[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 47 (Monday, April 4, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2082-S2083]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      SAM HOUSTON'S WALKING STICK

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, on Friday, I spoke at the Ladies 
Hermitage Association's Annual banquet in Nashville. This extraordinary 
organization, for 122 years, has preserved the home of President Andrew 
Jackson. No former President's home has more historical objects from a 
President's life than does the Hermitage. I ask unanimous consent that 
my remarks be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

       I am honored to accept the Lewis R. Donelson III award, but 
     in truth, the only appropriate person to receive the award is 
     Lewis R. Donelson himself. Lewie is a remarkable individual. 
     He will be 94 years of age in October. Two years ago, he shot 
     a hole in one and he regularly shoots his age in golf. His 
     doctor can find nothing physically wrong with him and he 
     takes no medicine. I am convinced the only appropriate next 
     step for Lewie is to put him into the Smithsonian.
       No other family's thread runs so proudly through 
     Tennessee's history, from John Donelson's river trip to 
     Nashville in 1779 to Andrew Jackson's marriage to John's 
     daughter, Rachel, to Lewie's life of distinguished public 
     service. Thank you to the Ladies Hermitage Association for 
     your remarkable work preserving Andrew Jackson's home.
       I was sworn in as Governor of Tennessee three days early, 
     on January 17, 1979. I did this at the request of the U.S. 
     Attorney in order to prevent the incumbent governor from 
     issuing pardons to prisoners whom the FBI believed had paid 
     cash for their release. Lewis Donelson offered the prayer at 
     that surprise inauguration ceremony. One of my first acts as 
     governor was to direct Lewie to take charge of, and secure, 
     the state capitol. Someone said, ``Lewie has been waiting his 
     whole life for someone to ask him to do that.''
       Lewis Donelson was my first appointee because I knew that 
     if he agreed to be the chief operating officer of state 
     government, it would help to recruit others during a time of 
     a crisis in confidence.
       Lewie's negotiating style became well known around the 
     Capitol. He would knock you to the floor with his first 
     offer. By the time you had gotten halfway back up you would 
     have agreed with him and considered that a success.
       About the only thing I was ever able to tell Lewie to do 
     was to stop driving his car to the Capitol while reading a 
     newspaper, and he only stopped that after he ran into the 
     back of another car.
       Alex Haley once told me, ``Lamar, if you would say, `let me 
     tell you a story' instead of making a speech, people might 
     actually listen to what you have to say.'' So, tonight, let 
     me tell you the story of Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston's 
     Walking Stick.
       The setting for this story is the first half of the 19th 
     century. Tennessee was then the fifth most populous state. 
     This was the West. There were three Tennessee presidents--
     Jackson, Polk and Johnson--and two who aspired to be 
     President: Davy Crockett and Sam Houston.
       The political competition was intense. In 1834, Andrew 
     Jackson's forces defeated the young congressman from West 
     Tennessee, David Crockett, who then rode his horse to the 
     courthouse steps and said to the assembled crowd what 
     defeated politicians have always wanted to say to such 
     voters, ``I'm going to Texas and you can go to hell.''
       The two-party competition of that era produced strong 
     leaders just as the reemergence of a two party system during 
     the last half-century has sent Tennesseans to national 
     positions from Vice President and Senate Majority Leader to 
     Cabinet membership. There have, as yet, been no more 
     presidents, although there have been regular attempts.
       In 1807, when Thomas Jefferson was president, the widow 
     Elizabeth Paxson Houston, aged 50, loaded six sons and three 
     daughters into two wagons and moved from Virginia to

[[Page S2083]]

