by Jon Meacham
In the message to the Creeks he signed on Monday, March 23, 1829, Jackson repeatedly returned to the idea that he was a father leading his children, and that they should trust him. “This is a straight and good talk,” he said. But it was only straight, not good.
CHAPTER 8
MAJOR EATON HAS
SPOKEN OF RESIGNING
JIMMY O’NEAL, the White House doorkeeper who accepted mail and greeted visitors, lived in quarters to the right of the main entrance on the north side of the mansion. His fondness for strong drink was a frequent trial for the president and his family. Once, ringing and ringing for him, Jackson said, “Where can Jimmy be?” “Drunk, most likely,” Andrew Donelson replied.
In the first week of April 1829, O’Neal was in good enough shape to bring Emily Donelson a letter addressed to her from John Eaton. “You are young and uninformed of the ways and of the malice and insincerity of the world, therefore do I speak to you,” Eaton wrote, advising Emily to ignore the gossip he presumed she was hearing from her new friends in Washington. “You may take it for a certain rule that those whom you hear abusing others will by and by when occasion offers, abuse you too.”
Rather than approaching Emily with deference or appealing to a sense of justice or loyalty, Eaton chose to make his case on the ground that Emily herself might one day be the target of vicious gossip—hardly the way to persuade a young woman who had already bristled at Margaret’s faux intimacy and who had nothing to be ashamed of. It was an odd, dissonant argument to put forward. Calling Emily’s circle a “little nest of inquisitors,” Eaton said that he knew “their gossiping tattle” had touched on “me and my wife.” Then, making the same mistake Ely had made with Jackson, he invoked Rachel. “I should presume, that some recent events which gave pain in your own bosom would lead you to forbear attaching any importance to tales of slander.”
It was the worst road to take with the self-conscious Emily, yet once embarked, Eaton could not help but go further, his words stoked by his resentments and frustrations.
These people care nothing about you. They are eternally haunting your house, and bringing you tales and rules, only that your Uncle is in power, and they hope to give themselves consequence through the smiles they may pick up in your doors.… You have known me long and well, and well know that in nothing have I ever deceived you or your friends. Appreciate therefore what is written … for your own benefit, not mine. Let your uncle get out of office, and I greatly mistake if you do not have cause to repent that ever you nestled to your bosom such friends and such counselors.
As Emily read the letter with, as she said, “some surprise,” Eaton, with a day’s reflection, realized he had failed to ask a crucial question. Desperate to know the precise nature of the rumors in circulation—he and Margaret needed to hear the stories in order to mount an effective defense—Eaton scrawled Emily a second note. “On looking to the copy [of the first letter], I perceive there is omitted one of the great objects of writing it,” Eaton wrote on Thursday, April 9, 1829.
The great object? “… to ask you, if you felt entirely at liberty, to state to me, what were the remarks” Emily had heard. He had to know: the capital was arrayed against him, speaking of his wife’s easy virtue and of what Adams called Eaton’s own “lewd, licentious life,” and the only way to begin to possibly, just possibly, repair the damage was to determine exactly what he was facing.
HE WOULD LEARN nothing from Emily. Answering him in a polite but steely letter dated Friday, April 10, she gave no quarter. She was, she said, “totally unacquainted” with the notion that her conduct was being directed by others. She warned him off the Rachel-Margaret analogy with candor and verve: “Having drawn my attention to the slanders got up for political purposes to tarnish the reputation of my lamented Aunt, you will suffer me to say that the most conclusive proof of her innocence was the respect in which she was universally held by her neighbors, and the love and veneration entertained for her by her family.” The unmistakable implication: the same could not be said of Mrs. Eaton. Yes, Emily acknowledged, “there were some unfortunate circumstances connected with her marriage growing out of the unsettled state of the country,” but—and this was, to Emily, the most important point—“they never disturbed the confidence and esteem which she deserved and received at the hands of society.” In two sentences, Emily thus demolished a key element in Eaton’s defense of his wife: that the assault was of a piece with the campaign against Rachel, equally unfounded and equally worthy of a vigorous counterattack from all those who loved Jackson.
