During the latter months of his administration at Washington his health had been particularly bad, so bad in fact that when he started back to Nashville in March, President Van Buren insisted on sending his own personal physician, Dr. Lawson, to accompany him on the trip home. Back at the Hermitage he wrote his political protege and successor to thank him for this attention, and in the course of his letter he said: “I hope rest in due time may restore my health so as to be able to ride over my farm, and to visit my good neighbors. This will be a source of amusement and much pleasure to me.” Gradually his health improved sufficiently for him to assume active charge of the operation of the farm; and this was a time when the ablest management was needed to make any enterprise successful. The country was in the throes of a financial panic, prices of farm products were depressed, and, as Jackson wrote in one of his letters early in 1837, negroes that had cost from $1,000 to $1,800 were being sold at sheriff’s sales for $300 for women and $500 for men. “The rest of my life is retirement and ease” he wrote to a friend when he laid down his Presidential cares and went back to the Hermitage; but, unfortunately for his peace of mind, things did not work out that way. There was but little ease for the old General during his remaining eight years at home. The very first year he was there an unseasonably late spring delayed the germination of the cotton seed, and during the ensuing summer he was consumed with apprehension concerning the outcome of the crop. * * * * It is interesting to observe that in Jackson’s time the principal “money crop” of the Hermitage, as well as of the neighboring plantations, was cotton. Nashville at that time was a cotton market of major importance, and the number of gins in the county then shows that there was a large quantity of cotton grown every year in this vicinity. Today there is not a stalk of cotton grown in the county; and the nearest gin to Nashville is a small one located fifteen miles south of the city in an adjoining county where some of the agricultural die-hards still cultivate the old crop. The growing season between frosts is really too short in Davidson County to encourage cotton planting; but the first settlers got started to growing it, and since farmers are traditionally opposed to change in their habits they continued to plant it even after experience demonstrated that it was not a profitable year-after-year crop. As early as 1838 Jackson sensed this fact and wrote to one of his friends: “I will soon have to quit making cotton here”—but he never did quit.