by Jon Meacham
John Eaton kept the president company while the Donelsons remained in Washington; Emily’s baby was due any day. “My dear and sincere friend Major Eaton is with me,” Jackson wrote Andrew junior, underscoring the words, and “he is worthy to be called friend.”
EATON HAD JACKSON’S ear at the moment, and Margaret’s words still echoed in Donelson’s memory. Were he and Emily secure, or would the rise of the Eatons eclipse them? How could Donelson be sure that his own future was not under attack in Eaton’s private exchanges with Jackson?
Then, on Saturday, August 29, 1829, Andrew Donelson received an evening call from the Reverend John Campbell. It was not a social visit. Margaret had learned that Campbell was a source for Ely’s charges, and Campbell decided it would be best to come forward before the Eatons—fueled by passion and armed with information—could mount their attack on him. Stiff and formal, Campbell arrived at the White House in the humid darkness and climbed the stairs to Donelson’s office in the far northeast corner of the second floor.
The minister came straight to the point. At the time of the inauguration, Campbell said, he had felt bound by “feelings of the most sincere friendship” for Jackson, “as well as a sense of duty to religion and the interests of the society in which he was performing the services of a Pastor,” to try to derail Eaton’s nomination to the Cabinet. His reason: the story of Margaret’s alleged miscarriage and implicit adultery.
Donelson immediately grasped the implications of Campbell’s revelations. Here, standing only a dozen paces from the door of the president’s office, was the man whose hidden hand had pushed Ely to oppose Margaret Eaton. For six months, Jackson had been raging against visible political foes (Clay and Calhoun), but, aside from Ely, had found the sources of the Eaton rumors to be maddeningly invisible. Campbell’s confession, Donelson knew, opened a new front with a new enemy. Campbell must have known this, too, for he asked a favor of Donelson: Would Donelson absorb the first blows from Jackson by relating Campbell’s story to the president?
It was a clever but cowardly move on Campbell’s part, and Donelson refused. When it came to the Eatons, he had enough problems with Jackson without appearing to be the agent of the opposition. “I declined a conversation with the President on the subject,” Donelson said. Campbell was trapped. He would have to face Jackson alone.
After Campbell left, disappearing into the night to prepare for services the next morning, Donelson walked down the hallway to bed. So much to think about, so much to balance. The pregnant Emily slept in their big room at the west end of the house. “She seems strong and ready for the trial,” Donelson told Coffee, but childbirth could be harrowing. Campbell’s announcement, Donelson later wrote, added “combustible qualities” to the crisis that could “be ignited in so many different ways … that sooner or later, we must anticipate an explosion.”
Meanwhile, Donelson knew Calhoun was up to no good. A correspondent from South Carolina had told him to expect that Calhoun would “attempt much next winter at Washington and endeavor to place himself at the head of the Anti-Tariff party”—which meant the head of the nullifying party. But instead of taking the summer to gather his forces and his strength to fight Calhoun, Jackson was exhausting himself over the Eatons. Jackson’s emotions “have been steamed to the highest point,” Donelson told Coffee, “and have done more to paralyze his energies than years of the regular and simple operations of the Gov. ought to have done.” Retiring for the night on this August Saturday, Donelson understood there were still more tumultuous months to come.
THE FOLLOWING DAY passed quietly as the household began to prepare for Jackson’s homecoming on Tuesday. Then, on Monday, the thirty-first, in the Donelsons’ big bedroom, Emily bore a healthy little girl, Mary Rachel. The baby, her proud father wrote Coffee, was “a fine healthy child,” and Emily was “quite strong.” Thanking him for the “gratifying intelligence” of the safe birth, Coffee told Donelson, “I assure you the family was greatly relieved … in as much as great anxiety had been felt for Emily.” Arriving in Washington the next day, the first of September, Jackson declared little Mary “the Sunshine of the White House,” and was reminded anew of the role Emily and Andrew played in his life.
