During the subsequent eight years, as the bitterly fought battles of partisan politics raged and surged about him in the nation’s capital, his heart remained buried in the garden at the Hermitage. In May, 1829, he wrote to the Rev. Hardy M. Cryer (that bizarre combination of devout Methodist preacher and horseman) saying: “In the day I am laboriously employed, and it is only when late in the night I retire to my chamber that I have time to think of or write to my friends. It is then that I feel the great weight of the late affliction of Providence in the bereavement I have been visited with in the loss of my dear wife; I find myself a solitary man, deprived of all hope of happiness this side the grave, and often with myself at the Hermitage, there to spend the remnant of my days and daily drop a tear on the tomb of my beloved wife and be prepared, when Providence wills it, to unite with her in the realm above.” Due to the need for his immediate departure for Washington after the death of his wife, it was necessary that she be buried in a plain grave over which a temporary shelter was built. But it was never the General’s idea that her resting-place should go without a more elaborate monument; and even before he left the Hermitage in January, 1829, he began negotiations looking to the design and construction of what he described as a “monumental tomb.” A contract for the building of the tomb was given a Nashville contractor, D. Morrison; and Mr. Morrison designed a simple but impressive structure of classic Greek lines. It is built of stone, its dome-like top being supported by fluted stone columns and covered with copper. The structure is surrounded by a simple iron fence. The inscription on Mrs. Jackson’s tomb is popularly supposed to have been written by the General himself. Mrs. Rachel Jackson Lawrence stated that it was written by Major Henry Lee, the talented though scapegrace Virginian who was Jackson’s secretary and a resident of the Hermitage at the time of Mrs. Jackson’s death. It has even been attributed to Major John M. Eaton. Whoever wrote it, it is a beautiful and moving tribute to the pioneer woman who occupied the central place in Andrew Jackson’s heart throughout his life: