A Treasury of Great American Scandals (9 page)

Benton's fears turned out to be baseless. He was spared the wrath of Old Hickory. In fact, the two later became political allies when they were both elected to the U.S. Senate. Jesse Benton, on the other hand, cursed Jackson to his grave.

 

 

Andrew Jackson proved himself a violent foe when it came to defending his own honor but went nearly insane with rage if anyone dared besmirch the good name of his wife, Rachael. He had fallen in love with the pipe-smoking frontier woman while she was separated from her first husband, Lewis Robards. That marriage had been a disaster, and Rachael moved away to Natchez in Spanish Florida. Jackson accompanied her there, ostensibly to protect her on the dangerous journey south. Rachael was eventually divorced from Robards, although the legality of the divorce was later called into question, making Rachael a possible bigamist when she married Jackson in 1791. Such marital limbo made her a target for many of Jackson's political enemies, including the first governor of Tennessee, John Sevier.

After a series of political clashes, Sevier verbally accosted Jackson, then a judge on the Tennessee Superior Court, outside the Knoxville courthouse in 1803. “I know of no great services you have rendered to the country except taking a trip to Natchez with another man's wife!” Sevier taunted. With that crack Jackson went berserk. “Great God!” he bellowed. “Do you mention
her
sacred name?” Pistols were immediately drawn and shots fired, but neither man was hit and they were quickly separated. Jackson was still enraged, however, and challenged Sevier to a formal duel. When the governor hedged, Jackson posted him in the Tennessee
Gazette:
“Know ye that I, Andrew Jackson, do pronounce, publish, and declare to the world, that his excellency John Sevier . . . is a base coward and poltroon. He will basely insult, but has not the courage to repair.”

When the two did eventually meet on the field of honor, they immediately started shouting insults and profanities at one another. Jackson rushed forward with a raised stick, threatening to cane Sevier, who drew his sword. This sudden movement frightened the governor's horse, which trotted away with his pistols in the saddle bag. Jackson took full advantage of the situation, drawing his own pistol as Sevier ducked for cover behind a tree. This was not how gentlemen were supposed to fight! Seeing his father's peril, Sevier's son drew his own pistol on Jackson, while Jackson's second drew on the son. At a stalemate, and realizing how foolish the whole scene had become, the parties withdrew. They were alive, but enemies still. Rachael, meanwhile, would endure far more abuse when her husband later ran for president, and she died just before he took office.
¹⁰

“The Eaton Malaria”

 

 

 

 

Andrew Jackson was every bit as chivalrous as he was murderous. With the untimely death of his wife still a raw wound, he came to the defense of another woman's honor soon after being elected president in 1828. Though no duels were fought and no blood was shed over Margaret “Peggy” Eaton's reputation, the issue nevertheless had devastating consequences. In the two years that it dominated the new Jackson administration, “the Eaton malaria,” as Secretary of State Martin Van Buren called it, contributed to a serious rupture in the president's family relationships, the dissolution of his entire cabinet, and, perhaps most significantly, a bitter and permanent breach between Jackson and his vice president, John C. Calhoun.

Jackson had come to know the young woman who was at the center of these messy conflicts earlier in his career as a senator from Tennessee. He lived in her father's boarding house while working in Washington and came to dote on her, treating her almost like a daughter. Yet while Jackson found Peggy to be a delight, others in Washington weren't so enamored. They saw her as brash and opinionated, a woman who stepped way too far outside the bounds of what was considered proper female behavior.

The gossip about her was vicious, and it only grew worse when president-elect Jackson appointed her husband, Senator John Eaton of Tennessee, to his cabinet as secretary of war. People whispered that Peggy had been sleeping with Eaton while still married to her first husband, John Timberlake, and that she carried his child. The affair, it was said, caused Timberlake such despair that he slit his own throat while out to sea with the U.S. Navy. Peggy maintained that she was always faithful to Timberlake, and that it was asthma that killed him. Andrew Jackson was one of the few who believed her. “I had rather have live vermin on my back than the tongue of one of these Washington women on my reputation,” he once said to Peggy sympathetically.