On the evening of Tuesday, September 1, John Campbell returned to the White House and again went upstairs. Donelson greeted him and showed him to Jackson’s office while Jimmy O’Neal, the doorkeeper, rousted from his quarters, went to find the president, who was relaxing with William Lewis in a sitting room on the first floor. Hearing that his pastor was waiting, Jackson went upstairs, leaving a curious Lewis behind.
After Jackson arrived, Donelson left the two men alone. As he had on the previous Saturday, Campbell, having summoned up his courage to come, moved to the heart of the matter and repeated his story to the president. Jackson was stunned. “Never having suspected or even heard it lisped that the Reverend Campbell was the individual, I was truly astonished,” Jackson told Ely. This was his pastor, the minister whom he had heard preach week after week through the year. Now he was being told—by the man himself—the origins of what Jackson called “this vile tale”: that while married to Timberlake, Margaret had miscarried a baby after Timberlake had been away at sea for at least a year. The two men disputed dates and details. The conversation was going nowhere.
“We parted,” Jackson said tersely. Campbell left the mansion. The president went in search of documents that would contradict Campbell’s story, and was soon confident that he found sufficient evidence in Timberlake’s old papers. To Jackson, victory seemed at hand. Peace in the capital, and in his Cabinet, was imminent. It looked as though this might be the most glorious of weeks. First the birth of the new Donelson and now the vindication of Margaret: perhaps Jackson could at last dispel the shadows that had hung over him and his presidency since Rachel’s death.
Jackson called for Donelson and asked him to arrange with Campbell what Jackson assumed would be one of the final interviews on the Eaton affair. Leaving Emily and the baby, Donelson did as he was asked, and the meeting was set for Thursday. It was a clear, pleasantly warm day, and Jackson awoke and dressed with every expectation that the world was about to be set right. Campbell and Donelson gathered in Jackson’s office. As sunlight came in the two windows facing south toward Virginia, Jackson “stated the result of my inquiry … and having the proof in my hand, observed that it evidenced, beyond all contradiction, that the tale of [the miscarriage] could not be true.”
His tone could not have been anything but one of satisfaction, even triumph. He awaited his foe’s capitulation. He would be gracious in conquest, but he wanted the conquered to acknowledge defeat and ask how to make reparations.
BUT CAMPBELL WOULD not surrender. Jackson “must have misunderstood him as to the date,” he said. Perhaps nothing Campbell might have said at that moment could have flabbergasted and infuriated Jackson more. Jackson had had enough. The appointment was over. Campbell was dismissed, but he remained central in Jackson’s mind as he turned to write an urgent letter to Ely in Philadelphia summoning him to Washington: “I think it necessary that you come on here as soon as you can.” Jackson wanted to air the charges, refute them, and break Campbell.
“Man born of woman is full of trouble,” Eaton had said in the midst of this maddening week. Once Ely arrived, the showdown was set for Thursday, September 10, 1829. The setting: a special meeting of the Cabinet, in the president’s office, at seven in the evening.
CHAPTER 9
AN OPINION OF
THE PRESIDENT ALONE
WORD —GARBLED, INCOMPLETE word—of the battle between the president and the clergymen was leaking out into Washington. Writing his wife in mid-September 1829, John Quincy Adams said, “I have a confused story about Mr. Campbell of the Presbyterian Church and Dr. Ely … altogether unintelligible to me.” One reason the story may have been “confused” and even “unintelligible” to the former president is that those who knew all were not talking much, and those who knew only a
little were talking a great deal—a common feature of life in Washington.
The special meeting of the Cabinet took place that Thursday, on a cloudy and rather cool evening. A light breeze blew outside as Ely, Campbell, and the secretaries sat at the rectangular table in front of the fireplace. Eaton was not there; Jackson represented his interests. Andrew left Emily and the new baby to come down the long hall to the session. Lewis made his way from his room, took a left, walked beneath two arches, and came in. Jackson began with a lecture, James Parton wrote, “upon the meanness of calumny.” He and Campbell again angrily argued over the alleged miscarriage.