     a 419-acre farm near Maryville, Tennessee, that her husband 
     had purchased before his death. Of her fifth son Sam, who was 
     then 14 years old, the widow Houston said, ``I had no hope 
     for him. He was so wild.''
       The Houston farm lay on the border of the Cherokee Nation. 
     Sam found the life of a young Indian man more appealing than 
     working in the family store, so at 16 he ran away from home 
     to live with the Indians and became known by a Cherokee name, 
     Raven.
       By 1813, the War of 1812 was in full swing. In Maryville, 
     Sam took a silver dollar from the recruiter's drumhead and 
     enlisted. In February of 1814, his regiment received a call 
     to go to the aid of General Andrew Jackson at Horseshoe bend 
     in Alabama. For the next 31 years, Sam Houston was a friend 
     and protege of Andrew Jackson.
       Jackson taught Houston how to fight a duel. In 1823, he 
     helped Houston be elected to the U.S. House of 
     Representatives. The next year Houston helped Jackson in his 
     unsuccessful bid for the presidency. With Jackson's help 
     Houston became governor of Tennessee in 1827.
       With Houston's help, Jackson was elected president in 1828. 
     One biographer of Houston said that for Houston ``to be 
     governor of Tennessee with Old Hickory in the White House was 
     as close to being the Prince of Wales as American blood could 
     approach. Houston was the all-but-anointed heir of the most 
     popular president since Washington himself.''
       A local judge wrote at the time ``Houston stood six-foot-
     six in his socks, was of fine contour, a remarkable well-
     proportioned man, and of commanding and gallant bearing. He 
     enjoyed unbounded popularity among the men and was a great 
     favorite with the ladies.''
       As governor, Houston often visited the Hermitage, sometimes 
     picking flowers in Rachel Jackson's garden. He was chief 
     pallbearer when Rachel died on Christmas Eve of 1828, just 
     after Jackson's election to the Presidency. The next month 
     Governor Houston, then 36 years of age, married Eliza Allen 
     of Gallatin, who was 18. In March, Jackson became President. 
     A month later, on April 16, 1829, distraught over some still 
     unexplained trouble with Eliza, Houston resigned the 
     governorship and went to live with his old friends, the 
     Indians who by then had moved west. He married again and made 
     his way to Texas in 1832.
       We all know that the great story of Sam Houston and Texas. 
     But the story I would like to complete here tonight is of Sam 
     Houston's walking stick and Andrew Jackson's death.
       In March of 1845, President Tyler dispatched Andrew Jackson 
     Donelson to Texas to try to persuade Sam Houston to support 
     the annexation of Texas by the United States. Donelson was 
     the nephew of Rachel Donelson. He had served as President 
     Jackson's private secretary and in 1856 was nominated to run 
     for the vice presidency of the United States. He lived in the 
     plantation near the Hermitage, called Tulip Grove.
       Upon reaching Texas, Andrew Jackson Donelson wrote, ``Tell 
     Uncle that Houston has disappointed me and not given the 
     annexation question the support I expected.'' Houston had 
     kept people guessing about whether he favored allowing Texas 
     to remain an independent country, as British emissaries were 
     arguing. According to one officer of the Texas Navy, ``When 
     [Houston] was sober he was for annexation but when he was 
     drunk he would express himself strongly against the 
     measure.''
       The next month, in April of 1845, Houston, his wife 
     Margaret, and their two-year-old son Sam began a trip from 
     Texas to New Orleans and up the Mississippi River to see 78-
     year-old Andrew Jackson, who was dying at the Hermitage. 
     According to one biographer, during those last hours Jackson 
     was talking of his farm, his business, his country, and of 
     the annexation of Texas, and especially of recent comments by 
     Houston which had convinced Jackson that annexation would 
     occur. In one of his last letters to Donelson, Andrew Jackson 
     wrote, ``I knew British gold could not buy Sam Houston.''
       The Houstons' river passage was delayed when their 
     steamboat ran aground. Finally, at about 6 p.m. on Sunday, 
     June 8, 1845, the steamboat tied up at the Nashville landing 
     on the Cumberland River. The Houstons were told that Jackson 
     was near death. They hired a coach to race to the Hermitage. 
     A few miles outside Nashville their coach met the Jackson 
     family physician. He told them that Jackson had died at about 
     the same time the Houstons had arrived in Nashville. 
     Proceeding on to the Hermitage, Houston lifted his two-year-
     old son and said, ``Try to remember that you have looked upon 
     the face of Andrew Jackson.'' Houston then put his head on 
     Jackson's chest and wept. At midnight he wrote to President 
     Polk, ``I have seen the corpse. The visage is much as it was 
     in life.''
       The Houstons were guests at the Donelson plantation, Tulip 
