CHAPTER 4
AT THE WHITE House, President Adams was dour in defeat. “He seems to have been in bad health,” Leonidas Polk, an Episcopal seminarian in Alexandria, Virginia, wrote home after a visit with Adams. Henry Clay, meanwhile, was ill, lying on a sofa in his drawing room at Decatur House, the three-story brick town house across from the White House. When Margaret Bayard Smith, a chronicler of Washington life who had lived in the capital since 1800, called on Clay, he was “scarcely able to sit up … very pale, his eyes sunk in his head and his countenance sad and melancholy.” At the Clays’ and elsewhere, belongings were being boxed and set in straw to make way for the Jacksonians. To many in established Washington—a city and a culture of nearly three decades’ standing, with roots stretching to the first Adams and to Jefferson—Jackson’s arrival signaled the destruction of the rule of the nation in an atmosphere of geniality and gentility.
Taking up his presidential duties, Jackson thought the country was suffering from a crisis of corruption. If virtue was central to the well-being of the nation, then corruption and selfishness were corrosive, and could be fatal. By corruption, Jackson did not mean only scandal and mismanagement. He meant it in a broader sense: in the marshaling of power and influence by a few institutions and interests that sought to profit at the expense of the whole. He was not against competition in the marketplace of goods and ideas. Like the Founders, he believed in vigorous debate, and like Adam Smith, he put his faith in the capacity of free individuals to work out their destinies. But he was very much against the special deal or the selfish purpose, and he was very much in favor of his own role as defender of the many and protector of the nation. In Washington, he was intent on dismantling the kind of permanent federal establishment that created a climate in which, in his view, insiders such as John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay could thrive no matter what the people beyond Washington wanted.
Jackson worried about the power of the Second Bank of the United States, an institution that held the public’s money but was not subject to the public’s control, or to the president’s. Presided over by Nicholas Biddle—brilliant, arrogant, and as willful in his way as Andrew Jackson was in his—the Bank, headquartered in a Greek Revival building on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, was a rival interest that, Jackson believed, made loans to influence elections, paid retainers to pro-Bank lawmakers, and could control much of the nation’s economy on a whim.
IN SOUTH CAROLINA, Jackson knew, the state’s cotton and rice planters had been driven nearly mad by fears of slave rebellions. The previous decade had suggested one avenue: nullification. An early test of federal authority by South Carolina occurred after a slave conspiracy, perhaps led by Denmark Vesey, in 1822. International treaties allowed black seamen who docked in Charleston to come ashore and visit other blacks, but when it emerged that visiting sailors had possibly played a role in the plot, South Carolina ordered that black seamen had to be jailed while their ships were in port. Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, who had circuit authority over the state, ruled the law unconstitutional, but South Carolina continued to jail the sailors. The state was motivated by a fundamental fear: slave violence. According to the state senate, the “duty to guard against insubordination or insurrection” was “paramount to all laws, all treaties, all constitutions.” Washington decided not to force matters—and South Carolina thus overrode federal authority.
The state had remained unsettled throughout the decade. South Carolina was in economic trouble, its whites were wary of slave rebellion, and protective national tariffs agitated the state even more. (Cotton prices were falling for a variety of reasons, but the tariffs, which protected American manufacturing, were a handy target, for the duties drove up prices agrarian states had to pay for things produced in manufacturing states and lowered demand abroad for Southern cotton.) Their fury had led to talk of more nullification—they recalled their de facto victory in the case of the black seamen—and perhaps secession. Thomas Cooper, the president of South Carolina College, stated the matter succinctly in 1827: the time may be at hand, he said, when the state would have “to calculate the value of the Union, and ask of what use to us is this most unequal alliance.” For the hotheads things grew even less equal in 1828, when Congress passed, and President Adams signed, what became known as the Tariff of Abominations. The measure raised duties from 33 percent to 50 percent. The tariffs hurt, but should be seen as only one of several forces that led the state to consider shattering a union that seemed at best indifferent and at worst hostile to South Carolina’s way of life. The chief issue was the core of that way of life: slavery.
The sense of powerlessness in South Carolina was wide and deep. In a pair of letters written to Calhoun in April and May, Francis W. Pickens of Edgefield, South Carolina—a lawyer-planter and future legislator and governor—expressed a kind of romantic regional pride as he worried about the South’s ability to protect its interests. It was, Pickens said, “with the most melancholy feelings that I look on a great and gallant people, sacrificed by a government over which they have practically at present no restrictive power”—a state of things that left open possibilities of further taxation and even the abolition of slavery. “I believe after a series of years that no government that has the power to collect taxes and declare war, can be restrained but by a display of sufficient power to break it up,” Pickens said. Such harsh words seem to have made Calhoun—still very much hoping to preside over the Union from the White House—uncomfortable, for he lectured Pickens about the dangers of “revolutionary” talk. Pickens denied that he was thinking of the government’s immediate destruction but did not waver from asserting that force, or the threat of force, should always be an option. He was a pragmatic man, telling Calhoun “that there can be but very little practical effect produced by any thing short of a display of real power.”
