by Jon Meacham
It was a political affair, but its sexual elements also raised important questions for the women of the age. Cultural interpretations of the Eaton affair emphasize the significance of sexual purity to women in the early nineteenth century. Margaret Eaton was, fairly or not, a symbol of promiscuity. She was a threat to the domestic realm—the realm in which the women of Washington held power.
For Jackson’s foes, the intersection of Jackson’s loyalty to a friend with his vision of himself as the people’s tribune was a colossal misfortune, since the connection of these issues in Jackson’s mind meant that he would, as he put it, “sink with honor to my grave” before he would give in to those who opposed him over the Eatons.
JACKSON SAW HIS adversaries as threats to the common good—and he saw few larger threats than the Bank of the United States. In the 1828 campaign, Jackson heard allegations that Clay was manipulating the Bank to help Adams’s reelection. In January 1829, then-postmaster general John McLean, a Jacksonian who later joined the Supreme Court, wrote Nicholas Biddle about the “impression that during the late elections in [Kentucky], great facilities by the state branches were given to those persons who were favorable to the re-election of Mr. Adams.” McLean offered sensible counsel. Even if, he said, “the impression of unfairness” were “without any substantial foundation,” the wisest course for the Bank was “to guard against every appearance of wrong.” Biddle was a brilliant man, and even someone far duller than he should have understood McLean’s full meaning: Biddle had a political problem on his hands and needed to take care of it.
The president of the Bank ignored McLean’s advice. Biddle’s way was the right way, and he would not change course for anyone. In naming directors, Biddle told McLean, “their personal independence and their fitness for that particular duty must be the primary inquiry—their political preferences only a secondary concern. The great hazard of any system of equal division of parties at a board is that it almost inevitably forces upon you incompetent or inferior persons in order to adjust the numerical balance of directors.”
And that was how Biddle replied to his supporters. “Being friendly to the Bank myself,” McLean had added in his note to Biddle, “I should regret to see a political crusade got up against it. Some, I know, are ready to engage in this course, but I wish their number may be small.” McLean, Biddle, and the rest of the country were about to learn that when it came to President Jackson, a party of one was more than enough for a crusade.
JEREMIAH EVARTS ALREADY understood that about Jackson. Though he is largely forgotten, Evarts was one of the great American moral figures of the first decades of the nineteenth century. In speaking out against the forced removal of the Indians from their homes to lands west of the Mississippi, he was to Indian removal roughly what William Lloyd Garrison was to slavery: a force calling on the country to respect the rights and dignity of a persecuted people.
Born in Vermont in 1781, the son of a farmer, Evarts entered Yale in 1798. Under its president, Timothy Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the college was suffused with the idea of Christian service. “In whatever sphere of life you are placed, employ all your powers and all your means of doing good, as diligently and vigorously as you can,” Dwight preached in a sermon entitled “On Personal Happiness.” For Dwight and, ultimately, for Evarts, faith was about not only personal conversion but social transformation and the health of the nation. In their minds, and in the minds of thousands of American believers, there was a direct connection between the godliness of the people and the fate of the country.
Jackson believed, too, that virtue was essential to the maintenance of a republic, but he thought religious and philanthropic organizations were as corruptible and susceptible to manipulation by the powerful as any other human institution. Evangelical leaders he referred to as “religious enthusiasts” were standing in the way of Indian removal, one of his most cherished projects.
While religion was important in his private life (“Gentlemen, do what you please in my house,” Jackson would tell guests, but “I am going to church”), he believed in keeping religion and politics, as well as church and state, as separate as one reasonably could. Despite his lifelong commitment to Presbyterianism, Jackson had never taken the public step of what was known as “joining the church”—that is, making a public confession of faith in a particular congregation, which in turn enabled one to receive Holy Communion. Around 1826, according to an early biographer, he explained to Rachel the reasons for his reluctance: he did not want to appear to be making a show of his faith for public consumption—a show that might provoke attacks. “My dear, if I were to do it now, it would be said all over the country that I had done it for political effect,” Jackson said. “My enemies would all say so. I can not do it now, but I promise you that when once more I am clear of politics I will join the church.”
