Colonel Benton, so long in the United States Senate, himself a pioneer of the still remoter West, who knew Mrs. Jackson well and long, recorded his opinion of her in the following forcible language: 

“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 titled 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