Tough As Hickory

In the winter of 1812 Andrew Jackson took about two thousand Tennessee volunteers down to Natchez, expecting orders to move against the British at New Orleans. Coffee's cavalry rode down the Natchez Trace; Jackson took the infantry by river. The orders never came. A War Department letter dated 6 February 1813 reached him on 15 March and told him to disband his men where they stood, some four hundred and fifty miles from home, with no pay, transport or rations arranged. Jackson refused. He borrowed a thousand dollars on his own credit for wagons to carry the sick, gave up his horses to them, walked himself, and brought the whole force back up the Trace to Nashville. He had gone down expecting a battle and came back having fought nobody.

That is where the name came from. His men began saying he was as tough as hickory, and it followed him through the remaining thirty-two years of his life and into every history written since. A memorial stands beside the parkway in Williamson County where a segment of the army's road survives, and the route it follows is the one the column walked, though the tread underfoot is not the 1813 grade; the old road sank and travellers cut new lines around the worst of it. Jackson came back up the same road again in 1815, after New Orleans, this time with the reputation the earlier march had bought him.