[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 47 (Monday, April 4, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2082-S2083]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SAM HOUSTON'S WALKING STICK
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, on Friday, I spoke at the Ladies
Hermitage Association's Annual banquet in Nashville. This extraordinary
organization, for 122 years, has preserved the home of President Andrew
Jackson. No former President's home has more historical objects from a
President's life than does the Hermitage. I ask unanimous consent that
my remarks be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
I am honored to accept the Lewis R. Donelson III award, but
in truth, the only appropriate person to receive the award is
Lewis R. Donelson himself. Lewie is a remarkable individual.
He will be 94 years of age in October. Two years ago, he shot
a hole in one and he regularly shoots his age in golf. His
doctor can find nothing physically wrong with him and he
takes no medicine. I am convinced the only appropriate next
step for Lewie is to put him into the Smithsonian.
No other family's thread runs so proudly through
Tennessee's history, from John Donelson's river trip to
Nashville in 1779 to Andrew Jackson's marriage to John's
daughter, Rachel, to Lewie's life of distinguished public
service. Thank you to the Ladies Hermitage Association for
your remarkable work preserving Andrew Jackson's home.
I was sworn in as Governor of Tennessee three days early,
on January 17, 1979. I did this at the request of the U.S.
Attorney in order to prevent the incumbent governor from
issuing pardons to prisoners whom the FBI believed had paid
cash for their release. Lewis Donelson offered the prayer at
that surprise inauguration ceremony. One of my first acts as
governor was to direct Lewie to take charge of, and secure,
the state capitol. Someone said, ``Lewie has been waiting his
whole life for someone to ask him to do that.''
Lewis Donelson was my first appointee because I knew that
if he agreed to be the chief operating officer of state
government, it would help to recruit others during a time of
a crisis in confidence.
Lewie's negotiating style became well known around the
Capitol. He would knock you to the floor with his first
offer. By the time you had gotten halfway back up you would
have agreed with him and considered that a success.
About the only thing I was ever able to tell Lewie to do
was to stop driving his car to the Capitol while reading a
newspaper, and he only stopped that after he ran into the
back of another car.
Alex Haley once told me, ``Lamar, if you would say, `let me
tell you a story' instead of making a speech, people might
actually listen to what you have to say.'' So, tonight, let
me tell you the story of Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston's
Walking Stick.
The setting for this story is the first half of the 19th
century. Tennessee was then the fifth most populous state.
This was the West. There were three Tennessee presidents--
Jackson, Polk and Johnson--and two who aspired to be
President: Davy Crockett and Sam Houston.
The political competition was intense. In 1834, Andrew
Jackson's forces defeated the young congressman from West
Tennessee, David Crockett, who then rode his horse to the
courthouse steps and said to the assembled crowd what
defeated politicians have always wanted to say to such
voters, ``I'm going to Texas and you can go to hell.''
The two-party competition of that era produced strong
leaders just as the reemergence of a two party system during
the last half-century has sent Tennesseans to national
positions from Vice President and Senate Majority Leader to
Cabinet membership. There have, as yet, been no more
presidents, although there have been regular attempts.
In 1807, when Thomas Jefferson was president, the widow
Elizabeth Paxson Houston, aged 50, loaded six sons and three
daughters into two wagons and moved from Virginia to
[[Page S2083]]
a 419-acre farm near Maryville, Tennessee, that her husband
had purchased before his death. Of her fifth son Sam, who was
then 14 years old, the widow Houston said, ``I had no hope
for him. He was so wild.''
The Houston farm lay on the border of the Cherokee Nation.
Sam found the life of a young Indian man more appealing than
working in the family store, so at 16 he ran away from home
to live with the Indians and became known by a Cherokee name,
Raven.
By 1813, the War of 1812 was in full swing. In Maryville,
Sam took a silver dollar from the recruiter's drumhead and
enlisted. In February of 1814, his regiment received a call
to go to the aid of General Andrew Jackson at Horseshoe bend
in Alabama. For the next 31 years, Sam Houston was a friend
and protege of Andrew Jackson.
