“In the early seventies of the 19th Century the author of this work visited Nashville more than once in the capacity of a newspaper correspondent. On those occasions he enjoyed the honor and pleasure of calling upon Mrs. Sarah Childress Polk, widow of the President. Mrs. Polk was in her seventy-first year then. Her fund of historical and social reminiscences was exhaustless, and the best efforts to reproduce in print her faculty of relation would be feeble. Born in 1803, about twenty-eight or thirty miles from Nashville and not over twenty miles from the Hermitage, she had known the Jacksons from her earliest childhood. When she grew up and married Mr. Polk, the intimacy became still closer, and the relations between General Jackson and her husband in public life on the most important scale gave her recollections a quality of historical value not equalled by those of any other woman of her time.... “Mrs. Polk said that Mrs. Jackson—or ‘Aunt’ Rachel—was literally the childless mother of the whole neighborhood.... In their vicinage General and Mrs. Jackson were, of course, by far the most important persons. But no one would suspect it from observing the way and manner of their intercourse with the neighbors. In this respect the General was the most democratic of men, while Mrs. Jackson was at once the soul of merry-making and the embodiment of benevolence and charity. “Their home manners, Mrs. Polk said, were the most charming concert of simplicity with dignity. The General always in their earlier life said ‘Mrs. Jackson,’ both in the second and third persons; though, when their little adopted son began to talk, he got into the habit of addressing her as ‘mother.’ On her part, Mrs. Jackson invariably spoke of and to him as ‘Mr. Jackson,’ until after the War of 1812, she yielded to the universal fashion and began to call him ‘General.’ But no one ever heard either address the other by the first name or by any term of endearment or familiarity whatever. In fact, though more winning kindliness than that which marked the manners of both could not be imagined, there was yet an atmosphere of quiet self-respect and calm dignity about them which gently, though none the less imperatively, commanded scrupulous courtesy in their presence....