IN THE VAST stretches of Indian land, particularly in the Southwest, Jackson saw a monumental task: the removal of Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi. It was, said Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts, “the greatest question which ever came before Congress, short of the question of peace and war.” Jackson believed in removal with all his heart, and by refusing to entertain any other scenario, he was as ferocious in inflicting harm on a people as he often was in defending the rights of those he thought of as the people. To Jackson the interests of whites were paramount in the removal question. To those who argued for Indian rights, he justified his course by arguing that removal would guarantee the survival of the tribes, which would otherwise be wiped out, and by asserting that coexistence was impossible. In an 1833 book entitled Indian Wars of the West, Timothy Flint summed up the arguments of those in favor of removal: “Collisions, murders, escapes of fugitive slaves, and the operations of laws and usages so essentially different, as those of the white and red people, will forever keep alive between the contiguous parties feuds, quarrels, and retaliations, which can never cease until one of the parties becomes extinct.” Flint concluded that advocates of removal “see the race perpetuated in opulence and peace in the fair prairies of the west. Here they are to grow up distinct red nations, with schools and churches, the anvil, the loom, and the plough—a sort of Arcadian race between our borders and the Rocky Mountains, standing memorials of the kindness and good faith of our government.” But they would instead become reminders of the government’s bloodthirstiness and of the American people’s greed. Removal was, however, of a piece with Jackson’s broader vision of securing the country—even if he was securing it primarily for the advancement of the interests of whites.
IN THE CHURCHES and meeting rooms of organizations such as the American Sunday School Union, in pulpits and pews, the leaders of evangelical Christianity’s newly energetic campaign to bring religious precepts to public life were eager to enlist Jackson in their ranks. Church and state, these Christians believed, should be intertwined, arguing, in the words of a movement pamphlet entitled An Inquiry into the Moral and Religious Character of the American Government, that “Without religion, law ceases to be law, for it has no bond, and cannot hold society together.”
In 1827 the Reverend Ezra Stiles Ely of Philadelphia, a prominent Presbyterian minister and leader of the national church, called for the formation of “a Christian Party in Politics.” While many religious believers pursued large moral causes such as the abolition of slavery and justice for the Indians—causes that also attracted secular supporters—many others sought to impose a narrower religious agenda on the rest of the nation. Such Christians opposed travel and the transport and delivery of mail on the Sabbath, as well as the testimony of nonbelievers in courts of law. In early 1829, Ely wrote Jackson to pass along a letter from the Reverend Lyman Beecher of Boston, one of the great ecclesiastical figures of the age, asking that Jackson not ride on Sundays en route to Washington. Ely and Beecher hoped, they said, that “no Christian ruler of a Christian people should do violence to his own professed, personal principles,” and Jackson, shrewdly, did not travel on Sundays on the way to the capital unless he was on a steamboat. He would accede that far but no further. He fought corruption in the public sphere, with political means, and left the church free to do what it could by persuasion, not by fiat.
Jackson was more anticlerical than antireligious. Like bankers or entrenched incumbents, ministers created a layer between Jackson and the people at large, and he hated such elite intermediaries. Believers were part of the public; clergy were an interest with specific demands. Broadly put, the organized church was beyond Jackson’s control, and that made him suspicious of its ministers and their motives.
IN KENTUCKY AND elsewhere, Jackson fretted about what were drily known as internal improvements—projected roads and canals that were to be funded by the federal government. The issue was at the heart of a philosophical argument. Was Washington’s role to be a limited one, leaving such matters to the states except in truly national cases, or was the federal government to be a catalyst in what was known as “the American System,” in which tariffs and the sales of public lands funded federally sponsored internal improvements? As president, Jackson favored the former, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay the latter. Related, in Jackson’s mind, was the issue of the national debt (the money owed by the federal government). To him debt was dangerous, for debt put power in the hands of creditors—and if power was in the hands of creditors, it could not be in the hands of the people, where Jackson believed it belonged.
