by Jon Meacham
Both threatened violence, but Jackson soon moved to another establishment—a smart tactical maneuver, as it turned out—and Robards, furious with his allegedly flirtatious wife, returned to Kentucky alone. Then came word that the unhappy husband was going to come to Tennessee yet again “to take his wife” back to his own home. He planned, it was reported, to “haunt her.” Friends arranged for Rachel to travel to Natchez, Mississippi, then controlled by the Spanish. Jackson, who knew the route, went along, and returned to Nashville. According to the Jackson version of events, it was at this point—with Rachel in Natchez, and Jackson in Tennessee, in the winter of 1790–91—that Jackson learned Robards had obtained a divorce. Jackson rushed back to Natchez and married Rachel there. Only two years later, in December 1793, did it become clear that Robards had only petitioned for a divorce in December 1790. It was not granted until September 1793, which meant that Jackson had been “married” to another man’s wife for several years. By January 1794, all was put right, and Jackson and Rachel were legally married in a ceremony in Tennessee.
Or so Jackson, as a presidential candidate, would later have the world—and history—believe. The weight of the evidence, however, suggests the two lived together as husband and wife and even referred to themselves as married—there are two surviving references to Rachel as “Mrs. Jackson” from late 1790 and early 1791—before Robards took the initial step of filing for a divorce. Their passion for each other was apparently deep enough to lead them, despite their later claims to the contrary, to choose to live in adultery in order to provoke a divorce from Robards. By the looser standards of the frontier in the last years of the eighteenth century, such a course would not have damaged their reputations, particularly if—as was the case here—the woman’s family approved.
The bond Rachel and Jackson formed from their first meeting in 1788 was strong enough, and their private visions of a life together vivid enough, for them to seek the pleasure and comfort of each other’s arms as rapidly as they could. But by the time Jackson was running for president more than thirty years later, the moral climate had moved in a stricter direction. So it is likely that the Jacksons’ sensitivity to charges of impropriety in later years was rooted in the fact that the essential charge—that Mrs. Jackson was still Mrs. Robards when she and Jackson began their life together—was true.
What had brought them together in the first place? The drama of the abusive husband, the wronged woman, and himself as the knight defending her virtue would have appealed to Jackson’s imagination: it was a role he liked to think of himself as playing. Even more fundamentally, though, from about 1788 onward, Jackson was a man in the grip of an almost feverish love, a love it seems reasonable to assume he longed to consummate as soon as he decently could. In Rachel’s big eyes he found the suggestion of a lasting love. In Jackson’s slender but strong frame she found the promise of protection and a tenderness her first husband had never given her. In capturing Rachel as his own Jackson got what he wanted, and he got it with a combination of subtlety (courting her in her mother’s house, and staying on the right side of the family) and bravery (risking his standing, and the possibility of a duel, to have her as his wife before it was legally allowed). The road to marriage with Rachel had all the elements of life Jackson found compelling: it was a cause of the heart charged by complication and danger, but with the greatest possible rewards awaiting him if he could win through—the love of a good woman and, so important to the orphan from Waxhaw, a connection to a secure, leading family of the world in which he found himself.
THEY WERE DEVOTED to each other. When Jackson was away, Rachel was given to crying and worrying. From the road or the front, he summoned all his rhetorical power to assure her of his love. Rachel once wrote Jackson a fretful note about his safety while he was on a trip to Philadelphia. He rushed to assuage her anxieties. “I have this moment recd. your letter,” he told her, “and what sincere regret it gives me on the one hand to view your distress of mind, and what real pleasure it would afford me on the other to return to your arms, dispel those clouds that hover around you and retire to some peaceful grove to spend our days in solitude and domestic quiet.” But business mattered—Jackson was on a dual judicial and commercial journey—and he confessed a dark fear to her: an early return, he said, could “involve us in all the calamity of poverty—an event which brings every horror to my mind.” He had been without resources once, and, hating the idea of once again finding himself in a dependent position, he pressed on, struggling to warm the chill of his wife’s worries with letters. Because “you are full of apprehension and doubt with respect to my safety,” Jackson told Rachel, “I have wrote you every post since I left you—and will continue to do so … may the all ruling power give you health and Peace of Mind until I am restored to your arms.”