     Grove, for several days after Jackson's death. Houston led 
     the funeral cortege as he had as governor when Rachel Jackson 
     died. When Houston left Nashville to travel to Texas, he left 
     his walking stick at Tulip Grove. It is made of mulberry wood 
     and has a solid gold cap. The stick is split and has been 
     glued together, which may have been the reason Houston left 
     it.
       How do we know this stick was Houston's stick?
       For one thing, the words ``Sam Houston'' and ``Texas'' and 
     a Lone Star are engraved on the gold cap.
       For another, we know from photographs and historical 
     accounts that Houston carried walking sticks. We also know 
     that he knew how to use his stick. In March of 1832, while 
     visiting Washington, DC, Houston encountered Congressman 
     Stanberry from Ohio who had criticized the Jackson Indian 
     policy. Houston confronted Stanberry and said, ``You are a 
     damned rascal!'' and whacked him multiple times over the head 
     with his hickory cane, cut from the grounds of the Hermitage.
       Fortunately, we know about the provenance of Sam Houston's 
     walking stick from Stanley Horn, the former Tennessee state 
     historian, and Dr. Ben Caldwell. Both Mr. Horn and Dr. 
     Caldwell once owned this stick. Dr. Caldwell is here tonight.
       Here is what affidavits and letters from Mr. Horn and Dr. 
     Caldwell tell us: Andrew Jackson Donelson, the owner of Tulip 
     Grove, where Houston left his walking stick, had married a 
     widow of the grandson of Thomas Jefferson. Their son, William 
     Alexander Donelson, inherited many of their Jefferson and 
     Jackson items, including the stick. Some of these items, 
     including the stick, were exhibited at Tennessee's 1896 
     centennial celebration. This exhibit was mentioned in a 
     Nashville newspaper article in 1927.
       When William Alexander Donelson died these Jackson and 
     Jefferson relics were inherited by his widow, known as ``Miss 
     Bettie.'' In a letter to Ben Caldwell on June 15, 1976, Mr. 
     Horn wrote, ``I knew her several years before her death in 
     1940. [She] told me the details of how the cane was split, 
     etc. I bought the cane at the sale of her effects after her 
     death, and had the slight break repaired; and it remained in 
     my possession until I sold it to you.''
       Mr. Horn sold the stick to Dr. Caldwell and Baker Duncan of 
     San Antonio in 1973.
       In a letter to me in 1985 Dr. Caldwell said, ``Mr. Horn 
     proudly displayed the stick in his home. The only way that 
     Baker Duncan and I were able to purchase the walking stick 
     from Mr. Horn was a purchase-swap. He was collecting books 
     containing presidential notations that were in the 
     presidents' personal library. He had a book [of every 
     President] except that he did not have a book of John F. 
     Kennedy's library as he had opposed President Kennedy and he 
     did not want to pay a premium for one of his books . . . I 
     purchased a book that formerly belonged to John F. Kennedy . 
     . . and we were able to trade this with money to Mr. Horn for 
     his walking stick.''
       Ben Caldwell also told me last year:
       ``Mr. Horn had offered the stick to the San Jacinto Museum 
     in Texas but they gave him some rigamarole and he said `to 
     hell with it' and so Baker Duncan and I bought the stick from 
     him.''
       In 1985, I bought Sam Houston's walking stick from Ben 
     Caldwell and Baker Duncan. Ben said it would be appropriate 
     for the second Tennessee governor from Blount County to own 
     the walking stick of the first. So he arranged a three-way 
     purchase swap that worked this way: I paid money to Mr. 
     Horn's daughter, Ruth Crownover, for a sword that belonged to 
     General Stonewall Jackson and then traded that sword to Baker 
     Duncan for his half of the Houston stick. I also paid Mrs. 
     Crownover for a bird bath sculpted by Will Edmondson and then 
     traded that to Ben for his half of the cane.
       I then gave the stick to our youngest son, Will Houston 
     Alexander, who we named for Sam Houston. When Will was born 
     in 1979, Honey said that I was ``in my Sam Houston phase.'' 
     The lure of Texas also attracted Will. He spent seven years 
     at the University of Texas and its law school but now is 
     living in Nashville. We are glad that he is here tonight.
       I have since displayed Sam Houston's walking stick in the 
     offices of Tennessee's governor, the president of the 
     University of Tennessee, and the U.S. Secretary of Education. 
     The story of the stick has always produced good conversation, 
     as well as several attempts by Texans to run off with it.
       For the last eight years, Sam Houston's walking stick has 
     been displayed in my United States Senate office in 
     Washington, DC. It is beneath a photograph of Sam Houston 
     taken when he was United States Senator from Texas. In that 
     photograph Senator Houston is standing with a walking stick 
     much like the one he left in Nashville 166 years ago when 
     Andrew Jackson died.

                          ____________________