The ugly chatter about Peggy Eaton had ramifications beyond a bunch of society hens clucking with disapproval. Though women of the era had little power in most arenas, they ruled supreme when it came to maintaining community morals and standards. If they decided someone was unfit for polite society, that person was ostracized without appeal. Men were expected to honor the women's decisions and snub whomever they were told to snub. Peggy Eaton had been declared unworthy of Washington society and thus was eminently snubable. The rejection of his wife would make John Eaton's position in Jackson's cabinet difficult. “The great objection to this gentleman is his wife, whom, it is said, is
not
as
she
should be,” wrote James Gallatin, son of Thomas Jefferson's secretary of the treasury Albert Gallatin.

But what made the Eaton affair as incendiary as it became was Andrew Jackson's belief that the attacks on Peggy were actually political daggers being thrust at him—a conspiracy to make John Eaton's position in the cabinet untenable, thus destabilizing his administration and undermining his decisions. Gallant as he was in defending Peggy Eaton, Old Hickory was ultimately fighting for himself. And as those on the wrong end of his pistol knew, he could be a savage fighter.

Nathan Towson, a hero of the War of 1812 and a leader of Washington society, discovered just how determined Jackson could be when he questioned the president-elect's choice of John Eaton for secretary of war. “Mr. Eaton is an old personal friend of mine,” Jackson told Towson. “He is a man of talents and experience, and one in whom his state, as well as myself, have every confidence. I cannot see, therefore, why there should be any objection to him.”

“There is none, I believe, personally, to
him
,” Towson replied, “but there are great objections made to his wife.”

“And pray, Colonel,” Jackson said with rising irritation, “what will his wife have to do with the duties of the War Department?”

“Not much, perhaps,” answered Towson, “but she is a person with whom the ladies of this city do not associate. She is not, and probably never will be, received into society here, and if Mr. Eaton shall be made a member of the cabinet, it may become a source of annoyance to both you and him.”

Jackson was now boiling: “Colonel, do you suppose that I have been sent here by the people to consult the ladies of Washington as to the proper persons to compose my cabinet? In the selection of its members I shall consult my own judgment, looking to the great and paramount interests of the whole country, and not to the accommodation of society and drawing rooms of this or any other city. Mr. Eaton will certainly be one of my constitutional advisors.” With that, the tense conversation concluded, and Towson was ushered out of Jackson's office.

If Andrew Jackson's determination to stand by the designated secretary of war and his wife was fierce, so was the opposition to Peggy Eaton. Her sound snubbing at Jackson's inauguration set the tone for what was to come. Few of the cabinet wives, led by Vice President Calhoun's wife, Floride, deigned speak to her or even acknowledge her presence. The women's lead was dutifully followed by their husbands, enraging the new president all the more. The people who were supposed to be on his side were boldly defying him by their open rejection of Peggy Eaton. Even his niece Emily Donelson, who was to stand in for his late wife as official hostess, joined in the anti-Eaton movement—as did her husband, Andrew Donelson, who was also Jackson's nephew and private secretary. Both lived at the Executive Mansion (as the White House was then known) with the president, making for a rather tense household.

Postmaster General William Barry was one of the only cabinet members, along with Secretary of State Van Buren, who refused to reject Peggy Eaton. He firmly believed that the organized movement against her was not the result of anything she had done but rather a snobbish reaction to the elevation of an innkeeper's daughter to the status of cabinet wife. “This has touched the pride of the self-constituted great,” Barry wrote, “awakened the jealousy of the malignant and envious, and led to the basest calumny.”

Jackson was of the same mind and made it his mission—to the exclusion of all the other issues facing his new administration—to vindicate Peggy Eaton. He sought out and interrogated her accusers, collected evidence in her defense, and threatened and cajoled those who remained recalcitrant. His tireless efforts, however, did nothing but cause more whispers. “God knows we did not make him president . . . to work the miracle of making Mrs. E an honest woman,” wrote Alexander Hamilton's son James.

At one point, the president gathered his cabinet before him and presented the evidence he had collected on behalf of Mrs. Eaton. When he turned to one of the gossip spreaders, Reverend Ezra Stiles Ely, whom he had invited to the meeting to retract what he had been saying, Ely hedged. Now Jackson was furious. “She is as chaste as a virgin!” he sputtered in frustration. The cabinet remained unconvinced, and Peggy Eaton remained
persona non grata.