Jackson liked to think of himself as first and foremost a republican—a man who believed the best government was the one that meddled least in the affairs of the governed. For Jackson, the primary duty of federal power, once invoked, was to protect the many from the few. Like the Bank, like the radicals of South Carolina, like the Washington elite, the Christian movement for justice for the Indians and for public purity posed a threat to Jackson’s vision, which held that the people (or at least white male people) were sovereign and that intermediary forces were too apt to serve their own interests rather than the public’s. Jackson’s solution? Jackson. On the Indian question, he was determined to have his way, and few doubted that he would prevail. “I have not seen a single man, of any party, who thinks that anything effectual can be done to protect our weak red men of the forest,” Evarts wrote to the American Board of Commissioners.
THE SOUTH CAROLINIANS were coming to the same conclusion: when Jackson did not want to be moved, he did not move. Jackson had watched the stirrings of nullification the previous year and sensed trouble. “There is nothing that I shudder at more than the idea of a separation of the Union,” Jackson wrote James Hamilton, Jr., of South Carolina in June 1828. “Should such an event ever happen, which I fervently pray God to avert, from that date I view our liberty gone—It is the durability of the confederation upon which the general government is built that must prolong our liberty. The moment it separates, it is gone.” He believed the nullifiers were a mortal threat to the Union. “The South Carolinians get nothing,” Kendall wrote Blair on Saturday, March 7, 1829. “The General told me he should have taken a member of his cabinet from that state but for their movements last summer. They are fine fellows, but their zeal got the better of their discretion.”
As time went on, Jackson thought he detected something even more sinister than straightforward partisanship in what he viewed as the persecution of the Eatons: that Calhoun and some Southern radicals were using the affair to weaken Jackson and strengthen themselves. “Some foundation there must be to give rise to so much talk,” Louisa Adams wrote to her husband of Margaret’s reputation, “but my own belief is that it is a trick of the Carolina party to sow discord among the Administration and to get the W[ar] D[epartment] into their own hands.”
Mrs. Adams was on to something. Though it is true that Jackson initially blamed “Clay and his minions” and “these satellites of Clay” for the battle against the Eatons, he had long been suspicious of Calhoun. The vice president’s snubbing of Margaret only exacerbated existing tensions. The Calhouns had left Washington for their plantation at Pendleton, South Carolina, shortly after the inauguration. (In the custom of the age, vice presidents were largely legislative figures, presiding over the Senate, and thus tended to leave Washington when Congress was not in session, from, roughly, March to December each year.) Virgil Maxcy, a Maryland lawyer who had been an enthusiastic Jackson supporter, wrote Calhoun in April 1829, saying that “we must submit to the melancholy conviction, that the U.S. are governed by the President—the President by the Secretary of War—and the latter by his Wife.” Maxcy also confirmed that Calhoun’s hunch was righ
t: according to rumor, Eaton was said to be “not friendly” to Calhoun.
That should not have been surprising to the vice president, for Calhoun was himself wary of Eaton. The states’ rights elements in South Carolina believed Eaton unreliable on the tariff and, by extension, an almost certain enemy of nullification, and because of these fears they were concerned about his influence over Jackson. When the so-called Tariff of Abominations was being debated in 1828, Senator Robert Hayne said, “Eaton and others … disregarded the South.” Eaton’s failure to follow the South Carolina line on the evils of the tariff as a senator from Tennessee, the scholar Richard Latner noted, troubled Calhoun, who said that Eaton had shaken “our confidence in General Jackson … at the critical moment when the passage of the bill cast so deep a gloom over the South, and menaced with so much danger the liberty and institutions of our country.” Serious words.
