CHAPTER 6
WRITING A FRIEND in Tennessee, Jackson linked his intransigence on the Eaton question to his most enduring conviction: that as president he was acting selflessly in the interest of the nation and of its mass of citizens, who looked to him for clarity in a chaotic world. “I was elected by the free voice of the people,” Jackson told his friend John C. McLemore, a Nashville businessman. “I was making a Cabinet to aid me in the administration of the Government, agreeable to their will.” In a remark that indicates how he viewed his own will and that of the country as one, he said: “I was making a Cabinet for myself.” Then, returning bitterly to the immediate social dimension of the problem, he added: “I did not come here to make a Cabinet for the ladies of this place, but for the nation.”
Jackson was beset—by Clay, by Calhoun, and by powerful Protestant clergymen, including his own Washington minister. On Wednesday, March 18, the same day the Calhouns started their journey south, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Ely sat down at his desk in Philadelphia to write to Jackson on the subject of the Eatons.
The pastor of the city’s Third Presbyterian Church, Ely was among the best-known clerics of the day. Christian voters, Ely had said in his celebrated 1827 sermon on a “Christian Party in Politics,” should join forces to keep “Pagans” and “Mohammedans” (Muslims) from office as well as deists like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Unitarians like John Quincy Adams. The essence of the sermon: “Every ruler should be an avowed and a sincere friend of Christianity.… Our civil rulers ought to act a religious part in all the relations which they sustain.”
Ely had old connections to Jackson, dating back to Jackson’s days when he had business interests in Philadelphia, and Ely was not shy about pushing Jackson on the evangelical community and evangelical causes on Jackson. When Ely published his “Christian Party” sermon before the 1828 presidential election, he added his own warm exchange of letters with Jackson and his call for voters to send Jackson to the White House—the implication being that Old Hickory was a man evangelicals could count on.
Yet Jackson handled Ely’s sermon, and his problematic support, deftly. Realizing that sectarian rhetoric like Ely’s struck many Americans as dangerous, Jackson articulated a middle position, arguing that one of the country’s greatest strengths was freedom of religion, a freedom that also gave the skeptical the right to live unmolested and unevangelized.
Jackson acknowledged the centrality of the separation of church and state. “Amongst the greatest blessings secured to us under our Constitution,” Jackson said, “is the liberty of worshipping God as our conscience dictates”—or not. But he also gave faith its due—in moderate terms: “All true Christians love each other, and while here below ought to harmonize; for all must unite in the realms above,” Jackson wrote Ely after the sermon. “I have thought one evidence of true religion is when all who believe in the atonement of our crucified Savior are found in harmony and friendship together.”
In his vision of Christian voters marching as to war, Ely was attempting to undo the work of decades by ensuring that only avowed Protestants would hold public office. He even had a specific timetable in mind. In preparing his sermon for publication, Ely included a quotation from the American Sunday School Union. “In ten years, or certainly in twenty, the political power of our country would be in the hands of men whose characters have been formed under the influence of Sabbath schools,” resulting in “an organized system of mutual co-operation between ministers and private Christians, so that every church shall be a disciplined army.”
Ely’s crusade—for crusade it was—foundered when a specific mission, the battle to end the federal delivery of mail on Sundays, collided with Jacksonians. Jeremiah Evarts’s opinion of the Sabbath mails illustrates the scope of evangelical passion on the question: “We have always viewed it as a national evil of great magnitude, and one which calls for national repentance and reformation, that the mails are carried, and the post-offices kept open, on that holy day in every part of our country,” Evarts said. To desecrate the Sabbath, these activists believed, was to invite God’s wrath on the nation.
Colonel Richard M. Johnson, a Kentucky congressman, senator, and later vice president under Van Buren, was in charge of a congressional committee assigned to rule on the question.
Johnson was one of the more intriguing politicians of the time. A “War Hawk” lawmaker along with Clay and Calhoun in the War of 1812, Johnson left Congress to fight in the field. At the Battle of the Thames in 1813, Johnson claimed to have personally killed Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader who was allied with the British. Johnson was open about his common-law marriage to a mulatto slave, Julia Chinn, and their two daughters; Chinn would die in the cholera epidemic of 1833. She had two successors. On discovering that his new companion was unfaithful, Johnson, Kendall reported, “sold [her] for her infidelity,” and then took up with the woman’s sister.
The Johnson committee’s decree crippled Ely’s “Christian party” movement. “It is not the legitimate province of the Legislature to determine which religion is true, or what false,” wrote Johnson in 1829. “Our government is a civil, and not a religious institution.”
A second Johnson report on the subject the next year depicted the Sabbath mails movement as an obstacle to the life of the mind. “The advance of the human race in intelligence, in virtue, and religion itself depends, in part, upon the speed with which … knowledge … is disseminated,” Johnson wrote, concluding: “The mail is the chief means by which intellectual light irradiates to the extremes of the republic. Stop it one day in seven, and you retard one seventh of the advancement of our country.” The reports issued, Congress did not move to limit Sunday mails.
