"A more exemplary woman in all the relations of life--wife, friend, neighbor, mistress of slaves--never lived, and never presented a more quiet, cheerful, and admirable management of her household. She had the general"s own warm heart, frank manners, and admirable temper; and no two persons could have been better suited to each other, lived more happily together, or made a house more attractive to visitors. No bashful youth or plain old man, whose modesty sat them down at the lower end of the table, could escape her cordial attention, any more than the t.i.tled gentlemen at her right and left. Young persons were her delight, and she always had her house filled with them, all calling her affectionately "Aunt Rachel.""
In the homely fashion of the time, she used to join her husband and guests in smoking a pipe after dinner and in the evening. There are now living many persons who well remember seeing her smoking by her fireside a long reed pipe.
When General Jackson went forth to fight in the war of 1812, he was still living in a log house of four rooms. "And this house," says Parton, in a sketch written years ago, from which this is chiefly drawn, "is still standing on his beautiful farm ten miles from Nashville. I used to wonder, when walking about it, how it was possible for Mrs.
Jackson to accommodate so many guests as we know she did. But a hospitable house, like a Third Avenue car, in never full; and in that mild climate the young men could sleep on the piazza or in the corn-crib, content if their mothers and sisters had the shelter of the house. It was not until long after the general"s return from the wars that he built, or could afford to build, the large brick mansion which he named the "Hermitage," The visitor may still see in that commodious house the bed on which this happy pair slept and died, the furniture they used, and the pictures on which they were accustomed to look. In the hall of the second story there is still preserved the huge chest in which Mrs. Jackson used to stow away the woolen clothes of the family in the Summer, to keep them from the moths. Around the house are the remains of the fine garden of which she used to be proud, and a little beyond are the cabins of the hundred and fifty slaves, to whom she was more a mother than a mistress."
A few weeks after the battle of New Orleans, when Jackson was in the first flush of his triumph, this plain planter"s wife floated down the Mississippi to New Orleans to visit her husband and accompany him home.
She had never seen a city before; for Nashville, at that day, was little more than a village. The elegant ladies of New Orleans were exceedingly pleased to observe that General Jackson, though he was himself one of the most graceful and polite of gentlemen, seemed totally unconscious of the homely bearing, the country manners, and awkward dress of his wife.
In all companies and on all occasions he showed her every possible mark of respect. The ladies gathered about her and presented her with all sorts of showy knick-knacks and jewelry, and one of them undertook the task of selecting suitable clothes for her. She frankly confessed that she knew nothing at all about such things, and was willing to wear any thing the ladies thought proper. Much as she enjoyed her visit, she was glad enough to return to her old home on the banks of the c.u.mberland, and resume her oversight of the dairy and the plantation.
Soon after the peace, a remarkable change came over the spirit of this excellent woman. Parson Blackburn, as the general always called him, was a favorite preacher in that part of Tennessee, and his sermons made so powerful an impression on Mrs. Jackson that she joined the Presbyterian Church, and was ever after devotedly religious. The general himself was almost persuaded to follow her example. He did not, however; but he testified his sympathy with his wife"s feelings by building a church for her--a curious little brick edifice--on his own farm; the smallest church, perhaps, in the United States. It looks like a very small school-house; it has no steeple, no portico, and but one door; and the interior, which contains forty little pews, is unpainted, and the floor is of brick. On Sundays, the congregation consisted chiefly of the general, his family, and half a dozen neighbors, with as many negroes as the house would hold, and could see through the windows. It was just after the completion of this church that General Jackson made his famous reply to a young man who objected to the doctrine of future punishment.
"I thank G.o.d," said this youth, "I have too much good sense to believe there is such a place as h.e.l.l."
"Well, sir," said General Jackson, "_I_ thank G.o.d there _is_ such a place."
"Why, general," asked the young man, "what do you want with such a place of torment as h.e.l.l?"
To which the general replied, as quick as lightning: "To put such rascals as you are in, that oppose and vilify the Christian religion.""
The young man said no more, and soon after found it convenient to take his leave.
Mrs. Jackson did not live to see her husband President of the United States, though she lived long enough to know that he was elected to that office. When the news was brought to her of her husband"s election, in December, 1828, she quietly said: "Well, for Mr. Jackson"s sake" (she always called him Mr. Jackson) "I am glad; for my own part, I never wished it."