EMILY DONELSON HAD hated Margaret from the start. “To please Uncle, when we first came here we returned her call,” Emily wrote home in late March, but Margaret appears to have assumed an uncomfortable degree of familiarity. “She then talked of intimacy with our family and I have been so much disgusted with what I have seen of her that I shall not visit her again,” Emily said. “I am afraid it is to be a great source of mortification to our dear old Uncle.”
Emily grasped the politics of the problem. “I think if Eaton felt any disinterested friendship he never would have accepted the appointment,” Emily told her sister in a letter that was critical of both Eaton and William Lewis. “I believe there is very little of that article to be found here.… That sycophant Lewis that pretended to come along out of friendship to the Genl has got himself into a fat office and to save himself all expense has taken his quarters here for the next 4 years.” Arch words from a young woman who sometimes affected to be unmoved and uninterested in the vicissitudes of life in Washington. These lines were written twenty-three days after the inauguration—a sign that the White House stage was set for struggles for influence and pride of place in Jackson’s affections.
Andrew Donelson and John Eaton were uncomfortable with each other. To Eaton, Donelson was young, not particularly experienced, and in perhaps too much of a hurry. It had not been that long ago, Eaton knew, that he had been Donelson’s chaperone on a trip from Tennessee to West Point. To Donelson, Eaton seemed to be at once ascendant and condescending, wielding more power with Jackson than any other adviser.
Jackson’s household was therefore in more or less open warfare even before his first month in office had elapsed. The Donelsons formed one party, while down the hall, Lewis was allied with the Eatons. A bit farther along the passageway, Jackson himself longed for peace at home and victory in the city.
Part of the conflict stemmed from Andrew Donelson’s political ambitions, part from Emily’s social designs, and the two were inevitably linked. When it came to Lewis and Eaton—threats to her Andrew’s position—Emily fought with spirit. “I think as Uncle wanted to give offices to his immediate friends there were others that had done more for him and deserved more at his hands than either Eaton or Lewis,” Emily said.
There should be no friendship—or even the faint appearance of friendship—between the White House family and the Eatons. Visits had been paid and returned, and as far as Emily was concerned, that was that. She already knew, most likely from women such as Floride (before the Calhouns left) and the other Cabinet wives—particularly Mrs. John Branch, wife of the secretary of the navy, and Mrs. Samuel Ingham, wife of the Treasury chief—that proximity to the Eatons would mean social distance from the best families of Washington. “I am prepared to defend our course—and will not yield one inch of ground,” Mrs. Ingham wrote to Emily, who had no intention of living her life in exile from the upper reaches of capital society on account of Margaret Eaton.
As usual, Margaret was her own worst enemy. Her brashness in claiming connection to Jackson’s family made Emily’s revulsion all the stronger. Realizing that she would find no friend in Emily, Margaret, rather than keeping a decorous silence, began to speak of Emily as “a poor, silly thing,” and escalated her rhetoric from there. “I was quite as independent as they and had more powerful friends,” Margaret said of the Emily faction. “None of them had beauty, accomplishments or graces in society of any kind, and for these reasons—I say it without egotism—they were very jealous of me.”
Jackson’s political allies were puzzled by the unfolding drama. After Jackson gave Margaret’s father a federal position as an inspector of the District of Columbia prisons, James Hamilton, Jr., then a pro-Jackson South Carolinian, wrote Van Buren: “For God knows we did not make him president … to work the miracle of making Mrs. E. an honest woman, by making her husband Secy of War, or by conferring some crumbs of comfort on every creature that bears the name O’Neale.”
AT GADSBY’S HOTEL one morning after a big party hosted by Sir Charles Vaughan, the British minister, Margaret was the talk of the dining room. “Mrs. Eaton brushed by me last night and pretended not to know me,” one man said in front of four others at Gadsby’s table. “She has forgotten the time when I slept with her.”
