engage in self-fornication under the consent of the king,” he said, though not quite like that. Poll loved the more colorful line. The officer struck Jackson with his sword. He carried the scar with him, as well as two bullets from various fights. Jackson embroiled himself in dozens of duel challenges but in only one where he killed a man.

He was a lawyer, judge, and U.S. senator from Tennessee before he returned to the military and won in New Orleans. His career in politics and the military started in the early 1780s and ended with his death. Polk, whom he mentored, was elected president in 1844. Jackson assiduously promoted his campaign.

The museum’s in-depth. We learn about the War of 1812, the Indian wars, and the 1824 election, which Jackson loudly considered rigged by, as Poll would say, “sons a’ bitch crooks,” adding “Stop the Steal.” There’s the Petticoat Affair, the Bank War, and the Nullification Crisis, during which South Carolina claimed it could pick and choose which federal laws to obey, like today’s sanctuary cities and states, which think they ought to make their own immigration law.

Jackson was censured by Congress. He replaced his entire cabinet after an unusually dysfunctional first year as president. Jackson was the first president to come from nothing, unlike the planter aristocrats from Virginia or the two Adamses from Massachusetts. He was self-educated. He was charming in a bawdy, frontier way. Smug, big-city aristos from Boston to Washington hated him. Jackson smashed their cabal, loudly and with gusto.

“Guano heads,” Poll squawked, though he didn’t say “guano” exactly, repeating “Drain the swamp” a dozen times. That parrot’s a gift that keeps on giving.

There’s a very good ten-minute introductory film in an auditorium with comfortable seats. Historians and actors take us through Jackson’s career. People learn in different ways, and some want to see a movie rather than go through the museum. Both are rewarding, but the museum is both scholarly and accessible.

Of our antebellum presidents from the South, and that’s eight of the 15 presidents before Lincoln, all owned slaves. How is this moral and ethical carbuncle treated at the Hermitage? The Hermitage museum was developed about 20 years ago and references Jackson’s ownership of about 150 slaves but doesn’t dwell on it or the fact that he doesn’t seem to have thought slavery was a moral question at all.

The museum has produced attractive and compelling wall banners addressing slavery at the Hermitage. It profiles a dozen slaves who worked there, mostly house servants, among them a man who lived at the Hermitage from his birth until his death in 1901. He became a tenant farmer and, later, a Hermitage tour guide. The Hermitage has restored slave quarters and done lots of research on slaves on the old plantation.

This is a work in progress. Jackson was president during an odd period when the so-called slave question wasn’t a hot one. Indian removal seemed more central. Regarding Jackson and Native Americans, he figures prominently in the abuses of the time, but was he pivotal or decisive? He seems to have been part of a broad, deeply held consensus and has to be viewed in that context.

The Hermitage brings Jackson to life, but what about citizenship? I think the place does a very good job on three fronts. First, knowing our history, not fake history, is vital to good citizenship. We need to know our rights and responsibilities but also their origins. This isn’t an abstraction. It’s nuts-and-bolts knowledge and a source of pride. The Hermitage conveys the Age of Jackson with style and substance.

Second, Jackson was the first president made from scratch, from the frontier, from poverty, and through relentless grit. Though the Constitution prohibits a hereditary aristocracy, a radical move in its time, cultures of entitlement and entrenchment are apt to develop. Jackson, also a war hero and a magnetic personality, sat atop a vast outsider movement. He called the Democratic Party, a new creature, “the democracy” in opposition to a horse-age Acela Corridor aristocracy rigging the country’s finances and politics on behalf of itself. This is broadly empowering.

Third, Jackson was the pivotal man in the 1820s and ’30s. We’re not flotsam and jetsam bobbing on the sea of history. Leadership makes a difference. One man makes a difference. We as individual citizens can make a difference, if we value our rights and are willing to use our voices. Entitled elitists? Cant pushers? Grievance pimps? “Pluck them,” Poll opines.

“And the Pronoun People, too.” Out of the beaks of fowl ofttimes come gems.