Calling on the Presidents: Tales Their Houses Tell. Clark Beim-Esche
who sided with the colonies during the Revolution. He was also a friend of Wilberforce."
Our tour group moved on to the dining area, but mentally I was still in the drawing room. “Napoleon and Fox, Napoleon and Fox," I kept repeating to myself. Certainly an odd pairing of portrait busts in this small drawing room. And then Carolyn Holmes's phrase struck me again. As different as both these men were—and as distinct as each had been from James Monroe—all three shared that same essential quality of being “good at getting things done." Fox had courageously challenged the British Parliament during the American Revolution, going so far as to wear the colors of the continental army to sessions of parliament. He had also been outspoken on the issues of religious tolerance and individual liberty, even sullying his good name when he had come out in support of the French Revolution. Later he had worked tirelessly with Wilberforce to wipe out the scourge of human trafficking in African slaves. Napoleon, too, of course, had been an endlessly enterprising “doer" who had come very close to creating a new European empire with Paris as its center. Monroe may have had his reservations about some of each of these men's personal failings, but it would have been impossible for him to deny that both men were thoroughly committed to action. Neither had been merely content to plan a future society—or world—for others to realize. As such they belonged here.
The dining room seemed almost out of place in such a humble dwelling—the decision to dedicate an entire room of the five to giving dinner parties appeared, on its surface at least, a questionable use of space. But then I recalled Carolyn's enjoyment of Monroe's phrase describing Highlands, “my cabin castle." This was the room that transformed the plantation into a “castle," suitable for entertaining the likes of Thomas Jefferson, who dined here often, James Madison, Lafayette, and other notables of the new revolutionary age. Though issuing from a much more unexceptional background than any of his Virginia political peers, Monroe was no less a representative of the aristocracy of merit about which his friend Thomas Jefferson had spoken so memorably. The elegance of the dining table, the refinement of the furnishings and dishware, all spoke of this new generation of republican worthies, of which James Monroe was an established member.
The last three rooms on our tour, two bedrooms and a rather cozy study, were serviceable and straightforwardly useful. There was no ostentatious display of wealth or possessions in any of them, but a small family could be most adequately housed in such a “cabin castle." The Monroes had loved this plantation site and had only put it on the market when their overall indebtedness had necessitated the sale.
Before we left the last room of our tour, the study, our docent pointed out several silhouettes of the Monroe family, framed and hanging as decorative touches on the walls of the room. Her chief interest in them was in the fact that, unlike most silhouettes, which are black paper cutouts mounted on white backgrounds, these silhouettes had been created by the cut out edgings of white paper. The black silhouette images we saw, then, were not cut out of black paper but were created by the white cut edgings, placed upon a plain black background. Her next observation, whether or not she had intended it as a continuation of her comments about these unique silhouettes, constituted a wonderful parallel to them. She noted that when James Madison had inquired of Thomas Jefferson about the character of James Monroe, Jefferson's answer had been immediate and unequivocal: “If you turn Monroe's soul inside out, you will find not a speck." Even Jefferson's portrait of James Monroe, then, was cut completely out of white paper.
The remainder of our tour of this beautiful farm/plantation took place outside, and I found it particularly interesting to note that Ash Lawn-Highland is committed to being a center of living history. The site's education department is dedicated to helping young people from nearby communities have a chance to experience life as it was lived in the early years of the 19th century. There is a sheep-shearing day where children can see where wool comes from and watch it being spun into material that will be used to create items for sale in the site's store. Hay mowing, egg gathering, and cooking classes that feature foods harvested from the Ash Lawn-Highland gardens give young students a window into the workings of a functioning plantation.
I couldn't help but think that James Monroe would have loved to see his plantation so full of activity. Of all the beautifully maintained and reverently presented presidential homes in Virginia, none was so dedicated, even more than 150 years after the passing of its President, to “getting things done."
Andrew Jackson: “Old Hickory” down Rachel’s Lane
I have had the opportunity to visit Andrew Jackson's estate, the Hermitage, just east of Nashville, Tennessee, on three separate occasions in three separate years, and I have always come away with an appreciation of the extent to which this locale presents both the complexity and the worth of this great man. I also suspect that this first sentence may have already enraged some of my readers. "Complexity?" I can hear a voice repeat bitterly. "Jackson was the least complex, most stubbornly direct man who ever darkened the door of the White House." "Worth?" I can hear another scoff. "Tell that to the Supreme Court!" "Great? Only if you consider 'greatness' to be a tyrannical insistence on having one's own way regardless of the consequences to the nation."
So you see I am not unmindful of the controversies that still surround the legacy of our seventh President. But here at the Hermitage, one feels invited at almost every turn to contemplate the man more deeply, to appreciate more thoroughly both the world he inhabited and the world he envisioned, and to understand more completely why the political age he initiated still bears his name.
That such is the case is due, in no small part, to the continuing efforts of the Ladies' Hermitage Association, an organization that has curated and overseen the preservation of the Hermitage since 1889, rendering it, in the words of one guide to presidential homes, “…the most accurately restored early presidential home in the country" (Schaefer 41).
Nowhere is the complexity of Andrew Jackson more blatantly on display here at the Hermitage than in the fact that this site boasts two “Hermitage" structures: the original log cabin (or, at least, the second floor thereof) in which Andrew and Rachel Jackson lived for seventeen years, and the later “Hermitage," the more familiar Mansion House, that was finally completed in 1821. The question worth asking, of course, is why did the President keep this first roughhewn reminder of the Jacksons' humble beginnings so near to the later and more impressive Mansion House? The pat answer that is frequently forwarded to this question is that Jackson's frugality had come to the fore and that he had simply used the upper story of what had been his home to accommodate slaves on his burgeoning plantation. While true in the most literal sense—the remaining structure did become a living space for some of the slave population of the Hermitage plantation—it doesn't explain why Jackson would have gone to the trouble of preserving it. To understand this decision, one needs to know the man more intimately.
Like the hickory wood to which he was so often compared, Andrew Jackson was tough, hard, and unbending. And, most significantly, he was a man who never pretended to be anything more or less than what he was—even when “what he was" might be unpolished or unadmirable. Jackson was proud of his frontier roots. Like the common people he so openly championed and worked to include more broadly in the democratic process, his rustic origin was simply the truth about his beginnings. Why hide such a heritage? Why regret it?
After all, the crucible of the frontier had been the backdrop of the rags to riches story of an orphaned son determined to get ahead. The harsh and brutal realities of the “far west" had made Jackson a fierce and tenacious Indian fighter and, all the same, had led him to the later chapters in his life: a successful law practice, political ascendancy, and, ultimately the supreme office of Chief Executive. Jackson never forgot, never wanted to forget, the origin from which he had sprung. But his sights were also set considerably higher than merely achieving personal comfort and affluence, and these aspirations serve to add complexity to the simple picture already considered of a homespun frontiersman who had made good. Jackson was a visionary as well as a fighter, and his expansive visionary dream