At a stalemate on the question—Jackson said it could not have happened; Campbell said it had, though he could not name the year—Jackson moved on. Finally came the charge of Eaton and Margaret spending the night together in a New York hotel, a tale Ely had investigated and found wanting. “The reverend gentleman told his story, and concluded by saying that there was no evidence to convict Major Eaton of improper conduct,” Parton wrote.
“Nor Mrs. Eaton, either,” Jackson said.
“On that point,” Ely said, “I would rather not give an opinion.”
Jackson could take no more. “She is as chaste as a virgin!” he said, but no one in the room appears to have seconded the president’s sentiment. Campbell was unbending, gambling that the volume of rumors about Margaret outweighed any defense, even one marshaled by the president. The allegations about Margaret, Louisa Adams wrote her husband, “are so public that my servants are telling them [at the] tea table.” As usual, Margaret had done herself little good by talking. Much of the to-ing and fro-ing between the president, the clergy, and the Eatons was known because of Margaret, Mrs. Adams said: “All this got abroad from the intemperate language of the Lady.”
Though Jackson would not give up the fight, there is a hint that he did find the storm over Margaret’s sexual history unsavory. He was standing by his friend Eaton, but he did not want his own family to be cast in such a light.
He was relieved, therefore, to hear from Andrew Jackson, Jr., that a “little engagement” with a Tennessee girl named Flora had been broken off, following Jackson’s fatherly advice. Jackson, who knew the young woman, believed she “had given herself up to coquetry,” and suggested in the aftermath that his adopted son “treat her with all kindness, but I assure you I am happy at the result, as I seldom ever saw a coquette make a good wife.”
He wrote these words only eleven days after declaring Margaret “as chaste as a virgin”—a defense even she herself would not have advanced. “When you marry, if ever,” Jackson told Andrew junior, “I wish you to marry a lady who will make a good wife and I, a good daughter, as my happiness depends much upon the prudence of your choice.” As Jackson had learned anew since the Eatons’ wedding, marriage was not a private matter, and he did not want his son bringing another flirtatious woman into his circle.
JACKSON WAS FINDING executive power ever more congenial as the months went by before his first annual message, due to be delivered at the convening of Congress in December 1829. He might not be able to move the ladies of Washington, but he could put his own people in federal offices, threaten (however subtly) Biddle, make his intentions clear to the Indians, and, two days after the Eaton Cabinet meeting, he launched a secret diplomatic initiative to establish more favorable trade relations with Turkey. In a note marked “Secret and Confidential,” dated Saturday, September 12, 1829, Jackson instructed Navy Secretary John Branch to put $20,000 at the disposal of the commander of the U.S. squadron in the Mediterranean to pay the costs of a mission to Sultan Mahmud II of Turkey. The sultan had lost Greece and much of his fleet in a fabled revolution in the 1820s (Lord Byron died fighting for Greek independence from the Muslim Turks). Turkey needed ships; Jackson wanted expanded commerce in that part of the world. Ignoring the Senate, which had traditionally approved the appointment of commissioners who undertook such missions, Jackson moved unilaterally: the fewer players, the stronger his control. He would deal with the Congress in due course. First he wanted action, and so the commissioners set out for Constantinople.
In the autumn of 1829, Nicholas Biddle paid a call on Andrew Jackson. It was a cordial enough session, with Jackson explaining his reservations about the Bank, and Biddle, as usual, appearing unconcerned about Jackson’s skepticism. “I do not dislike your Bank any more than all banks,” Jackson told Biddle, according to a memorandum Biddle kept of the conversation. “But ever since I read the history of the South Sea bubble”—referring to a failed land speculation scheme in England—“I have been afraid of banks.” Jackson had also learned to fear debt and lenders in the most personal way possible: he had been nearly ruined by them. In 1795, he became involved with a speculator in Philadelphia and ended up in what he called “great difficulty” that he only narrowly escaped. From that point on, Jackson was skeptical of promissory notes, land speculation, and financial maneuvering.
