Fortunately for succeeding generations the Hermitage, that paragon of hospitality, is preserved just as it was in those early days when Old Hickory himself was there to greet the way-worn traveler—peddler or President—and make him feel at home. Serene and stately in its grove of trees, flanked by its formal garden and surrounded by its broad acres, it stands there a few miles out from Nashville in all its classic and simple beauty. Here is the home he built for himself and his beloved wife; the same old house to which he returned in 1837 after eight turbulent years in the White House; the place where he planted his cotton and raced his horses, where he spent his last years, where he died and where he is buried. The visitor’s first glimpse of the house is down through the same old winding driveway, shaded with the native cedar trees planted under Jackson’s personal direction; and its broad façade is seen through the trees, its graceful Corinthian columns gleaming in the sunlight, just as it looked to the old General when he drove up in his lumbering carriage drawn by his famous team of greys. Off to the right is seen the formal flower garden he had laid out for Mrs. Jackson in 1819; the garden where he laid her to rest when she died in 1828, and along whose paths he found pleasure and repose during the last year of his life. Inside the house are found things just as he left them when he died—the hand-painted wall paper, the massive mahogany furniture, the gleaming silver, the books in their shelves in the library. * * * * As a persisting result of the astonishingly violent politics of his day, the image of Andrew Jackson in the public mind today is often blurred and distorted. In his campaign for the Presidency he was the victim of such a torrent of cruel, personal vilification as never before nor since has blackened the annals of American politics. In newspapers, broadsides, and public addresses he was persistently and vigorously denounced as an uncouth, ignorant backwoods ruffian, a tipsy tavern brawler, a military despot, an adulterer and an assassin. The voters of these United States were urged to believe that, despite his spectacular achievements as a militia general and Indian fighter, he was morally, mentally and temperamentally unfit to sit in the President’s chair. This barrage of malignant partisan propaganda did not succeed in barring Jackson’s way to the White House; but it did have the effect of indelibly impressing on the minds of many thousands of American citizens of those days the honest conviction that Andrew Jackson was what we today tersely style a “roughneck;” and that impression has persisted to a surprising extent through succeeding generations even down to the present time.