The theocratic kingdom Ely hoped for was not at hand, but the evangelicals’ challenge to the mainstream, so manifest in the Jackson administration, was to be a constant force in the life of the nation.
WHEN JACKSON RECEIVED Ely’s letter about the Eatons in March 1829, he already understood that the minister was a man of great ambition and spotty judgment—a “busybody Presbyterian clergyman of Philadelphia,” as John Quincy Adams called him. Ely had pestered Jackson with appeals not to travel on the Sabbath, but, as a minister who liked proximity to the powerful, he had also been a faithful supporter of Rachel Jackson’s during the 1828 campaign. He had come to Washington for the inauguration, paid his respects, and, according to Jackson, “recommended the appointment of Major Eaton in the warmest terms” and “expressed the most favorable opinion” of both Mr. and Mrs. Eaton on that occasion.
What was behind Ely’s initial enthusiasm for the Eatons? Knowing that Jackson was close to them, Ely had most likely been attempting to please the new president. The Eaton appointment was already controversial by that point, and Ely may have been trying to store up treasure with Jackson that might be drawn on in pursuit of evangelical causes.
Then everything changed. Before he left Washington for home, Ely visited with a fellow minister, the Reverend John N. Campbell, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Washington, where Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Calhouns occasionally worshipped.
Campbell had absorbed Washington’s view of the Eatons. A social creature, he enjoyed mixing with his fancier parishioners. He walked Ely through a series of damaging stories about the Eatons—stories that Ely added to a few he had picked up in Baltimore on the way home, as he wrote to Jackson. Everyone in Washington, Ely told Jackson, said that Mrs. Eaton was “a woman of ill fame before Major Eaton knew her and had lived with him in illicit intercourse.” As though he were filing a brief, Ely broke down Mrs. Eaton’s sins into a “sad catalogue.”
He reported a rumor that Margaret had privately said that her children were Eaton’s, not Timberlake’s, and that “Mr. Timberlake, when he last left Washington, told this gentleman with tears, ‘that he would never return to this country’ on account of Eaton’s seduction of his wife.” An unnamed “clergyman of Washington”—Campbell—“besought me to tell you that when Timberlake had been gone more than a year from this country, Mrs. T. had a miscarriage.”
And Ely brought Rachel Jackson into the conversation. He was really writing, he said, because “the name of your dear departed and truly pious wife is stained through Mrs. Eaton. In a meeting of the directors of a bank in Baltimore it was publicly said ‘it’s too bad, but what could you expect better: it’s only supporting Mrs. Jackson,’ or words to that effect.” Those who consider Margaret “to have been a licentious woman for years will consider her elevation to society through the influence of the President as a reflection upon the memory of Mrs. Jackson,” Ely said. “It is uttered by a thousand malicious tongues, ‘he could not make an objection to [Eaton] on account of his wife.’ ”
As he closed, Ely rhetorically asked, “Need I apologize for this long letter? My heart’s desire and prayer to God for you is that you may have the happiest presidency, and heaven at last.”
AN APOLOGY WOULD not even have begun to appease Jackson. Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, Ely was both sanctimonious and salacious, questioning the honor of one of Jackson’s dearest friends, assailing his friend’s wife in detail, and tying Rachel to the current scandal.
Jackson’s reply—immediate, passionate, precise, disputing every specific—began drily enough, with Jackson writing that “I sincerely regret you did not personally name this subject to me before you left Washington.” Jackson scribbled with rising rage, disposing, he believed, of each “slander.” His fiercest language was reserved for Ely as a clergyman and for the anonymous cleric—Campbell, Jackson’s own pastor—who had told the story of the allegedly illicit pregnancy. With a preacherlike vehemence of his own, Jackson thundered:
With regard to the tale of the clergyman, it seems to me to be so inconsistent with the charities of the Christian religion, and so opposed to the character of an ambassador of Christ, that it gives me pain to read it. Now, my dear friend, why did not this clergyman come himself and tell me this tale, instead of asking you to do it? His not having done so convinces me that he did not believe it, but was willing, through other sources, to spread the vile slander.
In a climactic passage, Jackson again referred to Ely as a friend—in politics, often a term that should put one on guard, for a warm salutation can be followed by a knife thrust:
Whilst on the one hand we should shun base women as a pestilence of the worst and most dangerous kind to society, we ought, on the other, to guard virtuous female character with vestal vigilance.… When it shall be assailed by envy and malice, the good and the pious will maintain its purity and innocence, until guilt is made manifest—not by rumors and suspicions, but by facts and proofs brought forth and sustained by respectable witnesses in the face of day.… The Psalmist says, “The liar’s tongue we ever hate, and banish from our sight.”
Your friend,
Andrew Jackson
That Jackson summoned up this particular Bible verse is telling, for the words he quoted to Ely come from the 101st Psalm, which Isaac Watts translated as “The Magistrate’s Psalm.” At the end of his first month as president of the United States, one question for Jackson was whether his obsession with defending his old friend—and his old friend’s new wife—was in fact wise. He remembered part of the psalm; could he remember, and heed, the King James Version of it, which included a prayer for the magistrate to “behave … wisely in a perfect way”?