Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison: What I Know Going In

Again, a First Lady about whom no books have been written and a President with almost no book options to choose from. At least this time there is a good excuse: Willilam Henry Harrison is the infamous President who chose not to wear an overcoat, shivered through his inauguration, caught ill (three weeks later), and died a month into his term. According to a quick Wikipedia search, Anna Harrison was too ill to accompany William Henry to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration and never made it there before he died. Jane Irwin Harrison, the widow of the Harrison's late son, agreed to take on hostess duties until her mother-in-law's expected arrival. That's all I know. I look forward to learning more by reading:  

William Henry Harrison by Gail Collins, another in Schlesinger's The American Presidents series.  

Image taken from amazon.com

Unfortunately, the book is currently checked out by another patron at the library and is not due until mid-December. It'll probably be another couple months before I get to blogging again. I apologize in advance, dear reader. 

Van Buren Revealed

I started a new full-time job last month, so I have fallen behind on my reading and blogging. It's probably been a month or more since I finished my chosen Martin Van Buren biography. I hate to give short shrift to an already forgotten past president and first lady, but I need to power through this mostly-from-memory blog before the holiday rush really sets in.  

I learned basically nothing about either Van Buren's wife or his acting first lady from reading his biography. He married his cousin, Hannah Hoes, partly because Kinderhook, New York, was such an exclusively Dutch part of the state that Van Buren, though born in the United States, spoke Dutch as his first language and was criticized by some as too foreign to be president. The community was tightly interrelated. They quickly made a family, but Hannah died nearly two decades before Martin became president. The most important thing I remember about Angelica Singleton Van Buren, his daughter-in-law who helped complete some of the first lady functions in the absence of a president's wife, is that she was a Southerner who complimented the Southern visiting and socializing that Van Buren used as part of his political networking and strategy.  

Van Buren was a single-term president because he was forced to take the blame for the Panic of 1837, which hit just months after his inauguration, the complicated result of unregulated economic practices set in motion well before he took the executive office. And while Van Buren continued to hold political influence after finishing his presidential term, including a second campaign for the presidency, his most significant impact on American political history perhaps happened well before he held the highest office in the land. Basically, while Andrew Jackson is most often given credit for creating the modern Democratic Party because he was the first President elected by it, Van Buren is, in fact, the figure who deserves that credit because of all the organizing he did behind the scenes to create the coalition that would become the party. Basically, Van Buren spent years putting in the muscle to organize people into this new kind of political grouping that held power to elect and sway officials. He began locally in New York, then traveled across the country, pulling people into this political organization that supported a kind of Jeffersonian democracy that extended from the rural planter to the urban worker while also getting behind federal government projects enough to appease westerners like Jackson who wanted to see United States expansion. Basically, by putting the weight of his name and his organization behind Andrew Jackson for president, Martin Van Buren created the modern Democratic Party.  

Van Buren also helped define a modern understanding of federal spending, limiting it to projects that specifically spanned more than one state, leaving in-state projects to the states themselves. Van Buren continued the Indian removals put in motion by Andrew Jackson, and he once owned a slave who ran away. Van Buren held complicated, sometimes contradictory, opinions about slavery and abolition. Much of what he said while in the political spotlight was so non-committal it could be used by either side. As every president before him, he refused to tackle to the issue of slavery in any substantive way, but Van Buren eventually took a stand wholly against admitting new slave states into the Union, ending any chances of his political re-election and predicting a civil war if the country did not heed his warning. 

Our eighth president certainly led a more interesting life than I expected from a one-term president who has been largely forgotten to history. I just wish we could learn more about the ladies in his life.  

Hannah Hoes Van Buren and Angelica Singleton Van Buren: What I Know Going In

Next to nothing. In finding my preferred book for our country's eighth president and first lady, I discovered that Martin Van Buren's wife, Hannah Van Buren, died eighteen years before he was elected to the White House. The role of Acting First Lady was taken up by Martin Van Buren's daughter-in-law, Angelica Singleton Van Buren. There are no books written about either of these women and almost none written about President Van Buren himself.  

I will learn about Van Buren's life and administration through the brief biography Martin Van Buren, written by Ted Widmer as part of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The American Presidents Series. 

Image from amazon.com

Our Trip to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage

My boyfriend and I were part of the throngs of people who traveled to the path of totality for the total solar eclipse on August 21. We had the most picturesque view of totality from a lovely campground on a lake just east of Nashville. It was amazing. If you have never experienced a total solar eclipse, it is 100% worth any expense to travel to see one at least once in your life. The day after the eclipse, we, along with seemingly everyone else who had traveled to the Nashville area for the event, decided to visit Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. Because of the unusually large crowds, it was not the experience I wanted it to be, and I felt like I learned very little. I think I left with more questions than when I arrived. Here are some of my thoughts: 

• If planning a trip to the Hermitage, do not plan it the day after a major event in the city of Nashville. In order to accommodate the large crowds, tours of the mansion were rushed, incomplete, crowded, and disorganized. I feel like on a normal weekday, visitors would receive significantly more personal attention, details, and opportunities for questions and discussions, which would be more educational and satisfying.  

• You really need to read everything to get the full story of slavery at the Hermitage, and even then, it's not very nuanced. From what I remember, there are panels discussing how Jackson had a reputation as a benevolent master (but say nothing of his overseers and their practices) but could be cruel when he felt it necessary. There still exists on site the cabin of the Jackson's longtime slave, Alfred, who devoted his entire life to serving the family making one believe in the complete benevolence of the Jacksons. Yet, on the other side of the Hermitage's acreage, there is a sign that talks clearly about how nearly all Jackson's slaves "voted with their feet" in response to life on Jackson's plantation by leaving the Hermitage and taking hold of their freedom after the Civil War. Many of the panels related to slavery are inside the two buildings that served as slave quarters. There you learn that one of them sits on the sight of the original Hermitage home of Andrew and Rachel, and that what was originally a two-story building was converted to a single story upon being made slave quarters. None of the interpretation can explain why Jackson put in the effort to remove an entire story from this structure. (Note: we did not take advantage of the audio tour that comes free with admission. Perhaps we should have?) 

