This has been a busy year for
Marble Springs. In addition to our regular annual events, we recently
joined Sevier descendants in commemorating the bicentennial of John Sevier’s
death, and we’ll also be celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the end of
the War of 1812 with a special event this month.
In retrospect, it’s somewhat appropriate that Sevier’s death coincided with the
end of the War of 1812. That war launched the national career of Sevier’s
mortal enemy Andrew Jackson, and historians usually mark the beginning of the
“Jacksonian Era” in 1815. On a national scale, the date represents the
passing of the torch from the generation that waged the Revolution to the
generation that came of age afterward. In Tennessee, a similar passing of
the torch took place as the first prominent settlers—men like Sevier and James
Robertson—yielded the stage to the men whose careers blossomed in the Age of
Jackson.
Maybe this generational difference helps account for the disdain in which
Sevier held Jackson. He dismissed him as a “poor, pitiful, pettyfogging,
scurrilous lawyer,” and indeed Jackson must have seemed like something less
than a formidable opponent for Sevier when he first arrived in Tennessee.
Sevier, after all, had been an officer of the Revolution, an architect of one
of America’s critical battlefield victories, a congressman, a brigadier general
of the Southwest Territory’s militia, and Tennessee’s first governor.
Jackson, by comparison, was an ambitious upstart, but he succeeded in securing
a position of command over the state militia that Sevier wanted for himself in
1802.
The tables turned the following year, when Jackson’s allegations that Sevier
had engaged in fraudulent land dealings failed to prevent Sevier’s re-election
to the governorship. That October, their personal and political feud
erupted into open confrontation when the two men encountered one another in
Knoxville and began trading insults. Jackson challenged Sevier to a duel,
and the two spent the next several days swapping barbs by letter before another
physical confrontation on the road to Southwest Point, where Sevier claimed
Jackson attempted to “assassinate” him. Little wonder that Sevier
referred to Jackson as “one of the most abandoned rascals in principle my eyes
ever beheld.”
Given their contentious history, it’s ironic that Sevier supported the war with
Britain that would make Jackson a national celebrity. It’s still more
ironic that when Sevier died, he was in Alabama as a member of commission
appointed to survey the boundary line of the land Jackson forced the Creeks to
sign over to the U.S. His last official duty was to formalize one of his
mortal foe’s greatest accomplishments.
But I think it’s important to remember that the achievements of Jackson
himself, and the achievements of all the frontier leaders of the Age of
Jackson, ultimately rested on the foundation laid by Sevier and his generation
of Tennessee pioneers. The territorial expansion, economic growth, and
national renown that Tennesseans like Jackson achieved in the nineteenth
century depended on what men like Sevier had accomplished in the
eighteenth. Indeed, I think it’s impossible to think about Tennessee
history without first considering Sevier and his contemporaries. In that
sense, Jackson’s rise to national fame and Tennessee’s reputation as the
“Volunteer State” in the War of 1812 both represent a sort of fulfillment of
Sevier’s career.
I hope you’ll join us for the rest of the events we have planned at Marble
Springs in this bicentennial year of Sevier’s death.
~Michael Lynch
President of the Board