Old Washington was at once horrified and thrilled by the scandal. After a visit to the Clays’ house on Lafayette Square, Edward Bates, a congressman from Missouri who lost his 1828 reelection bid, wrote his wife an inflated account of the Eatons’ history. Eaton, Bates said, “has just married Mrs. Timberlake, a lady with whom it is said he has been on very familiar terms for several years past. She was the wife of a purser in the Navy, whose duties called him to foreign parts; but the lady, notwithstanding her lonely condition, increased and multiplied surprisingly.”
Bates was reflecting the prevailing gossip. “I’ve just returned from Mr. Clay’s,” he said. The “hard-featured” Lucretia Clay was there, as was a sister of Dolley Madison’s. “Of course, there is no getting along in such a party without a little scandal,” Bates said. “Mrs. Eaton the bride above mentioned was of course talked of and I gathered that she had not received the accustomed visits of congratulation from the ladies of the city.”
On Sunday, March 8, 1829, four days after the inauguration, Lucretia and Henry Clay went to dine at the home of Margaret Bayard Smith and her husband, Samuel Harrison Smith, the president of the Washington branch of the Bank of the United States. The Smiths had come to Washington immediately after their wedding twenty-nine years before, in the autumn of 1800. Shortly thereafter John Adams became the first president to spend a night in the White House. Six years later Henry Clay came to Washington as a U.S. senator from Kentucky. He served in the Ninth Congress alongside his hostess’s brother, James A. Bayard of Delaware.
Dining on this Sunday—the Smiths lived on the square between Pennsylvania Avenue, Fifteenth Street, and H Street, near the White House—Samuel Harrison Smith and Clay talked, Mrs. Smith said, as “the patriot to the patriot,” men whose lives were intertwined with the history of the city and its more or less permanent powers. Smith had served as an interim secretary of the Treasury under Madison; Clay had risen through the Congress, becoming Speaker of the House, and now stood as the opposition’s heir apparent to reclaim the White House. Washington was home, the public’s business their business, the nation’s memories bound up with their own families’.
The weather outside was forbidding—cold and cloudy—but inside at the table Mr. Smith and Clay found a refuge in memories and stories from the days when, in their view, giants, not pygmies, lived in the White House. They did not mention Jackson. They did not have to. The “falling-off”—as the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father put it when he spoke of how low his wife had come in marrying the usurping Claudius—was obvious to all in the dining room. “The characters and administrations of Jefferson and Madison were analyzed, and many private anecdotes were drawn,” said Mrs. Smith. “Mr. Clay preferred Madison, and pronounced him after Washington our greatest statesman, and first political writer—He thought Jefferson had the most genius—Madison most jud
gment and common sense—Jefferson a visionary and theorist, often betrayed by his enthusiasm into rash and imprudent and impracticable measures, Madison cool, dispassionate, practical, safe.”
Mr. Smith listened, then begged to differ—politely and among equals, of course. The conversation was riveting; the dishes were being cleared away, yet everyone at the table, well fed and with full glasses of wine, listened intently.
“Your father,” Mrs. Smith wrote their son, “would not yield Jefferson’s superiority and said he possessed a power and energy, which carried our country through difficulties and dangers; far beyond the power of Madison’s less energetic character. ‘Prudence and caution would have produced the same results,’ insisted Mr. Clay. After drawing a parallel between these great men, and taking an historic survey of their political lives, they both met on the same point, viz. that both were great and good, and tho’ different—yet equal.”
Reasonable men of affairs, reaching reasonable conclusions about matters of history and statecraft—the scene is cozy, intimate, full of talk of great men with insight and familiarity and connections between the public and the personal. These were people who believed themselves noble members of a ruling class—an aristocracy in all but name.
At ten—late for Lucretia, who tended to retire earlier—the Clays said good night, concluding a kind of tribal ritual of a band of warriors, facing enemies in the darkness beyond, warming themselves with fire and story.