• Andrew and Rachel's tomb is lovely, but I wish Rachel had a nice gold plaque on the perimeter to tell people about her like they put out for Andrew. I fear people won't realize that Andrew actually had the lovely gazebo/tomb built for Rachel and in Rachel's beloved garden and will instead think that it was built by others for Andrew with Rachel as an afterthought.   

• Rachel is at best a minor presence at the Hermitage. Granted, Rachel only lived in the mansion for a few short years, and the mansion is restored to its appearance well after she had passed. I wish we would have been told more about the wallpaper in the entryway, which I learned in my reading was chosen by Rachel.   

• Be sure to visit the museum in addition to the mansion and grounds. Yes, Rachel is a relatively minor presence there also, but you do get to see the veil that she wears in her portrait as well as the miniature of Rachel that Andrew Jackson carried with him often. The museum also does a commendable job of presenting a balanced interpretation of Andrew Jackson and his legacy. Perhaps almost too balanced as I walked away almost willing to forgive him the atrocities he put in motion when it comes to Indian Removal—almost. In the end, I still think of him as a rather reprehensible human being no matter his political accomplishments.

What I Learned about Rachel Jackson: Not Very Much

Sure, Patricia Brady is an engaging storyteller. Like in her biography of Martha Washington, she gives a well-written tale that weaves the lives of the Jacksons deeply into the context of the time. But we learn so much more about Andrew Jackson than Rachel Jackson in A Being So Gentle: The Frontier Love Story of Rachel and Andrew Jackson. I felt like Rachel was only presented on the margins and passively, almost exclusively with actions and events happening to her rather than by her. Reading this story after Louisa Thomas's complicated and complete presentation of Louisa Adams, I was a bit let down.   

Brady gives us a true frontier love story but told in relatively broad strokes and filled with the antics and ambitions of Andrew Jackson with Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson as not much more than a supporting character. We learn about the harrowing westward journey of the Donelsons, when Rachel was little more than 11 or 12, from Virginia to become one of the founding families of Tennessee. We get a general sense of what filled the days of a frontier woman and are told that Rachel was social and flirtatious, a good dancer with a basic education. We are told that this easy sociability was part of the breakdown of her marriage to a jealous Lewis Robards. In comes Andrew Jackson, boarder with the Donelson family, to "save" Rachel from this unhappy and reputedly violent marriage. Certainly, Rachel makes the decision that she is unhappy in her marriage to Robards and actively chooses to self-divorce and live as a married couple with Andrew Jackson. But the story presented here focuses so much on Andrew Jackson's actions to legitimize his relationship with Rachel and so little on what Rachel thought or did as part of the situation. In many parts, it reads like Andrew Jackson is making business dealings and doing crazy things – including duels to defend Rachel's honor – and Rachel, referring to herself as Rachel Jackson well before legal divorce and marriage to Andrew, just goes along for the ride.  

Image from Wiki Media Commons 

There are moments when we get more of a sense of who Rachel was. We learn that she was a devoted and adoring mother who was concerned that Andrew was not adequately present as a father to their adopted son. She was fearful during Andrew's time at war, wished he would stay home and live a family life as a farmer, and was happiest during the brief time when Andrew had "retired" to the Hermitage before his first presidential campaign. I wish we had learned more about how even with her discontent, she supported Andrew's military and political ambitions by maintaining the farm and business. Instead, Brady lingers on Rachel's purely feminine influence: "Rachel supported her husband's aspirations . . . Her role was to sympathize, to listen, to bring him peace at home"(196). We probably see Rachel as most active and interesting when Brady describes her deep devotion to the Presbyterian faith. During her six months in Florida while Andrew served as its first governor, Rachel went so far as to impose fines against Sabbath breakers in Pensacola because she was so uncomfortable with the dominance of Catholicism in the formerly Spanish colony. Still, I wish we had learned more. Even when dealing with the attempts to slander Rachel and Andrew during his second presidential campaign by attacking Rachel's virtue, we get almost no sense of how Rachel responded to the attacks. She is described as simply left "exhausted and sick at heart" (210) while we learn all about the steps Andrew takes to nullify the allegations and defend his beloved's honor. 

We simply do not get enough of Rachel's voice, thoughts, persona. Besides her decision to leave an unhappy marriage and live as married to another without legal sanction, we see Rachel Jackson as not much more than a stereotypical woman of the frontier elite. Even self-divorce was described as a relatively common and accepted practice at the time. I hate to begrudge a scholar who may have had limited sources with which to work, or who is working with a story that perhaps really is just that typical, but neither of those restraints are always made clear. And without that explanation, we get a pretty standard story of man who loved a woman, took her with him to marry him, pursued his aspirations while ignoring any complaints she may have had, and who expressed his love mostly by fighting (both verbally and violently) to defend his woman's honor. There are some lovely sentiments presented from the love letters between Andrew and Rachel, but not nearly enough to get a true sense of their love and relationship and certainly not enough to fully understand who Rachel Jackson was. I, for one, hope that the "first scholarly biography of Rachel Jackson" that Brady mentions Ann Toplovich, executive director of the Tennessee Historical Society, is working on (239) will be published soon.