IN THE WATERS off Cuba, on Sunday, February 22, 1829, well-armed pirates stormed the Attentive, an American merchant vessel bound for New York from the Cuban port of Matanzas. Murdering the captain and crew, the pirates captured the vessel and scoured it for money. The New Priscillawas also attacked in February in these waters, provoking anxiety on the busy seas between Cuba and the American ports and raising fears among American businessmen that pirates were singling out U.S. ships. Told of the Attentiveincident on his thirteenth day in office, Jackson exerted American power: an attack on anything American was an attack on America, and on him. “These atrocities will require prompt and energetic measures on the part of the Government [in] order to put them down,” Jackson told Navy Secretary John Branch, who dispatched the USS Natchez, an eighteen-gun sloop of war, to the coast of Cuba. “The dictates of humanity and the honor of our flag require that the piracies in those seas should be suppressed,” Jackson said. The world was on notice: Jackson would strike when struck.
PATRONAGE, THE BANK, nullification, Indian removal, clerical influence in politics, internal improvements, respect abroad—these were the questions that would define Jackson’s White House years. They were questions about power, money, and God, and Jackson’s answers were linked to his expansive view of the office of the president. He would die for the Union; his foes were fighting to keep the possibility of secession alive. Jackson believed that the president should use his powers with a firm hand; his foes thought of the Congress as the government’s center of gravity. And so Jackson began his presidency prepared for anything, in much the way he used to travel through the Tennessee wilderness forty years before, looking out for danger, guarding those in his care, and promising to save them all yet.
AS A COLD spell broke on the morning of the inauguration, sunlight poured down on the city and twenty thousand people converged on the Capitol grounds. It was, Emily reported home, “by far the greatest crowd that ever was seen in Washington.” Jackson left Gadsby’s Hotel, met an escort of Revolutionary War and Battle of New Orleans veterans, and walked up Capitol Hill.
He wore no hat—“the Servant in presence of his Sovereign, the People,” Mrs. Smith remarked—and moved with grace and simplicity.
“There, there, that is he,” called out some on the hill.
“Which?” said others.
“He with the white head.”
Then they saw. “Ah, there is the old man … there is the old veteran, there is Jackson.” The people, Mrs. Smith said, were “not a ragged mob, but well dressed and well behaved, respectable and worthy citizens.” The emotion of the day was intense. “It is beautiful!” said Francis Scott Key, who was with Mrs. Smith. “It is sublime!”
From the procession, Jackson went inside to the Senate chamber, where the president pro tempore swore John C. Calhoun in as vice president. Articulate and intellectual, more at home with ideas than action, Calhoun had balanced the Jackson ticket, but the two men were not close, and never would be. To Jackson, Calhoun brought a certain polish to the administration; to Calhoun, Jackson was, God willing, a one-term president whom he would soon succeed.
As they walked from the chamber to the East Portico on this March day, they were already on different ideological and political paths. Calhoun began his career as a fervent nationalist, a celebrated “War Hawk” who enthusiastically supported the War of 1812 in order to establish the nation’s credentials with the rest of the world. Moving ever nearer a pure states’ rights position, however, Calhoun sensed that the protective tariff—which many of Calhoun’s constituents believed helped Northern states at the expense of the South—was a sign of things to come. If the national government could tax the South against its will, the national government could, in the future, take the region’s slaves away against its will.
In the late autumn of 1828, at his Fort Hill estate near Pendleton, South Carolina, he had drafted what would become the South Carolina Exposition and Protest to make the case for nullification. The nullification doctrine would enable a state to void a federal law within its borders. The federal government then had two choices: either leave the state alone or amend the Constitution (which required the approval of two thirds of each house of Congress or a constitutional convention called by two thirds of the states, and then ratification by three fourths of the states) to make the objectionable law explicitly constitutional. And what if the amendment passed? The nullifying state must then capitulate or secede from the Union.
For about a decade, from roughly 1828 to 1838—a period that included the crisis with Jackson—Calhoun, who nursed presidential ambitions, was unwilling to state clearly whether he believed his theory logically led to secession. Many of those around him in South Carolina did think so, and, perhaps most important, so did Jackson, who always thought of what he called “the absurd and wicked doctrines of nullification and secession” as parts of a whole. They were of a piece in his mind, and he acted accordingly. By 1838, Calhoun more openly acknowledged the possibility of disunion. “We cannot and ought not to live together as we are at present, exposed to the continual attacks and assaults of the other portion of the Union,” he wrote his daughter, “but we must act throughout on the defensive, resort to every probable means of arresting the evil, and only act, when all has been done, that can be, and when we shall stand justified before God and man in taking the final step.” Calhoun was a careful man, but in the end his theory threatened the existence of the Union Jackson loved.
