Our world is full of big, difficult and costly arguments these days – most of them with no easy solution. But it is amazing that one continuing hot dispute is over something that occurred more than two centuries ago!
It involves questions about where President Andrew Jackson was born.
A recent Associated Press story in the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported that North Carolina and South Carolina are still arguing about which state contains Jackson’s birthplace: “Dueling monuments sit within miles of each other south of Charlotte, N.C.,” near the states’ mutual border, the story related.
We Tennesseans think of Jackson as a great Tennessean! He certainly was! There’s no dispute about that. His noted homeplace, The Hermitage, is in the Nashville area. A name of a community in that area comes from Jackson’s nickname, “Old Hickory,” for his demonstrated toughness in his eventful life.
Gen. Jackson lived at The Hermitage for years before he went to Washington, on a painful carriage journey, after he was elected in 1828 to become the seventh president of the United States.