From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   Chapter 1   
      
   Andy Will Fight His Way in the World   
      
   Christmas 1828 should have been the happiest of seasons at the Hermitage,   
   Jackson’s plantation twelve miles outside Nashville. It was a week before   
   the holiday, and Jackson had won the presidency of the United States the month   
   before. “How triumphant!   
   â€� Andrew Donelson said of the victory. “How flattering to the cause of the   
   people!â€� Now the president- elect’s family and friends were to be on hand   
   for a holiday of good food, liquor, and wine–Jackson was known to serve   
   guests whiskey,    
   champagne, claret, Madeira, port, and gin–and, in this special year, a   
   pageant of horses, guns, and martial glory.   
      
   On Wednesday, December 17, 1828, Jackson was sitting inside the house,   
   answering congratulatory messages. As he worked, friends in town were planning   
   a ball to honor their favorite son before he left for Washington. Led by a   
   marshal, there would be a    
   guard of soldiers on horseback to take Jackson into Nashville, fire a twenty-   
   four- gun artillery salute, and escort him to a dinner followed by dancing.   
   Rachel would be by his side.   
      
   In the last moments before the celebrations, and his duties, began, Jackson   
   drafted a letter. Writing in his hurried hand across the foolscap, he accepted   
   an old friend’s good wishes: “To the people, for the confidence reposed in   
   me, my gratitude and    
   best services are due; and are pledged to their service.â€� Before he finished   
   the note, Jackson went outside to his Tennessee fields.   
      
   He knew his election was inspiring both reverence and loathing. The 1828   
   presidential campaign between Jackson and Adams had been vicious. Jackson’s   
   forces had charged that Adams, as minister to Russia, had procured a woman for   
   Czar Alexander I. As    
   president, Adams was alleged to have spent too much public money decorating   
   the White House, buying fancy china and a billiard table. The anti- Jackson   
   assaults were more colorful. Jackson’s foes called his wife a bigamist and   
   his mother a whore,    
   attacking him for a history of dueling, for alleged atrocities in battles   
   against the British, the Spanish, and the Indians–and for being a wife   
   stealer who had married Rachel before she was divorced from her first husband.   
   â€œEven Mrs. J. is not    
   spared, and my pious Mother, nearly fifty years in the tomb, and who, from her   
   cradle to her death had not a speck upon her character, has been dragged forth   
   . . . and held to public scorn as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro,   
   and my eldest    
   brother sold as a slave in Carolina,â€� Jackson said to a friend.   
      
   Jackson’s advisers marveled at the ferocity of the Adams attacks. “The   
   floodgates of falsehood, slander, and abuse have been hoisted and the most   
   nauseating filth is poured, in torrents, on the head, of not only Genl Jackson   
   but all his prominent    
   supporters,â€� William B. Lewis told John Coffee, an old friend of Jackson’s   
   from Tennessee.   
   Some Americans thought of the president-elect as a second Father of His   
   Country. Others wanted him dead. One Revolutionary War veteran, David Coons of   
   Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was hearing rumors of ambush and assassination plots   
   against Jackson. To Coons,   
    Jackson was coming to rule as a tribune of the people, but to others Jackson   
   seemed dangerous–so dangerous, in fact, that he was worth killing. “There   
   are a portion of malicious and unprincipled men who have made hard threats   
   with regard to you, men    
   whose baseness would (in my opinion) prompt them to do anything,â€� Coons   
   wrote Jackson.   
      
   That was the turbulent world awaiting beyond the Hermitage. In the draft of a   
   speech he was to deliver to the celebration in town, Jackson was torn between   
   anxiety and nostalgia. “The consciousness of a steady adherence to my duty   
   has not been    
   disturbed by the unsparing attacks of which I have been the subject during the   
   election,â€� the speech read. Still, Jackson admitted he felt †  
   apprehensionâ€� about the years ahead. His chief fear? That, in Jackson’s   
   words, “I shall failâ€� to    
   secure “the future prosperity of our beloved country.â€� Perhaps the   
   procession to Nashville and the ball at the hotel would lift his spirits;   
   perhaps Christmas with his family would.   
      
   While Jackson was outside, word came that his wife had collapsed in her   
   sitting room, screaming in pain. It had been a wretched time for Rachel. She   
   was, Jackson’s political foes cried, “a black wench,â€� a “profligate   
   woman,â€� unfit to be the    
   wife of the president of the United States. Shaken by the at- tacks,   
   Rachel–also sixty-one and, in contrast to her husband, short and somewhat   
   heavy–had been melancholy and anxious. “The enemies of the General have   
   dipped their arrows in wormwood    
   and gall and sped them at me,â€� Rachel lamented during the campaign.   
   â€œAlmighty God, was there ever any thing equal to it?â€� On the way home from   
   a trip to Nashville after the balloting, Rachel was devastated to overhear a   
   conversation about the lurid    
   charges against her. Her niece, the twenty-one- year- old Emily Donelson,   
   tried to reassure her aunt but failed. “No, Emily,â€� Mrs. Jackson replied,   
   â€œI’ll never forget it!â€�   
      
   When news of her husband’s election arrived, she said: “Well, for Mr.   
   Jackson’s sake I am glad; for my own part I never wished it.â€� Now the   
   cumulative toll of the campaign and the coming administration exacted its   
   price as Rachel was put to bed,    
   the sound of her cries still echoing in her slave Hannah’s ears.   
      
   Jackson rushed to his wife, sent for doctors, did what he could. Later, as she   
   lay resting, her husband added an emotional postscript to the letter he had   
   begun: “P.S. Whilst writing, Mrs. J. from good health, has been taken   
   suddenly ill, with    
   excruciating pain in the left shoulder, arm, and breast. What may be the   
   result of this violent attack god only knows, I hope for her recovery, and in   
   haste close this letter, you will pardon any inaccuracies A. J.â€� Yet his   
   hopes would not bring her    
   back.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)