Calhoun kept his authorship of the 1828 document secret, and the vehemence of his views quiet. He believed that the white-haired general about to take the presidential oath would heed his counsel to slash the tariff, relieve the South, and calm fears of future interference with the region’s way of life. Then, Calhoun hoped, his own hour would strike, and carry him to the White House.
Emily, who had watched Calhoun’s swearing-in from the Senate gallery, walked to the East Portico. Looking out, she saw only “one dense mass of living beings.” Even Mrs. Smith, whose heart belonged to the capital of Madison, Monroe, and Adams, was nevertheless impressed by the scenes of democracy in action. “Thousands and thousands of people, without distinction of rank, collected in an immense mass round the Capitol,” she said, “silent, orderly and tranquil, with their eyes fixed on the front of that edifice, waiting [for] the appearance of the President in the portico.” When Jackson emerged, he bowed to the people, and “the shout that rent the air still resounds in my ears,” said Mrs. Smith. Cannons boomed. As the sounds of the salute died off, Jackson began to read his address.
When he put his mind and hand to it, Jackson could produce stirring rhetoric—but he did so usually in moments of clarity and purpose. His addresses to his troops in the field, his letters about the Union, and his calls for the triumph of the virtue of the people over the vices of the elite were occasions on which he knew what he wanted to say because he knew what he believed and what he wanted to accomplish.
His first inaugural, however, was purposely vague. Gazing out on the admirers gathered at the foot of the Capitol steps, Jackson saw that he was the object of wide affection—but he was not yet certain of the depth of that affection. The people hailed him today but might not tomorrow. Better, then, to proceed with care, to be general rather than specific, universal rather than particular—for specificity and particularity would give his foes weapons to use against him. Many leaders would have been seduced by the roar of that crowd, lulled into thinking themselves infallible, or omnipotent, or secure in the love of their followers. But Jackson knew that politics, like emotion, is not static. There would be times when he would have to tell people what they did not want to hear, press a case they did not want to accept, point them in a direction they would prefer not to go. Best, then, to preserve capital to spend on those speeches and those battles.
The rise of a nation with a large number of voters, living at great distances from one another, dependent for information and opinion on partisan newspapers, meant that a president had to project an image at once strong and simple. His ideas should be expressed clearly for the ordinary voter, who, consumed with the tasks and troubles of his own life, had only so much time and energy to devote to divining the details of a leader’s political creed. In a democracy like the one taking shape in America, the people considered both the content of a politician’s message and their impression of his character in deciding whether to support him. George Washington was the first and greatest such example, a man called to power not only because of his views but also for his reassuring bearing. He was a man with whom the people felt comfortable. Jackson’s political appeal came out of the same tradition—a tradition in which a leader creates a covenant of mutual confidence between himself and the broader public. If the people believe in the man, then the more likely they are to give him the benefit of the doubt on the details of governance. A Scottish visitor to Albany in the late 1820s noted an American love of what he called “the spirit of electioneering, which seems to enter as an essential ingredient into the composition of everything.” But it was a highly personal kind of electioneering: “The Americans, as it appears to me, are infinitely more occupied about bringing in a given candidate, than they are about the advancement of those measures of which he is conceived to be the supporter.”
The transaction between a potential president and the people is often as much about the heart as it is about the mind. “The large masses act in politics pretty much as they do in religion,” a Democratic senator said in the Jackson years. “Every doctrine is with them, more or less, a matter of faith; received, principally, on account of their trust in the apostle.” And they trusted Jackson. They might not always agree with him, they might cringe at his excesses and his shortcomings, but at bottom they believed he was a man of strength who would set a course and follow it, who would fight their battles and crush their enemies. They believed, in short, in the Jackson who, on that journey home from Natchez in the War of 1812, had said that he would not leave a man behind—not a single one. It was a pledge he had kept then, and the people believed it was one he would keep in the White House.
MORE STILTED THAN sonorous, the inaugural speech could be interpreted in almost any way a hearer chose to interpret it. Of the tariff, he said, “It would seem to me that the spirit of equity, caution, and compromise in which the Constitution was formed requires that the great interests of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures should be equally favored”—but he did not say he would lower the duties that had so enraged the South. Of the building of roads and canals—so crucial and yet so controversial, for there were disputes about whether Washington should help pay for them or leave the matter to the states—he said, “Internal improvement and the diffusion of knowledge, so far as they can be promoted by the constitutional acts of the Federal Government, are of high importance,” but did not specify what “acts” might be “constitutional.” Of all the points in the address, the sentence that resonated most in official Washington was a promise of “reform, which will require particularly the correction of … abuses” in the federal system.
