A Treasury of Great American Scandals

by Michael Farquhar

  “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 des
troyed—while Van Buren stepped right in as vice president, and eventually as president in 1837.

  Just as “the Eaton malaria” had splintered the president and vice president, along with most of the cabinet, it opened deep fissures within Jackson’s own family as well. His niece and nephew, Emily and Andrew Donelson, served not only as his hostess and secretary respectively, but also as companions to the widowed president. Much to his horror, though, the Donelsons decided to follow Washington society in their treatment of Peggy Eaton. Jackson was convinced that they had become enemy operators of Calhoun and the rest. “That my Nephew and Nece [sic] should permit themselves to be held up as the instruments, and tools, of such wickedness, is truly mortifying to me,” the president fumed in a letter. He even contemplated firing Andrew Donelson as his secretary. “I Know I can live as well without them, as they can without me, and I will govern my Household, or I will have none.”

  The Donelsons were sent to an unofficial exile in Tennessee, and the president was left to shuffle around the Executive Mansion all alone. Lonely as he was, he was not about to budge on the Eaton issue. “Better to put up with the separation for a short time,” he wrote, “than to come on and introduce again those scenes here that has cost me so much pain, which first and last has almost destroyed me, and this too produced by my dearest friends [the Donelsons], uniting with and pursuing the advice of my worst enemies.”

  The Eaton scandal, which dominated his administration for more than two years, so exhausted the president that he longed to lie in a grave next to his beloved wife, Rachael. “I only wish if it pleased the will of providence, that I was by her side,” he wrote, “free from all the deception and depravity of this wicked world. Then my mind would not be corroded by the treachery of false friends, or the slanders of professed ones.” Relief only came after the mass resignations from his cabinet and the departure of the Eatons from Washington. (Eaton had joined Van Buren in tendering his resignation, thus allowing Jackson to save face while clearing the way for the ouster of the anti-Eaton cabinet members.) As President Jackson tried to put the whole Eaton mess behind him and start fresh, a new toast became popular in Washington: “To the next cabinet—may they all be bachelors—or leave their wives at home.”

  The storm had passed, but Washington had not seen the last of the woman at the center of the hurricane. Peggy Eaton eventually came back to the capital, and after the death of her husband in 1856, set tongues wagging once again when she married, at age fifty-nine, a nineteen-year-old Italian dance instructer named Antonio Buchignani. The marriage seemed to be a happy one, at least until Buchignani ran off to Italy with all her money as well as her granddaughter. Left in poverty, Peggy nevertheless remained a fixture in Washington—a curious remnant of an earlier era when the issue of one woman’s reputation was almost enough to destroy a presidency.

  Peggy O’Neale Timberlake Eaton Buchignani died in 1879 at a home for destitute women. She was buried in the capital’s Oak Hill Cemetery next to John Eaton. A newspaper commenting on her death and on the irony of the situation editorialized: “Doubtless among the dead populating the terraces [of the cemetery] are some of her assailants [from the cabinet days] and cordially as they may have hated her, they are now her neighbors.”

  6

  A Not So Civil War

  As war was raging between the American North and South, a behind-the-scenes struggle erupted between President Abraham Lincoln and his general, George McClellan. Both leaders were firmly entrenched in their respective positions, but the markedly different styles in which they approached their conflict showed just what kind of men they really were. Lincoln, facing enormous pressure over Union setbacks and defeats early in the Civil War, grew increasingly frustrated by McClellan’s hesitation to confront the enemy—what he called the general’s chronic case of “the slows.” Yet despite his serious concerns, the president tried to motivate McClellan with respectful suggestions and gentle cajoling, often deferring to his superior military experience. It didn’t work. McClellan treated his commander-in-chief with barely disguised contempt, ignoring his orders and requests, and calling him, among other things, “an idiot” and “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon.”

  McClellan’s total lack of regard for the president was glaringly demonstrated one evening late in 1861 when Lincoln came to his home to discuss strategy. McClellan was not in, so Lincoln decided to sit and wait. The general eventually returned, but ignored a porter’s announcement that the president was there to see him and went straight up to his room. After about half an hour had passed, Lincoln sent up a message that he was still waiting. He was told, on McClellan’s orders, that the general had retired for the evening and would not be receiving company. The president chose not to react to the gross affront, saying, “It was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.” Yet despite his forbearance on this occasion, Lincoln’s patience with his general was fraying rapidly.