The people of Nashville, proud of the success of their favorite, resolved to celebrate the event by a great banquet on the 22d of December, the anniversary of the day on which the general had first defeated the British below New Orleans; and some of the ladies of Nashville were secretly preparing a magnificent wardrobe for the future mistress of the White House. Six days before the day appointed for the celebration, Mrs. Jackson, while busied about her household affairs in the kitchen of the hermitage, suddenly shrieked, placed her hands upon her heart, sank upon a chair, and fell forward into the arms of one of her servants. She was carried to her bed, where, for the s.p.a.ce of sixty hours, she suffered extreme agony, during the whole of which her husband never left her side for ten minutes. Then she appeared much better, and recovered the use of her tongue. This was only two days before the day of the festival, and the first use she made of her recovered speech was to implore her husband to go to another room and sleep, so as to recruit his strength for the banquet. He would not leave her, however, but lay down upon a sofa and slept a little. The evening of the 22d she appeared to be so much better that the general consented, after much persuasion, to sleep in the next room, and leave his wife in the care of the doctor and two of his most trusted servants.
At nine o"clock he bade her good-night, went to the next room, and took off his coat, preparatory to lying down. When he had been gone five minutes from her room, Mrs. Jackson, who was sitting up, suddenly gave a long, loud, inarticulate cry, which was immediately followed by the death rattle in her throat. By the time her husband had reached her side, she had breathed her last.
"Bleed her," cried the general.
But no blood flowed from her arm.
"Try the temple," doctor.
A drop or two of blood stained her cap, but no more followed. Still, it was long before he would believe her dead, and when there could no longer be any doubt, and they were preparing a table upon which to lay her out, he cried, with a choking voice:
"Spread four blankets upon it; for if she does come to she will lie so hard upon the table."
All night long he sat in the room, occasionally looking into her face, and feeling if there was any pulsation in her heart. The next morning when one of his friends arrived, just before daylight, he was nearly speechless and utterly unconsolable, looking twenty years older.
There was no banquet that day in Nashville. On the morning of the funeral, the grounds were crowded with people, who saw, with emotion, the poor old general supported to the grave between two of his old friends, scarcely able to stand. The remains were interred in the garden of the Hermitage, in a tomb which the general had recently completed.
The tablet which covers her dust contains the following inscription:
"Here lie the remains of Mrs. Rachel Jackson, wife of President Jackson, who died the 22nd of December, 1828, aged 61. Her face was fair, her person pleasing, her temper amiable, her heart kind; she delighted in relieving the wants of her fellow-creatures, and cultivated that divine pleasure by the most liberal and unpretending methods; to the poor she was a benefactor; to the rich an example; to the wretched a comforter; to the prosperous an ornament; her piety went hand in hand with her benevolence, and she thanked her Creator for being permitted to do good.
A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound but not dishonor.
Even death, when he tore her from the arms of husband, could but transport to the bosom of her G.o.d."
Andrew Jackson was never the same man again. During his presidency he never used the phrase, "By the Eternal," nor any other language which could be considered profane. He mourned his wife until he himself rejoined her in the tomb he had prepared for them both.
Of all the blessed things below To hint the joys above, There is not one our hearts may know So dear as mated love.
It walks the garden of the Lord, It gives itself away; To give, and think not of reward, Is glory day by day.
And though sometimes the shadows fall, And day is dark as night, It bows and drinks the cup of gall, But gives not up the fight.
For One is in the union where The _mine_ is ever _thine_, Whose presence keeps it brave and fair, A melody divine.
L.
DISCONTENTED GIRLS.
ONE PANACEA FOR THEM--AND ONE REFUGE.
Not every girl is discontented, nor are any wretched all the time. If they were, our homes would lose much sunshine. Certainly no cla.s.s in the community is so constantly written about, talked at, and preached to as our girls. And still there always seems to be room left for one word more. I am persuaded that the leaven of discontent pervades girls of the several social ranks, from the fair daughter of a cultured home to her who has grown up in a crowded tenement, her highest ambition to dress like the young ladies she sees on the fashionable avenue. City girls and country girls alike know the meaning of this discontent, which sometimes amounts to morbidness, and again only to nervous irritability.
