When Men Grew Tall, or The Story Of Andrew Jackson

“I don’t understand.”

“Let me explain: You kill Robards. His wife is a widow. Also, because you have killed Robards in a quarrel over her, she is the talk of the settlement. Therefore, I put the question: Having made Rachel the scandal of the Cumberland, what will you do?”

There is a long, embarrassed pause. Presently Andrew lifts his gaze to the cool eyes of his friend.

“I shall offer her marriage. She shall, if she accept it, have the protection of my name.”

“And then,” goes on the ice-and-iron Overton, “the scandal will be redoubled. They will say that you and Rachel, plotting together, have murdered Robards to open a wider way for your guilty loves.”

Andrew takes a deep breath. “What would you counsel?” he asks.

“One thing,” – laying his hand on Andrew’s shoulder – “under no circumstances, not even to save your own life, must you slay Robards. You might better slay Rachel; since his death by your hand spells her destruction. Good people would avoid her as though she were the plague. Never more, on the Cumberland, should she hold up her head.”

That night the fear-eaten Robards solves the situation which his crazy jealousy has created. He starts secretly for the North. He tells two or three that he will never more call the blooming Rachel wife.

For a month there is much silence, and some restraint, at the widow Donelson’s. This condition wears away; and, while no one says so, everybody feels relaxed and relieved by the absence of the drunken Robards. No one names him, and there is tacit agreement to forget the creature. The drunken Robards, however, has no notion of being forgotten. Word comes down from above that he will return and reclaim his wife. At this the black eyes of Rachel sparkle dangerously.

“That monster,” she cries, “shall never kiss my lips, nor so much as touch my hand again!”

By advice of her mother, and to avoid the drunken Robards – who promises his hateful appearance with each new day – the blooming Rachel resolves to take passage on a keel boat for Natchez. Andrew, in deep concern, declares that he shall accompany her. He says that he goes to protect her from those Indians who make a double fringe of savage peril along the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. Overton, the taciturn, shrugs his shoulders; the keel-boat captain is glad to have with him the steadiest rifle along the Cumberland, and says as much; the blooming Rachel is glad, but says so only with her eyes; the Nashville good people say nothing, winking in silence sophisticated eyes.

Robards the drunken, now when they are gone, plays the ill-used husband to the hilts. He seems to revel in the rôle, and, to keep it from cooling in interest, petitions the Virginia Legislature for a divorce. In course of time the news climbs the mountains, and descends into the Cumberland, that the divorce is granted; while similar word floats down to Natchez with the keel boats.

The slow story of the blooming Rachel’s release reaches our two in Natchez. Thereupon Andrew leads Rachel the blooming before a priest; and the priest blesses them, and names them man and wife. That autumn they are again at the widow Donelson’s; but the blooming Rachel, once Mrs. Robards, is now Mrs. Jackson.

Slander is never the vice of a region that goes armed to the teeth. Thus it befalls that now, when the two are back on the Cumberland, those sophisticated ones forget to wink. There comes not so much as the arching of a brow; for no one is so careless of life as all that. The whole settlement can see that the dangerous Andrew is watching with those steel-blue eyes.

At the first suggestion that his Rachel has been guilty of wrong, he will be at the throat of her maligner like a panther.

Time flows on, and a horrible thing occurs. There comes a new word that no divorce was granted by that Legislature; and this new word is indisputable. There is a divorce, one granted by a court; but, as an act of separation between Rachel the blooming and the drunken Robards, that decree of divorce is long months younger than the empowering act of the Richmond Legislature, which mistaken folk regarded as a divorce. The good priest’s words, when he named our troubled two as man and wife, were ignorantly spoken. During months upon months thereafter, through all of which she was hailed as “Mrs. Jackson,” the blooming Rachel was still the wife of the drunken Robards.

The blow strikes Andrew gray; but he says never a word. He blames himself for this shipwreck; where his Rachel was involved, he should have made all sure and invited no chances.

The injury is done, however; he must now go about its repair. There is a second marriage, at which the silent Overton and the widow Donelson are the only witnesses, and for the second time a priest congratulates our storm-tossed ones as man and wife. This time there is no mistake.

The young husband sends to Charleston; and presently there come to him over the Blue Ridge, the finest pair of dueling pistols which the Cumberland has ever beheld. They are Galway saw-handles, rifle-barreled; a breath discharges them, and they are sighted to the splitting of a hair.

“What are they for?” asks Overton the taciturn, balancing one in each experienced hand.

