From 1858 to 1860 the Hermitage was without an occupant, and suffered as tenantless houses usually suffer. There was nothing further said about using it as a military school, nor was there any agitation of the plan to offer it for sale “as a whole or in lots.” Fortunately for coming generations of American citizens, the property remained intact; but the old house stood there vacant and decaying until 1860 when Isham G. Harris, the new governor of Tennessee, sent to Mississippi to request Mr. Jackson to return and be its custodian. Mr. Jackson had not been especially prosperous in his new home, and he was glad to return and reëstablish himself in the Hermitage as “tenant at will.” His household at this time consisted of himself and wife, his daughter Rachel, his two sons, Andrew and Samuel, his wife’s widowed sister Mrs. Adams and her three sons. When Tennessee cast her lot with the Southern Confederacy in July, 1861, it did not take long for the young men of the Hermitage household to join the Confederate forces. Five brave-hearted young soldiers walked out the broad front door of the Hermitage, mounted their horses and rode off to the front. Only one returned. Andrew, III, who had been educated at West Point, was commissioned colonel of the First Tennessee Heavy Artillery, and he was the lone survivor after four years of war, more than half of which was spent in prison at Camp Chase. Samuel, a captain, was killed at Chickamauga and lies buried in the family burial plot in the Hermitage garden. None of the Adams boys survived the war. One was in the Confederate Navy, one was a casualty at the siege of Vicksburg, and the other died in Kentucky fighting with General John Morgan. Andrew Jackson, junior, with his wife and daughter and Mrs. Adams remained at home in the Hermitage and watched the waves of the war roll back and forth around them. In 1862 after the fall of Fort Donelson (named, incidentally, for Daniel A. Donelson, a general in the Confederate Army and a nephew of Mrs. Rachel Jackson), Nashville fell into the hands of the Federal troops and was never regained by the Confederates. During the Federal occupation of Nashville and the surrounding country, General George H. Thomas placed a cavalry guard over the Hermitage to protect it from damage or despoliation; and to this thoughtful foresight on General Thomas’s part may be attributed the fact that the old home of Andrew Jackson did not suffer the fate of so many other historic houses in the South during the four years of war.