The significance of this pledge can be understood only when we remember that Jackson represented the first major transition in the White House in more than a generation—the first since Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, twenty-eight years before. Madison, Monroe, and Adams had been their own men, but had essentially left the federal government more or less in the same hands. Now Jackson was, from the start, calling those hands “unfaithful” and “incompetent”—particularly the ones who had served the second Adams.
Jackson closed with a prayer—for order and for guidance, for himself and for the Union. As president, he said, he would depend “on the goodness of that Power whose providence mercifully protected our national infancy and has since upheld our liberties in various vicissitudes,” and hoped “that He will continue to make our beloved country the object of His divine care and gracious benediction.” His mother would have been pleased. He was playing the role of national pastor—a minister at last, leading the largest possible flock.
He bowed once more to the people, and the cheers rose again. Jackson then took the oath from Chief Justice John Marshall, kissed a Bible, and mounted a white horse to ride down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. “Country men, farmers, gentlemen, mounted and dismounted, boys, women and children, black and white” followed him, Mrs. Smith said, “carriages, wagons and carts all pursuing him to the President’s house.”
WHEN THE PROCESSION arrived, the mansion was all his—and theirs. Angry with Adams for the attacks on Rachel during the campaign, Jackson had refused to call on his predecessor, and so President Adams had moved out the night before and made no public appearances on Inauguration Day. (He learned of the moment of the transfer of power when, riding his horse, he heard the Capitol cannon fire in the distance.) It is possible that Jackson’s failure to communicate directly with Adams helped lead to the disaster that followed, a legendary scene in American history that has forever linked Jackson with the image of a crowd trashing the White House. “No arrangements had been made,” Mrs. Smith noted, and “no police officers placed on duty and the whole house [was] inundated by the rabble mob.”
The reception Jackson had planned turned chaotic, with his enthusiastic followers filling the house past capacity. “The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping” replaced it, said Mrs. Smith. “Here was the corpulent epicure grunting and sweating for breath,” reported the New York Spectator, “the dandy wishing he had no toes—the tight-laced Miss, fearing her person might receive some permanently deforming impulse—the miser hunting for his pocket-book—the courtier looking for his watch—and the office-seeker in an agony to reach the President.” The household staff’s attempts to serve the guests only made things worse. “Orange punch by barrels full was made, but as the waiters opened the door to bring it out, a rush would be made,” said a congressman from Pennsylvania, “the glasses broken, the pails of liquor upset, and the most painful confusion prevailed.”
Standing in the mansion, Jackson was nearly crushed by the visitors. His aides formed a protective ring around the president and spirited him back to Gadsby’s. Mrs. Smith thought of the sacking of Versailles—an excessive allusion, for the worst damage she could detect, she admitted, was that “the carpets and the furniture are ruined.” The cost of the destruction was limited to a few thousand dollars, but the scene was further proof, if any were needed, that the armies of democracy were pitching their tents in Andrew Jackson’s White House.
THE MISTRESS OF the house, Emily Donelson, was apparently horrified. The melee was the kind of thing that embarrassed Emily, who, as a newcomer to the highest levels, was, like her uncle, sensitive to making a good appearance and leaving the rougher elements of frontier life—even life in the frontier aristocracy—where she believed they belonged: back on the frontier, not in Washington.
In a long letter to her sister about the inaugural, Emily not only failed to mention the mob scene but cast the afternoon in a favorable, more genteel light—rearranging reality in order to make the family’s first moments at the pinnacle appear more polished than they had actually been.
“After the inauguration Uncle and the rest of us repaired to the White House,” Emily said, “where every one visited him that wished to treat him with respect.” The only allusion—a heavily veiled one—to the chaos of the reception came in this fragment of a sentence: “The crowd,” Emily added, “was about as great here as it was at the Capitol.” Then she moved rapidly on, saying, “Uncle has scarcely had a moment to himself since he arrived and has been surrounded by visitors.… I hope [he] will now have time to rest himself and attend to his health, which has been very delicate.” In her mind, then, the early days of the administration were days of presidential affairs, callers who wished to salute Jackson “with respect,” and her warm concern about his well-being—not of what Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who was at the White House on Inauguration Day, called “the reign of King Mob.”
Emily knew that the sight of a crowd climbing through the windows of the White House for cups of spiked punch was the last thing her family needed. The girl who had taken a maid with her to school in Nashville and who had relished her first days in capital society on her 1824–25 visit was self-conscious about the Jackson clan’s image. The public swirl of rumors about the Jacksons’ murky marriage probably made Emily even more sensitive than she would have been if all the world had not been reading of confused wedding dates, adultery, and bigamy.