As for herself, Emily used restrained irony and a tone that was soft but stringent. “As to the probability of my becoming a victim to the slanders of this or any other place, I feel it due to myself to say that although I am conscious of possessing many of the faults and imperfections common to humanity, yet I hope I shall maintain my reputation as it has heretofore been unsullied, and at the close of my life that I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that my character has not only been pure but unsuspected,” she wrote.
Emily then turned Eaton’s condescension against him. “As you say, I am young and unacquainted with the world, and therefore will trouble myself as little as possible with things that do not concern me”—things such as rumors about Margaret Eaton.
Eaton had misjudged Emily. The young woman was getting the better of him. With subtlety and deft disingenuousness, she wrote: “I take this opportunity to assure you that I do not wish to decide upon any person’s character here, nor control in any way the etiquette of this place.”
As Emily knew, however, she could not act as though she were not who she was: hostess for the president of the United States, the woman closest to him in both physical and emotional terms, the center, with her husband, her child, and the baby she was to deliver in four months’ time, of what Jackson called “my family, my chosen family.” Andrew Donelson sent his wife’s letter to Eaton, enclosing a more conciliatory—but still lukewarm—note of his own: “No one can be more ready than myself,” Donelson wrote Eaton, “to pay to yourself and to Mrs. Eaton every proper mark of respect.” Andrew’s insertion of “proper” left him room to maneuver, for “proper” could mean whatever Donelson wanted it to mean.
For Eaton, the exchange with Emily and Andrew was a disaster. He had set out to draft Emily into service as a defender of his cause and had failed. There seemed to be no relief at hand. With the large exception of Jackson himself, the Eatons were isolated. If they were spoken of, it was either with scorn or, at best, pity. Eaton himself bristled and seethed, hungry to challenge his wife’s accusers to duels, but for now had to content himself with writing overly formal letters demanding to know whether the addressee had ever said this or that. His powerlessness to exert any kind of control drove him first to fury, then to a sense of futility.
AT SOME POINT after his exchange with Emily, Eaton weighed whether his war to survive in office was worth fighting. In a previously unknown letter of Emily’s that has been in private family hands for more than a century and three quarters, there is evidence that Eaton—most likely in conversations with Jackson and Lewis that reached Andrew Donelson’s ears—considered stepping down in these first months of the presidency. “Indeed the prejudice is so strong against them here, that Major Eaton has spoken of resigning and it seems the most proper course for him to pursue,” Emily told her mother on Sunday, May 10.
The talk of Eaton’s leaving office in the spring of 1829 came to nothing, but what if Jackson had decided to encourage his friend to leave the Cabinet, perhaps giving Eaton a diplomatic post or urging him to return to Tennessee to run for governor, thus taking the issue of his wife to the people? A quick end to the petticoat war would have brought tranquillity to Jackson’s family, for what was to Emily a middle course struck her uncle as a radical one, and he hated that she and Andrew refused to bend to his will and accept the Eatons unconditionally. In politics, the battle for primacy between Calhoun and Van Buren could not have been fought in t
he way that it was, as Van Buren would have had to find some other means to ingratiate himself with Jackson than by becoming Margaret’s courtly champion.