Jackson taught Houston how to fight a duel. In 1823, he
helped Houston be elected to the U.S. House of
Representatives. The next year Houston helped Jackson in his
unsuccessful bid for the presidency. With Jackson's help
Houston became governor of Tennessee in 1827.
With Houston's help, Jackson was elected president in 1828.
One biographer of Houston said that for Houston ``to be
governor of Tennessee with Old Hickory in the White House was
as close to being the Prince of Wales as American blood could
approach. Houston was the all-but-anointed heir of the most
popular president since Washington himself.''
A local judge wrote at the time ``Houston stood six-foot-
six in his socks, was of fine contour, a remarkable well-
proportioned man, and of commanding and gallant bearing. He
enjoyed unbounded popularity among the men and was a great
favorite with the ladies.''
As governor, Houston often visited the Hermitage, sometimes
picking flowers in Rachel Jackson's garden. He was chief
pallbearer when Rachel died on Christmas Eve of 1828, just
after Jackson's election to the Presidency. The next month
Governor Houston, then 36 years of age, married Eliza Allen
of Gallatin, who was 18. In March, Jackson became President.
A month later, on April 16, 1829, distraught over some still
unexplained trouble with Eliza, Houston resigned the
governorship and went to live with his old friends, the
Indians who by then had moved west. He married again and made
his way to Texas in 1832.
We all know that the great story of Sam Houston and Texas.
But the story I would like to complete here tonight is of Sam
Houston's walking stick and Andrew Jackson's death.
In March of 1845, President Tyler dispatched Andrew Jackson
Donelson to Texas to try to persuade Sam Houston to support
the annexation of Texas by the United States. Donelson was
the nephew of Rachel Donelson. He had served as President
Jackson's private secretary and in 1856 was nominated to run
for the vice presidency of the United States. He lived in the
plantation near the Hermitage, called Tulip Grove.
Upon reaching Texas, Andrew Jackson Donelson wrote, ``Tell
Uncle that Houston has disappointed me and not given the
annexation question the support I expected.'' Houston had
kept people guessing about whether he favored allowing Texas
to remain an independent country, as British emissaries were
arguing. According to one officer of the Texas Navy, ``When
[Houston] was sober he was for annexation but when he was
drunk he would express himself strongly against the
measure.''
The next month, in April of 1845, Houston, his wife
Margaret, and their two-year-old son Sam began a trip from
Texas to New Orleans and up the Mississippi River to see 78-
year-old Andrew Jackson, who was dying at the Hermitage.
According to one biographer, during those last hours Jackson
was talking of his farm, his business, his country, and of
the annexation of Texas, and especially of recent comments by
Houston which had convinced Jackson that annexation would
occur. In one of his last letters to Donelson, Andrew Jackson
wrote, ``I knew British gold could not buy Sam Houston.''
The Houstons' river passage was delayed when their
steamboat ran aground. Finally, at about 6 p.m. on Sunday,
June 8, 1845, the steamboat tied up at the Nashville landing
on the Cumberland River. The Houstons were told that Jackson
was near death. They hired a coach to race to the Hermitage.
A few miles outside Nashville their coach met the Jackson
family physician. He told them that Jackson had died at about
the same time the Houstons had arrived in Nashville.
Proceeding on to the Hermitage, Houston lifted his two-year-
old son and said, ``Try to remember that you have looked upon
the face of Andrew Jackson.'' Houston then put his head on
Jackson's chest and wept. At midnight he wrote to President
Polk, ``I have seen the corpse. The visage is much as it was
in life.''
The Houstons were guests at the Donelson plantation, Tulip
Grove, for several days after Jackson's death. Houston led
the funeral cortege as he had as governor when Rachel Jackson
died. When Houston left Nashville to travel to Texas, he left
his walking stick at Tulip Grove. It is made of mulberry wood
and has a solid gold cap. The stick is split and has been
glued together, which may have been the reason Houston left
it.
How do we know this stick was Houston's stick?