They shared a passionate emotional attachment, but Jackson—like many husbands before and since—may have loved his wife rather more than he listened to her. He did what he wanted to do, and if his course upset his wife, sending her into gloomy moods and fits of tears, he was sorry, but Rachel’s anguish rarely affected his decisions to leave her when duty called. A public man, he savored public adulation, though he knew his wife had a point as she tried to keep him grounded amid the cheering crowds. He respected her views, for they were informed by decades of close observation of Jackson’s political life, and they were offered out of love. Rachel also knew he struggled to keep his emotions in check and warned him when she thought he was in danger of letting his passions get the better of him. “I thank you for your admonition,” Jackson wrote Rachel after one such exhortation. “I hope in all my acts and conduct through life they will measure with propriety and dignity, or at least with what I believe true dignity consists, that is to say, honesty, propriety of conduct, and honest independence.”
HE RELISHED THE roles of protector and savior. Just after dusk on a cold March day in 1791, when Jackson was practicing law on the circuit around Jonesborough, Tennessee, he and his friend John Overton were traveling with a small group through dangerous territory. Reaching the banks of the Emory River in the mountains, the lawyers spotted a potentially hostile Indian party. “The light of their fires showed that they were numerous,” Overton recalled to Henry Lee, and “that they were painted and equipped for war.” Under Jackson’s leadership (Overton credited him with a “saving spirit and elastic mind”), the travelers scrambled into the hills on horseback, riding roughly parallel to the river—which they had to cross to make it home. Pursued by the Indians, Jackson, Overton, and two others pressed on through the night, coming to a place where the water looked smooth enough to allow a hastily constructed raft and the horses to make it to the other side. Jackson took charge of the raft piled high with saddles and clothes. Overton would follow with the horses.
There was immediate trouble. The waters were not as smooth as they had appeared: a powerful undercurrent swept the boat—and Jackson—downstream, toward a steep waterfall. “Overton and his companion instantly cried out and implored Jackson to pull back,” Lee wrote. “But he either not being so sensible of the danger, or being unwilling to yield to it, continued to push vigorously forward.” Jackson struggled with his oars: disaster was at hand. He and the saddles could be lost, and the Indians were still on their trail. “Finding himself just on the brink of the awful precipice,” Lee recounted, Jackson extended his oar to Overton, who “laid hold of it and pulled the raft ashore, just as it was entering the suck of the torrent.” Catching their breath on the bank of the river, Overton and Jackson looked at each other.
“You were within an ace, Sir, of being dashed to pieces,” Overton told him. Jackson waved him off, replying, “A miss is as good as a mile; it only shows how close I can graze danger. But we have no time to lose—follow me and I’ll save you yet.” They eluded the Indians, arriving home exhausted but safe.
Here was the daring Jackson, the courageous Jackson, the cool Jackson—and the erratic, blithe, boastful Jackson, a man who saw
what needed to be done in a crisis but also needed his friends to carry the day. “Follow me and I’ll save you yet” are confident, inspiring, warming words, yet it was Overton who had just rescued Jackson, not the other way around. It was partly this boldness and resilience that attracted men and women to Jackson’s side in the first place, for in doubtful moments people need someone who can reassure them amid danger. Jackson was such a man—and he always had wise friends nearby who loved him enough to overlook or chuckle at his professions of pride, and then mount up to ride with him again.
STILL, JACKSON’S PRIDE led him into peril more than once. In Knoxville in the autumn of 1803, in the midst of a quarrel with Tennessee governor John Sevier over which man would become major general of the state militia, Jackson alluded to his own past “services” to the state. “Services?” Sevier replied. “I know of no great service you have rendered the country, except taking a trip to Natchez with another man’s wife.”
“Great God!” Jackson roared. “Do you mention her sacred name?”