Without Margaret, many things might have been different. Van Buren probably would have outfoxed Calhoun in the end anyway—the Eaton affair only exacerbated and exaggerated fundamental differences of political opinion, chiefly on the question of the nature of the Union, between Calhoun and Jackson, but it would probably have been more difficult, and taken longer. Calhoun himself thought the affair crucial in Jackson’s decision to turn on his first vice president. With the Margaret issue alive, Calhoun said, “the road to favor and patronage lay directly before me, could I have been base enough to tread it. The intimate relation between Gen. Jackson and Maj. Eaton was well known.” That Calhoun’s influence was checked by the Eatons does not necessarily mean the vice president would have thrived had Eaton left the Cabinet in the first spring of the administration. In Jackson’s mind the damage was perhaps done, and in his regret at losing Eaton he might have exacted revenge on Calhoun and others. There is little question, however, that the race between Calhoun and Van Buren would have been run on a different track, and what Calhoun in 1831 called the “artful machinations” of those who “have placed Gen. Jackson and myself in our present relation”—the “present relation” at that juncture meaning, essentially, that Jackson would just as soon have shot the vice president of the United States—would have had to find a different weapon to begin dividing Jackson from Calhoun.
As it turned out, Eaton chose to soldier on, with Jackson commanding Margaret’s lean but determined forces. There would be no resignation, no capitulation, no surrender.
BY JUNE 1829, after his talk of retreating from the field, Eaton hoped that the combination of Jackson’s confidence and his own brave face might carry the day. “It is Sunday, the good and pious be all at Church, myself at home,” Eaton wrote John Coffee. Eaton’s gratitude to Jackson was evident; many other politicians would have thrown Eaton over when they had the chance. In writing to Coffee, Eaton found himself marveling at the image of Jackson that came to him as he put words to paper. “Our old friend is himself again” after his latest illness, Eaton said. “Occasionally, when home and the Hermitage is chanced to be named, you may perceive something of deep emotion; but ordinarily he is lively, cheerful and agreeable—professing the same undying industry and the same prying curiosity to ascertain whatever is right and proper to be done, as he ever had.… President Jackson and Andrew Jackson are one and the same thing.… Such a man cannot fail to win the esteem and confidence of the people.”
The only exceptions, according to Eaton: “those who have been removed from their offices” and—in an indirect allusion to his plight—those for “whom motive dictates a contrary feeling.” It was Eaton’s only brush with self-pity. He soon returned to his rhapsody to Jackson: “He has firmness enough, you know, to go on with what he believes to be right, let those opposed find fault and abuse as they may.” Eaton’s closing was brief: “My wife desires to be kindly remembered to you.”
Jackson, it is true, could be wrongheaded about things, but his defense of the Eatons should not be seen, as it sometimes is, as simply a case of prideful defiance undertaken by a president who loved a fight for fight’s sake. That the attacks on his friend’s wife came so soon after those on his own beloved and seemed to him—perhaps wrongly—to be as baseless surely fueled Jackson’s Eaton campaign, but the echoes were not the only driving force. Jackson understood that he was expending precious political capital and untold hours battling for the Eatons’ full acceptance into Washington society, but he was doing it less for Margaret than for her husband, for whom he held genuine regard and whose good sense appears to have extended to every aspect of public life except for his own marriage.
THE FIGHT OVER Biddle’s Bank was progressing, too, in its way. On Saturday, June 27, 1829, Senator Levi Woodbury, a future Jackson Cabinet secretary, wrote Treasury Secretary Samuel Ingham from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to report that parts of the business community there, and a number of Jackson supporters, were unhappy with Jeremiah Mason, the president of the Portsmouth branch. Petitions were en route to make the case that Mason, a Federalist who was close to Daniel Webster and to John Quincy Adams, had been “partial, harsh, novel, and injurious.” It was the old story: the Bank was said to be under the influence of men hostile to Jackson.