I once knew and marveled at a young person who spent her languid existence idly lounging in a rocking-chair, eating candy, and reading novels, whilst her mother bustled about, provoking by her activity an occasional remonstrance from her indolent daughter. "Do, ma, keep still," she would say, with amiable wonder at ma"s notable ways. This incarnation of sweet selfishness was hateful in my eyes, and I have often queried, in the twenty years which have pa.s.sed since I saw her, what sort of woman she made. As a girl she was vexatious, though no ripple of annoyance crossed the white brow, no frown obscured it, and no flurry of impatience ever tossed the yellow curls. She had no aspirations which candy and a rocking-chair could not gratify. It is not so with girls of a larger mind and greater vitality--the girls, for instance, in our own neighborhood, whom we have known since they were babies. Many of them feel very much dissatisfied with life, and do not hesitate to say so; and, strangely enough, the accident of a collegiate or common-school education makes little difference in their conclusions.
"To what end," says the former, "have I studied hard, and widened my resources? I might have been a society girl, and had a good time, and been married and settled sometime, without going just far enough to find out what pleasure there is in study, and then stopping short."
I am quoting from what girls have said to me--girls who have been graduated with distinction, and whose parents preferred that they should neither teach, nor paint, nor enter upon a profession, nor engage in any paid work. Polished after the similitude of a palace, what should the daughters do except stay at home to cheer father and mother, play and sing in the twilight, read, shop, sew, visit, receive their friends, and be young women of elegant leisure? If love, and love"s climax, the wedding march, follow soon upon a girl"s leaving school, she is taken out of the ranks of girlhood, and in accepting woman"s highest vocation, queenship in the kingdom of home, foregoes the ease of her girlish life and its peril of _ennui_ and unhappiness together. This, however, is the fate of the minority, and while young people continue, as thousands do, to dread beginning home life upon small means, it must so remain.
Education is not a fetich, though some who ought to know better regard it in that superst.i.tious light. No amount of school training, dissevered from religious culture and from that development of the heart and of the conscience without which intellectual wealth is poverty, will lift anybody, make anybody happier or better, or fit anybody for blithe living in this shadowy world. I have no doubt that there are numbers of girls whose education, having made them objects of deep respect to their simple fathers and mothers, has also gone far to make the old home intolerable, the home ways distasteful, and the old people, alas!
subjects of secret, deprecating scorn. A girl has, indeed, eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when her eyes are opened in such wise that she is ashamed of her plain, honorable, old-fashioned parents, or, if not ashamed, is still willing to let them retire to the background while she shines in the front.
I did not write this article for the purpose of saying what I hold to be the bounden duty of every father and mother in the land; viz., to educate the daughter as they educate the son, to some practical, bread-winning pursuit. That should be the rule, and not the exception. A girl should be trained so that with either head or hands, as artist or artisan, in some way or other, she will be able to go into the world"s market with something for which the world, being shrewd and knowing what it wants, will pay in cash. Rich or poor, the American father who fails to give his daughter this special training is a short-sighted and cruel man.
My thought was rather of the girls themselves. Some of them will read this. So will some of their mothers-Mothers and daughters often, not invariably, are so truly _en rapport_ that their mutual comprehension is without a flaw. There are homes in which, with the profoundest regard and the truest tenderness on both sides, they do not understand each other. The mother either sees the daughter"s discontent, recognizes and resents it, or fails to see it, would laugh at its possibility, and pity the sentimentalist who imagined it. And there are dear, blooming, merry-hearted, clear-eyed young women who are as gay and as elastic as bird on bough or flower in field.
To discontented girls I would say, there is for you one panacea--Work; and there is one refuge--Christ. Have you been told this before? Do you say that you can find no work worth the doing? Believe me, if not in your own home, you need go no further than your own set, your own street, your own town, to discover it waiting for you. No one else can do it so well. Perhaps no one else can do it at all. The girl can not be unhappy who, without reserve and with full surrender, consecrates herself to Christ, for then will she have work enough.--MARGARET E.
SANGSTER.
G.o.d giveth his beloved rest through action Which reacheth for the dream of joy on earth; Inertness brings the heart no satisfaction, But condemnation and the sense of dearth.
And shall the dream of life, the quenchless yearning For something which is yet beyond control, The flame within the breast forever burning, Not leap to action and exalt the soul?--
Surmount all barriers to brave endeavor, Make for itself a way where it would go, And flash the crown of ecstacy forever, Which only laborers with G.o.d may know?
In action there is joy which is no fiction, The hope of something as in faith begun, G.o.d"s sweet and everlasting benediction, The flush of victory and labor done!
Labor puts on the livery of greatness, While genius idle withers from the sight, And in its triumph takes no note of lateness, For time exists not in Eternal Light.