Emily began her life in national society in a curiously contradictory position. She owed her access to the grandeur of the White House to her family’s connection to Andrew Jackson, but it was precisely that connection that somewhat embarrassed her. Emily may have felt that she had to transcend, or at least obscure, some uncomfortable truths about Jackson and the world they all came from: the looser late-eighteenth-century morals that the Jacksons took advantage of in order to marry; the memories of crude violence, duels, and brawling that Jackson’s foes kept alive; even Jackson’s lack of formal education and intellectual polish.
As she dressed in her room at Gadsby’s in the early evening hours of Wednesday, March 4, 1829, Emily already knew the circles in which she wanted to move. Adjusting her gown of amber satin—Jackson had bought new dresses for her and for Mary Eastin—she hoped to transcend her provincial origins.
Emily was confident about her own capacity to build the life she wanted in Washington. Like many women on the frontier—women who ran plantations and complex households while their husbands or fathers were away at war or on business—she was accustomed to being independent. James A. Hamilton, a son of Alexander Hamilton, recalled being struck by Emily’s strength and self-reliance when, one day at the Hermitage, he watched her ride up to the house on horseback with one of her babies in her arms. “I was astonished to see a young and delicate lady and mother making a visit in this manner,” Hamilton said. As many others, including her uncle, soon learned, Emily was not afraid to ride alone.
Which was one of the reasons Jackson adored her. He admired women—as well as men—of courage, and he was loyal to those he loved. He liked Emily’s spirit. It may have reminded him of the young Rachel’s, back in Nashville and in Natchez. Though Emily and Andrew sometimes resented and bridled at Jackson’s authority, as children do with fathers, they wanted, as children also do with fathers, his affection and his blessing.
The day of the inaugural was no different. “Tired as he was that night,” wrote a family chronicler, “Jackson viewed with interest and pride Emily Donelson and Mary Eastin, who came into his room, seeking his approval of their appearance in the new gowns he had given them, as they started for the Inaugural Ball.” Still in mourning, Jackson was not going. He limited his celebrations to a small dinner. Calhoun was one of his companions at the table; afterward, the vice president went from Gadsby’s to the ball.
There he and Mrs. Calhoun joined Emily and Andrew to form the most brilliant circle of the evening. Mrs. Donelson and Mrs. Calhoun were the ranking women at Carusi’s, the assembly hall at C and Eleventh streets. In the absence of President Jackson, Vice President Calhoun was the central figure of the night. For Emily and Andrew, the mix of power, excitement, and glamor was intoxicating, and they loved the company they were in.
As the Donelsons danced and dined at Carusi’s, Emily was thinking beyond this single night out, beyond this season in Washington, beyond, even, the Jackson presidency. She was ambitious for her husband. Both Donelsons had reason to expect that Uncle Jackson’s wishes for Andrew to lead his own national political career might come to pass. Andrew Donelson was twenty-nine years old and, as secretary to the president, was in a unique position to master the mechanics of national and international politics. Emily kept watch over her husband’s prospects, protecting his interests in the great game of who was to be close to Jackson. At the same time, however, she was attached to Jackson himself, loved him, and took seriously her duty to make him comfortable amid the tumult of the presidency.
SHE DID IT well. Family life was crucial to Jackson, who had known so little of it growing up, and Emily ensured that the White House was a sanctuary for him. The Jackson circle soon moved from Gadsby’s to the mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue, and Emily, who was about three months pregnant with her second child, quickly settled in. When she brought him a question about social life in the White House—and there was really no such thing as a small question about social life in the president’s home, for society and politics were linked in etiquette, precedence, and seating—Jackson would say: “You know best, my dear. Do as you please.”
He trusted her and her husband as he trusted few people. An intimate of the Hermitage for so long, Emily knew what Jackson wanted and needed. He found comfort in the intimacy of a family gathered around a fireside. Looking back, Jessie Benton Frémont, the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, remembered Emily Donelson’s White House as a place where Jackson sat in a rocking chair near the hearth as light poured in through the big windows. Jessie’s senator father would confer with the president, who liked to “keep me by him, his hand on my head—forgetting me of course in the interest of discussion—so that sometimes, his long, bony fingers took an unconscious grip” and Jackson “twisted his fingers a little too tightly in my curls.” Little Jessie would endure the inadvertently inflicted presidential pain, then hope to be excused to the Donelson nursery down the hall.