In the eyes of Andrew gathers that steel-blue look of doom. “They are to kill the first villain who speaks ill of my wife,” says he.

CHAPTER VI – DEAD-SHOT DICKINSON

THE sandy-haired Andrew now devotes himself to the practice of law and the domestic virtues. In exercising the latter, he has the aid of the blooming Rachel, toward whom he carries himself with a tender chivalry that would have graced a Bayard. Having little of books, he is earnest for the education of others, and becomes a trustee of the Nashville Academy.

About this time the good people of the Cumberland, and of the regions round about, believing they number more than seventy thousand souls, are seized of a hunger for statehood. They call a constitutional convention at Knoxville, and Andrew attends as a delegate from his county of Davidson. Woolsack McNairy, his fellow student in the office of Spruce Mc-Cay, is also a delegate. The woolsack one has-realized that dream of old Salisbury, and is now a judge.

Andrew and woolsack McNairy are members of the committee which draws a constitution for the would-be commonwealth. The constitution, when framed, is brought by its authors into open convention, and wranglingly adopted. Also, “Tennessee” is settled upon for a name, albeit the ardent Andrew, who is nothing if not tribal, urges that of “Cumberland.”

The constitution goes, with the proposition of statehood, before Congress in Philadelphia; and, following a sharp fight, in which such fossilized ones as Rufus King oppose and such quick spirits as Aaron Burr sustain, the admission of “Tennessee,” the new State is created.

Its hunting-shirt citizenry, well pleased with their successful step in nation building, elect Andrew to the House of Representatives. A little later, he is taken from the House and sent to the Senate. There he meets with Mr. Jefferson, who is the Senate’s presiding officer, being vice-president of the nation, and that accurate parliamentarian and polished fine gentleman writes of him:

“He never speaks on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, but as often choke with rage.” There also he encounters Aaron Burr; and is so far socially sagacious as to model his deportment upon that of the American Chesterfield, ironing out its backwoods wrinkles and savage creases, until it fits a salon as smoothly well as does the deportment of Burr himself. Our hero finds but one other man about Congress for whom he conceives a friendship equal to that which he feels for Aaron Burr, and he is Edward Livingston.

Andrew the energetic discovers the life of a senator to be one of dawdling uselessness, overlong drawn out; and says so. He anticipates the acrid Randolph of Roanoke, and declares that he never winds his watch while in Congress, holding all time spent there as wasted and thrown away.

Idleness rusts him; and, being of a temper even with that of best Toledo steel, he refuses to rust patiently. Preyed upon and carked of an exasperating leisure, which misfits both his years and his fierce temperament, he seeks refuge in what amusements are rife in Philadelphia. He goes to Mr. McElwee’s Looking-glass Store, 70 South Fourth Street, and pays four bits for a ticket to the readings of Mr. Fennell, who gives him Goldsmith, Thompson and Young. The readings pall upon him, and athirst for something more violent, he clinks down a Mexican dollar, witnesses the horsemanship at Mr. Rickett’s amphitheater, and finds it more to his horse-loving taste. When all else fails, he buys a seat in a box at the Old Theater in Cedar Street, and is entertained by the sleight of hand of wizard Signor Falconi. On the back of it all he grows heartily sick of the Senate, and of civilization, as the latter finds exposition in Philadelphia, and resigns his place and goes home.

When he arrives in Nashville, the Legislature – which still holds that he should be engaged upon some public work – elects him to the supreme bench…

{There are missing paragraphs which are not found in any online edition of this ebook}

…objectionable Mr. Bean with those Galway saw-handles; and that violent person surrenders unconditionally. In elucidating his sudden tameness and its causes, Mr. Bean subsequently explains to a disgusted admirer:

“I looks at the Jedge, an’ I sees shoot in his eye; an’ thar warn’t shoot in nary ‘nother eye in the crowd. So I says to myse’f, says I, ‘Old Hoss, it’s about time to sing small!’ An’ I does.”

Notwithstanding those leaden exchanges with the Governor, and the conquest of the discreet Mr. Bean, our jurist finds the bench inexpressibly tedious. At last he resigns from it, as he did from the Senate, and again retreats to private life.

Here his forethoughtful Scotch blood begins to assert itself, and he goes seriously to the making of money. With his one hundred and fifty slaves, he tills his plantation as no plantation on the Cumberland was ever tilled before; and the cotton crops he “makes” are at once the local boast and wonder. He starts an inland shipyard, and builds keel and flat boats for the river commerce with New Orleans. He opens a store, sells everything from gunpowder to quinine, broadcloth by the bolt to salt by the barrel, and takes his pay in the heterogeneous currency of the region, whereof ‘coon skins are a smallest subsidiary coin. Also, it is now that he is made Major General of Militia, an honor for which he has privily panted, even as the worn hart panteth for the water brook.

