 It also overlooks the reality that the enslaved people at the funeral might have been mourning the uncertainty they faced. But those enslaved at the hermitage needed only to look at his son to see how things could get worse. Andrew Jackson Jr. struggled with alcoholism, and unlike his father, he was a terrible money manager. The prospect of Jr. taking over may have been enough to produce the wailing that Normant and others heard that spring day in 1845.