As he had in the face of earlier charges against other branches, Biddle conceded nothing. In August he traveled to New Hampshire himself to look into the matter and dismissed the allegations. Jeremiah Mason would continue in charge in Portsmouth. The complaints of the Jacksonians were ignored. Biddle took the occasion, in a letter to Secretary Ingham on Tuesday, September 15, 1829, to assert his own authority in stark language. The Bank, its branches, its directors, and its president, Biddle wrote Ingham, “acknowledge not the slightest responsibility of any description whatsoever to the Secretary of the Treasury touching the political opinions and conduct of their officers, that being a subject on which they never consult and never desire to know, the views of any administration.” Biddle said he and the Bank’s directors were reluctant to underscore their own power, “but charged as they are by Congress with duties of great importance to the country … they deem it most becoming to themselves, as well as to the Executive, to state with perfect frankness their opinion of any interference in the concerns of the institution confided to their care.” Biddle was essentially accurate: though the federal government named five of the Bank’s twenty-five directors, there was no mechanism for Congress or a presidential administration to control the Bank once it was chartered—save two possible courses. First, the administration could remove the government’s deposits from the Bank, fatally crippling it; or, second, it could kill the institution more frontally by declining to renew its charter, which was to expire in 1836.
Biddle could not really conceive of either. His view of his own power was absolute. Presidents came and went, but the Bank, Biddle believed, was eternal. Jackson’s understanding of things was very different, and there was a clue to the president’s thinking in a memorandum in Jackson’s hand about how Ingham should reply to Biddle’s assertion of autonomy. The Treasury secretary and the president, Jackson noted, could “redress all grievances complained of by the people of the interference by the branches with the local elections of the states, and all their interference with party politics, in every section of the country, where those complaints have reached the Executive.” The president of the United States and no one else—certainly no banker—spoke for a free people.
DESPITE THE DISPIRITING Eaton business, Jackson was comfortable in the White House, where he was charming even old-line Washingtonians like Margaret Bayard Smith. “We visited the President and his family a few days since, in the big house,” Mrs. Smith wrote shortly after the Jackson circle moved in. “Mr. Smith introduced us and asked for the General. Our names were sent in and he joined the ladies in the drawing-room. I shall like him if ever I know him, I am sure—so simple, frank, friendly.… His pew in church is behind ours, his manner is humble and reverent and most attentive.”
Jackson knew the thrust and tenor of the conversations his foes had about him around their dinner tables and at their firesides, and he knew, too, that personal contact was one way to slow the thrust and soften the tenor. He made certain, then, not to become a distant monarch. Loyalists and skeptics alike were welcome in his house.
When Martha Jefferson Randolph, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, moved from Monticello to Washington, Emily and Jackson each paid calls on her, honoring a former mistress of the White House. Mrs. Randolph, whose mother had died in 1782, long before Jefferson’s 1801–09 presidency, had served from time to time as her father’s hostess when he was president. She had given birth to a son (named James after James Madison, Jefferson’s secretary of state) in the White House, the first child to be born there, and Jackson instantly recognized her as a dowager figure due his
respect. He asked Van Buren to write to see whether he might call on her.
The answer was yes. Jackson and Van Buren saw her together, followed by Emily and Mary—an extraordinary gesture, for it was traditional for the president and his household to receive the initial call as a mark of respect, and then return calls as they pleased. As the first provincial White House circle, however, Jackson and the Donelsons discerned the wisdom of displaying deference to a grande dame from the city’s already mythical past. They knew that the highbrow dinner-table abuse of Jackson in houses such as the Smiths’ and the John Quincy Adamses’ presupposed a fall from the golden age of the first six presidencies. True provincial revolutionaries would not have cared what was said of them. They would more likely have reveled in their isolation, savoring the mix of disdain and fear their ascension occasioned from an elite that felt a sudden, possibly irretrievable loss of control and command.
Tough as hickory: Andrew Jackson’s raw courage in combat made him a hero to his men, and then to the nation.
Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson, the great love of his life. She died after being attacked as a bigamist and adulteress. Jackson never really recovered from losing her.
The Hermitage, Jackson’s plantation twelve miles outside Nashville, Tennessee. The house was always full of company.
Andrew Donelson, Jackson’s nephew and private secretary. The president had the highest of hopes for Donelson, telling him that one day he, too, would “preside over the destinies of America.”
“Everyone was in love with her.” Beautiful, shrewd, and headstrong, Emily Donelson was twenty-one years old when she became the president’s official White House hostess.