In spite of his delicate health, the seventy-three-year-old former general and president returned to the Crescent City on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans. According to the Daily Picayune, "an immense throng assembled at the wharf to welcome him, and the steamboats, vessels in the river, and house-tops were alive with people waving their hats and handkerchiefs as he approached." Feted throughout the city, Jackson was the focal point of parades, orations at the cathedral and Place d'Armes, and a performance at the St. Charles Theater. The general briefly visited the site of the battlefield and somehow found time to sit for portraits by Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans and Jean Baptiste Adolphe La Fosse before boarding the riverboat that would carry him home to Nashville via Natchez.
Andrew Jackson Général
ca. 1840; lithograph
by Jules Lion, lithographer; Imprimerie d’Aubert et de Junca, printer
The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1981.267.2
Jules Lion (1810–1866), a French-born painter, lithographer, and daguerreotypist active in New Orleans from 1837 to 1866, created three lithographic portraits of Jackson, none drawn from life, and all printed in Paris. The January 16, 1840, Louisiana Courier announced this variant as a good likeness, playfully adding that "the Old Hero has been taken by a lion."
Autograph by Andrew Jackson quoting US Navy officer Stephen Decatur
January 11, 1840; manuscript
The William C. Cook War of 1812 in the South Collection at The Historic New Orleans Collection, MSS 557, 2001-68-L.39
Jackson's souvenir autograph from his January 1840 visit to New Orleans provides a variation of a famous April 1816 after-dinner toast by the naval hero Stephen Decatur: "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right, and always successful, right or wrong."
25th Anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, Genl. Andrew Jackson . . .
1840; engraving on silk
by J. R. Clark, engraver
The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1974.67
Andrew Jackson
January 1840; oil on canvas
by Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans, painter
The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1982.11
Jacques Amans (1801–1888), a French portrait painter working in New Orleans, approached Jackson at the urging of local citizens to request a sitting. "If this favor should be granted by you," Amans wrote on January 10, "my intention is to present the portrait to the city of New-Orleans." Jackson complied and sat for Amans, possibly in multiple one-hour sessions, in a room at the St. Louis Hotel. The elderly, bespectacled Jackson appears to be fatigued, possibly due to the whirlwind of activities surrounding his visit to the city.
Invitation to ball in Natchez, Mississippi, honoring Andrew Jackson
January 13, 1840; letterpress
The Historic New Orleans Collection, 54-25-L