Seething, Jackson soon threatened to force the resignation of any in his cabinet who refused Mrs. Eaton's company. Secretary of the Treasury Samuel D. Ingham was surprised at his boss's vehemence but unwavering in his anti-Peggy position. Even the president of the United States, Ingham argued, could not dictate with whom he and his family would socialize. Tempering his stance somewhat, Jackson called Ingham and the other dissenting cabinet members, Secretary of the Navy John Branch and Attorney General John M. Berrien, into his office. “I do not claim the right to interfere in any manner in the domestic relations or personal intercourse of any member of my cabinet,” he told them, “nor have I ever in any manner attempted it.” But, he continued, the mistreatment of Mrs. Eaton adversely affected her husband, which was unacceptable. “I will not part with Major Eaton from my cabinet, and those of my cabinet who cannot harmonize with him had better withdraw for harmony I must and will have.”

Harmony remained elusive, however, and Branch, Berrien, and Ingham soon found themselves out of a job. One publication likened the forced resignations from Jackson's cabinet to “the reign of Louis XV when Ministers were appointed and dismissed at a woman's nod, and the interests of the nation were tied to her apron string.”

 

 

Never short on paranoia, President Jackson became increasingly convinced that Vice President John Calhoun was quietly working to undermine him through the Eaton affair and other matters, while at the same time maneuvering to succeed him as president. Even though the vice president and his wife had been at home in South Carolina during much of the administration's first year, Jackson had not failed to notice that Mrs. Calhoun had led the snubbing of Mrs. Eaton at the inauguration. He was sure something sinister was at work.

Jackson and Calhoun had strongly opposing views on the role of government. The vice president was a proponent of a state's right to nullify federal laws not in its best interests. The president, while a believer in states' rights, saw this concept as a dangerous threat to the stability of the union. Their differences on the nullification issue became glaringly public at a Washington dinner in 1830 when President Jackson exclaimed in a toast, “Our Union; it must be preserved,” while staring right at Calhoun. The vice president then responded with a toast of his own: “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear.”

As the relationship between president and vice president disintegrated, an issue from the past was revived to polarize them further. Back in 1818, when General Jackson was still basking in the glory of his victory over the British at New Orleans during the War of 1812, he led an unauthorized invasion into Spanish Florida in pursuit of the Seminole Indians. In the process, he seized territory and executed two British subjects—again, without authorization. Calhoun, who was then secretary of war under President James Monroe, wanted to punish Jackson for his insolence. The general, however, was unaware of this, believing instead that Calhoun was his defender in the matter. It was only later, when President Jackson started growing suspicious of Calhoun, that he listened to information coming to him about Calhoun's actual role in the Seminole matter. Livid, the president confronted the vice president with the information he had obtained. “I had a right to believe you were my sincere friend,” Jackson wrote, “and, until now, never expected to have occasion to say to you, in the language of Caesar
, Et tu Brute.
”

When it came to the Eaton affair, Calhoun maintained it was purely a social issue, and that Peggy Eaton was being justly ostracized by his wife and others on sound moral principles. “Happily for our country, this important censorship is too high and too pure to be influenced by any political considerations whatever,” the vice president wrote, applauding “the great victory that has been achieved in favor of the morals of the country, by the high minded independence and virtue of the ladies of Washington.”

It was his political rival, Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, whom Calhoun believed was whispering poison into the president's ear in an effort to curry favor and take Calhoun's place as Jackson's chosen successor. Van Buren had been openly and actively supportive of Mrs. Eaton, a sure way to Jackson's favor, and even paved the way for the clearance of the rest of the president's cabinet by offering his own resignation. The Red Fox, as Van Buren was sometimes called, had maneuvered well in the Eaton matter and would be well rewarded. “It is odd enough,” noted Daniel Webster, “but too evident to be doubted, that the consequences of this dispute in the social and fashionable world is producing great political effects, and may very probably determine who shall be successor to the present chief magistrate.” Webster was remarkably prescient in his observation. Now distrusted and despised by Jackson, Calhoun would resign the vice presidency and return to the Senate—his hopes for the highest office destroyed—while Van Buren stepped right in as vice president, and eventually as president in 1837.