A contemporary recalled that when Emily’s children and, later, those of Sarah Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Jr.’s wife, were infants and became “restless and fretful at night, the President, hearing the mother moving about with her little one, would often rise, dress himself, and insist upon having the child, with whom he would walk the floor by the hour, soothing it in his strong, tender arms, while he urged the tired mother to get some rest.” At White House meals, Jackson wanted the family’s youngsters to dine at the table with him: they were not to be kept in the kitchen or nursery, but at the center of the household.
Jackson also liked his family to shine socially, and Emily was happy to accommodate him. “Madam, you dance with the grace of a Parisian,” a foreign minister once told her at a party in Washington. “I can hardly realize you were educated in Tennessee.”
“Count, you forget that grace is a cosmopolite,” Emily said, “and like a wild flower is much oftener found in the woods than in the streets of a city.” It was a perfect reply: tough but charming, pointed but gracious—like Emily herself, or, for that matter, Jackson himself. On close inspection, they had much in common, perhaps most significantly a tendency to be stubborn yet mask willfulness with charm and geniality. In just one person, that was a formidable combination of characteristics; to have two people in the same house with that capacity made for a complex and quietly charged emotional universe—one that, given the psychological arsenals at both Jackson’s and Emily’s disposal, was at perpetual risk of becoming a battlefield instead of a home.
THERE WERE THINGS to fight about from the start. Though the Donelsons, with one child and another on the way, formed the core of the president’s world, his old quartermaster and political aide, Major William B. Lewis, was a constant factor. Lewis had made something of a show of wanting to leave Washington after the inauguration. A trusted operative, Lewis was useful to Jackson, but, like many who live and work in the orbit of the great, he was needy, and wanted reassurance about his role and relevance to Jackson. By announcing his planned departure to Tennessee, Lewis drew forth the words he longed to hear:
“Why, Major,” Jackson said, “you are not going to leave me here alone, after doing more than any other man to bring me here?” Watching, Emily scoffed at Lewis’s maneuver. Emily’s hostility suggests that she worried about her Andrew’s place within the government. Lewis was a rival for Jackson’s attention, positioned in equal proximity to the president, with a daughter, Mary Lewis, there to be one of the women around Jackson providing him with company and comfort.
There was another likely reason for Emily’s coolness toward Lewis. He was allied with a wing of Jackson’s universe that could mean trouble for her and for Andrew: that of John Henry Eaton, the new secretary of war.
Handsome, energetic, and devoted to Jackson, Eaton was as close to the president as anyone, and closer than most. “Eaton was altogether a personal appointment,” Amos Kendall wrote Francis Preston Blair, reporting that Jackson “said to a friend who told me that left alone as he was in the world, he desired to have near him a personal and confidential friend to whom he could unbosom himself on all subjects.”
Eaton, a longtime senator from Tennessee and a Jackson strategist, was the friend Jackson chose. Born in Halifax County, North Carolina, in 1790, Eaton attended the University of North Carolina and trained as a lawyer. He moved to Franklin, Tennessee, near Nashville, in 1808, served in the War of 1812 under General Jackson, and married Myra Lewis, a ward of Jackson’s. (William Lewis married a sister of the first Mrs. Eaton; both sisters were dead by the time Jackson became president.) When John Reid, one of Jackson’s military aides, died before completing a biography of the general, Eaton stepped in to complete the work, which was published in 1817. He served as a U.S. senator from Tennessee from 1818 to 1829, and in that decade played a key role in the construction of Jackson’s national political career. Eaton defended Jackson in the Washington debate over the general’s invasion of Florida, and he wrote The Letters of Wyoming, a widely published case for Jackson’s election in 1824. Jackson trusted him implicitly.
In coming to the Cabinet, Eaton brought Jackson a measure of comfort, the reassurance of years of loyalty, a usually sharp political sense—and a new wife, Margaret, the daughter of a Washington innkeeper named William O’Neale. The O’Neale boardinghouse was popular with visiting legislators like Eaton, and Andrew Jackson himself, who lived at the O’Neales’ during his brief return to Congress from 1823 to 1825.
Married on New Year’s Day 1829, the Eatons immediately created chaos in the capital. The source of the controversy: the new Mrs. Eaton’s sexual virtue. In the years before their wedding, Kendall wrote Blair, “Eaton boarded at her father’s, and scandal says they slept together.” One of Emily’s first letters home from Washington reported that “there has been a good deal of discontent manifested here about the cabinet and particularly the appointment of Major Eaton.” The crux of the matter: “His wife is held in too much abhorrence here ever to be noticed or taken into society.”