  It snapped early the next year after a particularly humiliating debacle near Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, when canal boats McClellan had ordered as anchors for a temporary bridge across the Potomac River proved too large to fit through the locks of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. “Why in tarnation . . . couldn’t [McClellan] have known whether a boat would go through that lock, before he spent a million of dollars getting them there?” President Lincoln exploded. “I am no engineer, but it seems to me that if I wished to know whether a boat would go through a . . . lock, common sense would teach me to go and measure it. I am almost despairing at these results. Everything seems to fail.” Lincoln concluded his rant by articulating the ultimate source of his frustration with McClellan: “The general impression is daily gaining ground that the General does not intend to do anything.” He had a point there.

  Things had seemed so promising when George McClellan, at thirty-four, was appointed head of the Army of the Potomac after the stunning Union defeat at the first battle of Bull Run at the beginning of the Civil War. Charged with defending Washington and building a force that would help crush the Confederacy, he was hailed as the “Savior of the Republic” and called “the Young Napoleon.” The handsome young general cut a dashing figure astride his mount, reviewing troops that would come to adore him. (Lincoln, in contrast, looked “like a scare-crow on horseback,” as an observer once described him riding next to McClellan.)

  “I find myself in a new & strange position here,” the general wrote his wife. “By some operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land.” Unfortunately McClellan actually seems to have believed this, quickly showing himself to be utterly dismissive of his civilian superiors—especially the president. Furthermore, he thought God had ordained him to his position—a belief rarely conducive to collaboration and compromise—and refused to discuss his strategies and agenda. At one council meeting, for example, he pronounced that “no General fit to command an army will ever submit his plans to the judgment of such an assembly . . . there are many here entirely incompetent to pass judgment upon them.”

  Lincoln might not have minded McClellan’s obstinate refusals to reveal his plans if he thought he actually had any. While the newly appointed general had done a fine job fortifying the capital and reorganizing and strengthening the Army of the Potomac, he seemed to lose momentum after that. And this is what concerned the president most. He wanted his general to take the offense against rebel forces in Manassas, Virginia, but McClellan always had an excuse for delay: His men were not yet strong enough to fight, or they would be facing Confederate forces of far greater numbers and strength. A frustrated Lincoln noted wryly at one point that if General McClellan was not going to use his army, he “would like to borrow it, provided he could see how it could be made to do something.”

  Finally the president demanded action; he ordered McClellan to advance on Manassas, site of the disastrous Union defeat at the first battle of Bull Run. McClellan objected, of course, but he did offer a detailed plan of his own—at last. He propos
ed attacking the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, from the eastern waterways. Lincoln had grave reservations about the plan, particularly the potential exposure Washington would face with its defenders engaged further south, but he reluctantly agreed. To assuage his concerns about the defense of Washington, however, the president held back about one-quarter of the troops McClellan intended to use in the Richmond campaign. The general was outraged. “It is the most infamous thing that history has recorded,” he wrote his wife with more than a touch a drama. “The idea of depriving a general of 35,000 troops when actually under fire!” He later claimed his entire plan was paralyzed by the president’s decision. “It compelled the adoption of another, a different and less effective plan of campaign,” McClellan later wrote in a self-justifying report on his tenure as commander of the Army of the Potomac. “It made rapid and brilliant operations impossible,” he continued. “It was a fatal error.”

  To Lincoln, the reduction in troops was just another excuse McClellan used so as not to have to confront the enemy, and the president just wasn’t buying it. He reminded his general that even after a portion of his troops were held back, he still had 100,000 at his command. “I think you better break the enemies’ line . . . at once,” Lincoln demanded. Indignant, McClellan wrote his wife: “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself.”

  Though Lincoln was clearly dissatisfied with McClellan’s “sluggishness of action,” as he told his friend Orville Hickman Browning, he wrote his general a letter intended to soothe his tender feelings and implore action. Only the Confederates benefitted by delay, he noted. “And, once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this.” Lincoln added a note of admonition in an otherwise conciliatory letter: “You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, the going down the [Chesapeake] Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty—that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments [sic], at either place.” The president then concluded, “I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with fuller purpose to sustain you. . . . But you must act.”