It was on December 22, 1809, that the wife of Severn Donelson, Mrs. Jackson’s brother, gave birth to twin boys. The news reached the General and his wife as they sat at the breakfast table in the old Hermitage. Mrs. Jackson, upon receiving the message, looked across the table at the General and said: “I’m afraid brother’s wife will be unable to raise both the little fellows with all those other children—she isn’t very strong, you know. Suppose we take one of them.” Rachel’s merest suggestion was law to the General; and so after breakfast the horses were brought to the door and away they went to brother Severn’s to see the new twins and suggest the adoption. The mother agreed to the proposal, the General promptly had the infant’s name officially changed to Andrew Jackson, junior; and from that day he treated him as his own son. Aunt Hannah, the most trusted of the house servants, was assigned to his special care; and it was in her strong arms that he was carried two miles through the woods from his birthplace to the Hermitage which was to be his future home. Hannah lived to be 101 years old, and never tired of telling of how she reared the young master. Later she was assigned to the duty of looking after Mrs. Jackson; and then Alfred took charge of little Andrew and helped bring him up to the estate of young manhood. Those were gay days on the Hermitage farm when little Andrew was growing up, and the loyal and loving Alfred was taking him hunting and fishing, along with the little Donelson cousins. The tender and patient devotion of the old General to his adopted son is one of the most touching chapters of his life. From the day old Hannah brought him in her arms across the threshold of the Hermitage, the General ever referred to him as “my son;” and had the boy actually been his own offspring he could not have treated him with more kindly and enduring affection. In his letters to his wife, while he was off fighting the Indians in Alabama, he never failed to mention little Andrew; and in one of these letters, following the bloody battle with the Creeks at Tallapoosa, he wrote: “Tell Andrew that I have for him a warrior’s bow and arrow.” The picture of the rough, turbulent, Indian-fighting frontiersman painted by conventional history does not tell us much of this side of the old soldier’s nature.