Then, according to a contemporary’s recollection, “several shots were fired in a crowded street. One man was grazed by a bullet; many were scared; but, luckily, no one was hurt.” The story is chiefly interesting for the light it sheds on Jackson’s sensitivities about Rachel’s honor. “Sevier had touched on a subject that was, with Jackson, like sinning against the Holy Ghost: unpardonable,” recalled the source.
No one died in the Sevier shootout, but Jackson could, and did, kill in cold blood. In 1806, an argument over a horse race—the dispute also apparently included a slur against Rachel—degenerated into a duel between Jackson and a man in Nashville named Charles Dickinson. Jackson was determined to have satisfaction, waving off reports that Dickinson might leave the city before the showdown. “It will be in vain, for I’ll follow him over land and sea,” Jackson said.
At seven o’clock on the morning of Friday, May 30, 1806, on the Red River in Logan County, Kentucky, Jackson and Dickinson faced each other at twenty-four feet. Jackson let Dickinson shoot first, and he hit Jackson in the chest with a bullet. Though wounded, Jackson coolly leveled his own pistol at his opponent, and fired. The trigger caught halfway; Jackson cocked the gun again and fired, killing Dickinson. Only later, as his boot filled with blood after he had left the dueling ground, did the extent of Jackson’s wound become clear. He carried Dickinson’s bullet in his body until he died. Even in pain—the wound complicated his health for decades—Jackson never let his mask drop. “If he had shot me through the brain, sir,” Jackson told a friend, “I should still have killed him.”
In fact, Jackson made more friends than he fought duels, and in the practice of law, the pursuit of politics, and his mastery of the military—his three overlapping professions—he inspired great loyalty. Jackson’s willingness to risk his own life to protect others won him the respect and thanks of his contemporaries and made them amenable to forgiving him his (many) trespasses. It was he who escorted parties of settlers through forests filled with Indians; it was he who enforced justice in a region that could have turned lawless; it was he who rallied volunteer troops and rode to the enemy. As an Indian fighter, Henry Lee wrote, Jackson’s “gallantry and enterprise were always conspicuous, attracted the confidence of the whites, and inspired honour and respect among the savages, who gave him the epithets of the sharp knife and the pointed arrow.” By projecting personal strength, Jackson created a persona of power, and it was this aura, perhaps more than any particular gift of insight, judgment, or rhetoric, that propelled him forward throughout his life.
As a judge of the Tennessee Superior Court—a post he held from December 1798 until July 1804—Jackson was riding circuit when he encountered the case of a man, Russell Bean, who had been indicted for “cutting off the ears of his infant child in a drunken frolic.” The local sheriff was afraid of Bean, who refused to appear in court. “Russell Bean would not be taken,” the sheriff told Jackson, who later related the incident to Henry Lee. “At this Judge Jackson expressed much astonishment, and peremptorily informed the officer ‘that such a return was an absurdity and could not be received, that the culprit must be arrested, and that he [the sheriff] had a right to summon the posse comitatus, to aid in the execution of the law.’ ” The sheriff asked Jackson to join the posse, and after arming himself, Jackson agreed. “Sir, I will attend you and see that you do your duty,” he said to the sheriff, who led Jackson to the place in town where Bean, “armed with a dirk and a brace of pistols,” was “boasting of his superiority to the law and entertaining the populace with taunts and reflections upon the cowardice of the sheriff and the pusillanimity of the court.” Then the court—in the person of Jackson—appeared. “Now, surrender, you infernal villain, this very instant,” Jackson said, “or I’ll blow you through.”
Wilting under Jackson’s “firm advance and formidable look,” Bean was “unnerved entirely.” He dropped his guns. “I will surrender to you, sir, but to no one else,” Bean said to Jackson.
Jackson could be touchy and unreasonable, but here, in a corner of Tennessee, we can see the faith others put in Jackson at times of peril and the respect his bravery inspired in his foes. “When danger rears its head, I can never shrink from it,” Jackson once told Rachel. He did what others would not—or could not—do. In a world of threats, that willingness made him a hero, a central figure, someone who could be counted on.