He was grateful, however, that Biddle was planning to make the final payment on the national debt by the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans in 1833, and said he would mention his thanks in his December message to Congress. “That is my own feeling to the Bank—and Mr. Ingham’s also,” Jackson said, according to Biddle. “[Jackson] said with the Parent Board and myself he had every reason to be perfectly satisfied,” Biddle recorded, and then apparently chose not to take the president’s next point seriously: “[Jackson] had heard complaints and then mentioned a case at Louisville—of which he promised to give me the particulars.” Jackson was not so satisfied, then, that he was not eager to continue registering the complaints of the people.
But Biddle chose to hear what he wanted to hear. “I said, well I am very much gratified at this frank explanation,” Biddle recalled himself saying. “We shall all be proud of any kind mention in the message—for we should feel like soldiers after an action commended by their General.”
“Sir,” said Jackson, “it would be only an act of justice to mention it.”
A SERIES OF Washington parties made the Eaton matter even more unpleasant. As the December session of Congress approached, the president gave the traditional dinner in honor of his Cabinet. It was held on Thursday, November 26, 1829, in the East Room. The evening had its glamorous elements, with elegantly dressed women and bemedaled and beribboned military officers circulating through the first-floor rooms; Barry, the postmaster general, and the only Eaton ally in the Cabinet except for Van Buren, called it “the most splendid entertainment I have ever been at in Washington.” The vice president and his wife were still in South Carolina, but many of the guests—presumably led by the Inghams, the Branches, and the Berriens—were cool to the Eatons, and Van Buren noted the president’s “mortification at what was passing before his eyes.”
Van Buren soon gave another dinner, but not a single Cabinet wife, including Margaret, accepted. He tried again, throwing an even more ambitious evening party. This time the company was large (even Calhoun, now in town, came; his wife had remained behind in South Carolina). Margaret was there, too, and at one point during the night, Van Buren ducked downstairs to take a rest on a sofa. He was soon interrupted by word that there had been a scene on the dance floor between Margaret and the wife of Alexander Macomb, the commanding general of the U.S. Army. They had bumped into each other and quarreled; Van Buren was summoned by a friend “to prevent a fight.” The evening was less than triumphant.
A later ball given by the Russian minister, Baron Paul de Krudener, nearly led to the expulsion of the Dutch envoy, Bangeman Huygens, and his wife. Because Mrs. Calhoun and Mrs. Ingham were absent, Mrs. Eaton was the ranking Cabinet wife, and Krudener escorted her in to dinner. John Eaton offered his arm to Madame Huygens, who was said to be furious (it was alleged that she had expected Van Buren to escort her, but the secretary of state was detained at the card table). Angry at being linked so overtly to the Eatons—the Huygenses were also seated with them at Krudener’s dinner—Madame Huygens was said to have
vowed social revenge by declaring she would give a party, snub the Eatons, and that Ingham, Branch, and Berrien would follow suit.
Jackson heard the Huygens rumors and, after a sleepless night worrying over the possibility that the diplomatic world was to oppose him over the Eatons, joining his own secretary of the Treasury, attorney general, and secretary of the navy, he called for Van Buren, who went to see the Huygenses. If they were in fact actively conspiring against the president and the Eatons, they would have to leave the country. In their conversation with Van Buren, the Huygenses denied that there was any kind of plot at work. Van Buren took their word, as did Jackson, who “received the information with unaffected pleasure.” There would, at least, be no international incident over Margaret.
AS THE AUTUMN wore on, Emily went to Jackson to talk about Mary Rachel’s baptism. She had barely raised the subject when Jackson interrupted her. “Spare no expense nor pains, ma’am,” he said. “Let us make it an event to be remembered; we will do all honor to the baby.” Emily was touched, and the arrangements that took shape blended the important elements in Jackson’s universe—clan, faith, and country.
The service would be in the East Room, the liturgy taken from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Congressmen, senators, diplomats, secretaries, judges, and military officers filled the elegant room. Emily and Andrew had chosen to have one godfather, Van Buren, and one godmother, Cora Livingston, for their daughter. Given the politics of the moment, asking Van Buren was interesting, but it also suggests that as difficult as things were, there were bonds of affection and respect among those closest to Jackson.