For one thing, the words ``Sam Houston'' and ``Texas'' and
a Lone Star are engraved on the gold cap.
For another, we know from photographs and historical
accounts that Houston carried walking sticks. We also know
that he knew how to use his stick. In March of 1832, while
visiting Washington, DC, Houston encountered Congressman
Stanberry from Ohio who had criticized the Jackson Indian
policy. Houston confronted Stanberry and said, ``You are a
damned rascal!'' and whacked him multiple times over the head
with his hickory cane, cut from the grounds of the Hermitage.
Fortunately, we know about the provenance of Sam Houston's
walking stick from Stanley Horn, the former Tennessee state
historian, and Dr. Ben Caldwell. Both Mr. Horn and Dr.
Caldwell once owned this stick. Dr. Caldwell is here tonight.
Here is what affidavits and letters from Mr. Horn and Dr.
Caldwell tell us: Andrew Jackson Donelson, the owner of Tulip
Grove, where Houston left his walking stick, had married a
widow of the grandson of Thomas Jefferson. Their son, William
Alexander Donelson, inherited many of their Jefferson and
Jackson items, including the stick. Some of these items,
including the stick, were exhibited at Tennessee's 1896
centennial celebration. This exhibit was mentioned in a
Nashville newspaper article in 1927.
When William Alexander Donelson died these Jackson and
Jefferson relics were inherited by his widow, known as ``Miss
Bettie.'' In a letter to Ben Caldwell on June 15, 1976, Mr.
Horn wrote, ``I knew her several years before her death in
1940. [She] told me the details of how the cane was split,
etc. I bought the cane at the sale of her effects after her
death, and had the slight break repaired; and it remained in
my possession until I sold it to you.''
Mr. Horn sold the stick to Dr. Caldwell and Baker Duncan of
San Antonio in 1973.
In a letter to me in 1985 Dr. Caldwell said, ``Mr. Horn
proudly displayed the stick in his home. The only way that
Baker Duncan and I were able to purchase the walking stick
from Mr. Horn was a purchase-swap. He was collecting books
containing presidential notations that were in the
presidents' personal library. He had a book [of every
President] except that he did not have a book of John F.
Kennedy's library as he had opposed President Kennedy and he
did not want to pay a premium for one of his books . . . I
purchased a book that formerly belonged to John F. Kennedy .
. . and we were able to trade this with money to Mr. Horn for
his walking stick.''
Ben Caldwell also told me last year:
``Mr. Horn had offered the stick to the San Jacinto Museum
in Texas but they gave him some rigamarole and he said `to
hell with it' and so Baker Duncan and I bought the stick from
him.''
In 1985, I bought Sam Houston's walking stick from Ben
Caldwell and Baker Duncan. Ben said it would be appropriate
for the second Tennessee governor from Blount County to own
the walking stick of the first. So he arranged a three-way
purchase swap that worked this way: I paid money to Mr.
Horn's daughter, Ruth Crownover, for a sword that belonged to
General Stonewall Jackson and then traded that sword to Baker
Duncan for his half of the Houston stick. I also paid Mrs.
Crownover for a bird bath sculpted by Will Edmondson and then
traded that to Ben for his half of the cane.
I then gave the stick to our youngest son, Will Houston
Alexander, who we named for Sam Houston. When Will was born
in 1979, Honey said that I was ``in my Sam Houston phase.''
The lure of Texas also attracted Will. He spent seven years
at the University of Texas and its law school but now is
living in Nashville. We are glad that he is here tonight.
I have since displayed Sam Houston's walking stick in the
offices of Tennessee's governor, the president of the
University of Tennessee, and the U.S. Secretary of Education.
The story of the stick has always produced good conversation,
as well as several attempts by Texans to run off with it.
For the last eight years, Sam Houston's walking stick has
been displayed in my United States Senate office in
Washington, DC. It is beneath a photograph of Sam Houston
taken when he was United States Senator from Texas. In that
photograph Senator Houston is standing with a walking stick
much like the one he left in Nashville 166 years ago when
Andrew Jackson died.
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