HE WAS BECOMING a man of standing in Nashville, and in that role he and Rachel were Aaron Burr’s hosts in Nashville in 1805. A former vice president and the man who had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Burr was an adventurer at the center of a murky ongoing conspiracy in these years to lead a military expedition of some kind in the Southwest, possibly to marry U.S. land with Spanish holdings to create a stand-alone republic or empire. It was an elusive scheme, and with Jackson, Burr seems to have spoken only of preparing a force in the event of war with Spain in Florida, a subject of perennial interest in the Southwest at the time. At Burr’s request, Jackson agreed to build five boats and supply them with provisions.
That Jackson was not privy to a treasonous conspiracy seems evident; his call for the militia to make itself ready noted that they would move “when the government and constituted authorities of our country require it.” Burr had other ideas, including the possibility of seizing New Orleans. Beginning to suspect trouble, Jackson wrote several officials, including President Jefferson and Louisiana governor William C. C. Claiborne. “I fear there is something rotten in the State of Denmark,” Jackson told Claiborne. Ultimately Jefferson had Burr arrested and tried for treason; Burr was acquitted in 1807. The episode illuminates two elements of Jackson’s character: his ambition to secure the nation from foreign threats, an ambition so abiding that he very nearly allowed himself to become entangled in a terrible conspiracy; and, second, his equally abiding love of the nation as a family that could not be broken up.
JACKSON WAS forty-five years old when America and Britain went to war in 1812, and he was viewed as a formidable leader of men. By this time he had served as attorney general for Tennessee in its territorial days, in 1791; been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1796; moved to the U.S. Senate in 1797; served as a judge from 1798 to 1804; and, in 1802, had also become major general of the state militia. All the while he struggled to build his planting and commercial interests, from buying huge tracts of land to running a frontier store. “He loves his country and his countrymen have full confidence in him,” Tennessee governor Willie Blount wrote to the secretary of war at the outbreak of hostilities in 1812. “He delights in peace; but does not fear war. He has a peculiar pleasure in treating his enemies as such; with them his first pleasure is to meet them on the field. At the present crisis he feels a holy zeal for the welfare of the United States, and at no period of his life has he been known to feel otherwise.” Since his mother and his brothers had died for the Union, he would defend the nation to the death.
It was not only courage and con
viction that turned Jackson into a great general and a transformative president. He cared about his followers, thought of them as his family, and communicated this warmth in word and deed. Speaking of his men at a low moment in the War of 1812, Jackson promised to “act the part of a father to them.” Many leaders say such things and do not mean them, and many followers dismiss such sentiments as words without substance. Jackson was different. He proved his love in times of crisis, earning capital with his troops that both gave him a nickname and formed a bond of affection and respect between himself and his followers that lasted for the rest of his life.
In the cold winter of 1812–13, just months after the United States declared war on Great Britain, Jackson assembled his volunteers—2,071 in all—to march south, toward New Orleans. Jackson’s army set off in January 1813, and, five hundred miles later, at Natchez, federal military authorities told Jackson to hold up, and soon the secretary of war ordered him to disband and return to Nashville. By now 150 of Jackson’s men were sick, 56 could not sit up, and Jackson had a total of eleven wagons for the trip. “They abandon us in a strange country,” he angrily wrote to Governor Blount, adding: “And I will make every sacrifice to add to their comfort.” Lee captured Jackson’s bleak view: “They had sacrificed domestic comforts, abandoned civilian pursuits, cherished heroic visions; and voyaged a thousand miles—all as it seemed for nothing—and were suddenly left without motives for action, subjects for hope, the power of progression, or the means of return—between them and their homes frowned a vast wilderness where the ambushed savage lurked intent on theft and murder.…” As they prepared to move out, the doctor, Samuel Hogg, asked Jackson what he was to do.
Jackson did not hesitate. “To do, sir? You are to leave not a man on the ground.”
“But the wagons are full,” Hogg said, “and they will convey not more than half.”