When he is a general, the blooming Rachel cuts and bastes and stitches a gorgeous uniform for her Bayard, in which labor of love she exhausts the Nashville supply of gold braid. Once the new General dons that effulgent uniform, which he does upon the instant it is completed, he offers a spectacle of such brilliancy that the bedazzled public talks facetiously of smoked glass. The new General in no wise resents this jest, being blandly tolerant of a backwoods sense of humor which suggests it. Besides, while the public has its joke, he has the uniform and his commission; and these, he opines, give him vastly the better of the situation.

Many friends, many foes, says the Arab, and now the popular young General finds his path grown up of enemies. There be reasons for the sprouting of these malevolent gentry. The General is the idol of the people. He can call them about him as the huntsman calls his hounds. At word or sign from him, they follow and pull down whatsoever man or measure he points to as his quarry of politics. This does not match with the ambitions of many a pushing gentleman, who is quite as eager for popular preference, and – he thinks – quite as much entitled to it, as is the General.

These disgruntled ones, baffled in their political advancement by the General, take darkling counsel among themselves. The decision they arrive at is one gloomy enough. They cannot shake the General’s hold upon the people. Nothing short of his death promises a least ray of relief. He is the sun; while he lives he alone will occupy the popular heavens. His destruction would mean the going down of that sun. In the night which followed, those lesser plotting luminaries might win for themselves some twinkling visibility.

It is the springtime of the malevolent ones’ conspiracy, and the plot they make begins to blossom for the bearing of its lethal fruit. There is in Nashville one Charles Dickinson. By profession he is a lawyer, albeit of practice intermittent and scant. In figure he is tall, handsome, graceful with a feline grace. If there be aught in the old Greek’s theory touching the transmigration of souls, then this Dickinson was aforetime and in another life a tiger. He is sinuous, powerful, vain, narrowly cruel, with a sleek purring gloss of manner over all. Also, he is of “good family” – that defense and final refuge of folk who would else sink from respectable sight in the mire of their own well-earned disrepute.

Mr. Dickinson has one accomplishment, a physical one. So nicely does his eye match his hand, that he may boast himself the quickest, surest shot in all the world. Knowing his vanity, and the deadly certainty of his pistols, the conspirators work upon him. They point out that to kill the General under circumstances which men approve, will be an easy instant step to greatness. Urged by his vanity, permitted by his cruelty, dead-shot Dickinson rises to the glittering lure.

Give a man station and fortune, and while his courage is not sapped his prudence is promoted. The poor, obscure man will risk himself more readily than will the eminent rich one, not that he is braver, but he has less to lose. The General – who has been in both Houses of Congress, and was a judge on the bench besides – will not be hurried to the field, as readily as when he was merely Andrew the horse-faced. However, those malignant secret ones are ingenious. They know a name that cannot fail to set him ablaze for blood. They whisper that name to dead-shot Dickinson.

It is a banner day at the Clover Bottom track. The General’s Truxton is to run – that meteor among race horses, the mighty Truxton! The blooming Rachel, seated in her carriage, is where she can view the finish. The General – one of the Clover Bottom stewards – is in the judge’s stand. Dead-shot Dickinson, as the bell rings on the race, takes his stand at the blooming Rachel’s carriage wheel. He is not there to see a race, but to plant an insult.

“Go!” cries the starter.

Away rushes the field, the flying Truxton in the lead! Around they whirl, the little jockeys plying hand and heel! They sweep by the three-quarters post! The great Truxton, eye afire, nostrils wide, comes down the stretch with the swiftness of the thrown lance! Behind, ten generous lengths, trail the beaten ruck! The red mounts to the cheek of the blooming Rachel; her black eyes shine with excitement! She applauds the invincible Truxton with her little hands.

“He is running away with them!” she cries.

Dead-shot Dickinson turns to the friend who is conveniently by his side. The chance he waited for has come.

“Running away with them!” he sneers, repeating the phrase of the blooming Rachel. “To be sure! He takes after his master, who ran away with another man’s wife.”

CHAPTER VII – HOW THE GENERAL FOUGHT

THE General seeks the taciturn Over-ton – that wordless one of the uneasy hair triggers.