HER FULL NAME was Margaret O’Neale Timberlake Eaton. Beautiful and brash, aggressive and ambitious, Margaret Eaton seems to have had few impulses on which she did not act, few opinions that she did not offer, few women whom she did not offend—and few men, it appears, whom she could not charm if she had the chance to work on them away from their wives. A contemporary described her almost breathlessly: “Her form, of medium height, straight and delicate, was of perfect proportions.… Her skin … of delicate white, tinged with red.… Her dark hair, very abundant, clustered in curls about her broad, expressive forehead. Her perfect nose, of almost Grecian proportions, and finely curved mouth, with a firm, round chin, completed a profile of faultless outlines.”
Adept at the barroom art of creating a sense of intimacy with paying customers, Margaret was outspoken and outrageous in an age that tended to value tact. In the months after her marriage to Eaton, Margaret became the subject of rumors about alleged sexual exploits. Her first husband, John Timberlake, a navy purser, died in 1828. It was said that, despondent over her unfaithfulness, he had slit his own throat. She was alleged to have become pregnant while her husband was away at sea. She reportedly passed a man in a hallway with no flicker of recognition—forgetting that she had slept with him. She was supposed to be pregnant by Eaton, who had done the gentlemanly thing and married her; the two were also said to have registered in a New York hotel as man and wife while Timberlake was alive. By her own account, Margaret had been trouble from the beginning, an out-going flirt from childhood forward. “I suppose I must have been very vivacious,” she said in her old age. “I was a lively girl and had many things about me to increase my vanity and help to spoil me. While I was still in pantalets and rolling hoops with other girls I had the attentions of men, young and old, enough to turn a girl’s head.”
At various points in her youth she was courted by an adjutant general, a major, and a captain—which delighted her. “The fact is, I never had a lover who was not a gentleman and was not in a good position in society,” she said.
Her passions came and went—urgent one moment, gone the next. Her tongue was ungoverned, and ungovernable. “It must be remembered that I had been raised in the gayest society and was naturally of a mercurial temperament,” Margaret said. “I must have said a great many foolish things. I am sure I did very few wise ones. I was foolish, hasty, but not vicious.” After she married Timberlake she lived in her father’s house when her husband was at sea.
It is impossible at this distance (as it was even then) to assess the truth of the charges against her. Margaret herself offered an interesting defense: “Just let a little common sense be exercised,” she said. “While I do not pretend to be a saint, and do not think I ever was very much stocked with sense, and lay no claim to be a model woman in any way, I put it to the candor of the world whether the slanders which have been uttered against me are to be believed.” What is certain is that the stories were in circulation—and that Margaret’s demeanor made things worse.
Jackson did not care. A hopelessly romantic matchmaker, he had advised Eaton to marry Margaret after Timberlake’s death. “Why, yes, Major,” Jackson said, “if you love the woman, and she will have you, marry her by all means.” When Eaton said there were rumors that he and Margaret had cuckolded Timberlake, Jackson replied, “Well, your marrying her will disprove these charges.” Loyal to Eaton, unable to keep himself from seeing parallels between the attacks on Rachel and the rumors about Margaret, the president drew on one of his oldest instincts: defend friends against all comers. Of Eaton, Jackson said, “I will sink or swim with him, by God,” and he meant it.
Down the hall, in the Donelsons’ small suite, Emily took a different view. “The ladies here with one voice have determined not to visit her,” she wrote home. It was a determination that would help change the course of American politics.
Had the conflict simply been about who was asked to dine at whose tables, or to visit, then the Eaton saga would be interesting but not especially important, an early Washington scandal about sexual mores. As improbable as it sounds, though, the future of the presidency was at stake.
“The whole will be traced to what I always suspected,” Jackson once told Emily. He believed the campaign against the Eatons to be “a political maneuver by disappointed ambition to coerce Major Eaton out of the Cabinet and lessen my standing with the people so that they would not again urge my reelection.” There was another, equally important possibility: even if Jackson decided not to seek another term himself, he would still have a strong hand in choosing a political heir from within his party. And loyalty to the Eatons was now a test of loyalty to Jackson. “It is odd enough, that the consequences of this dispute in the social and fashionable world are producing great political effects, and may very probably determine who shall be successor to the present chief magistrate,” said Daniel Webster.
That the race for the White House in a large republic should have been affected by the sexual history of the wife of the secretary of war seems bizarre; yet politics is often driven not only by large ideas about policy and destiny but by affections and animosities. From Helen of Troy to Henry VIII, what Alexander Pope called “trivial Things” in The Rape of the Lock have led to wars, revolutions, and reformations, and so it was to be in the administration of the seventh president of the United States.