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