by Jon Meacham
Yet she remained unwell as she prepared for the trip to Tennessee. She was to take three of the four children. Jackson Donelson was to stay with his father and uncle until Congress adjourned, and then come south. She was worried about her son being left in the White House. Andrew had to reassure her that he would “have nothing to do but to care for” Jackson “when I am not in my office.”
EMILY’S EMOTIONAL AGITATION—a breakdown in her usual sense of orderliness and of domestic command—foreshadowed a breakdown in her physical health. She reached Nashville on Sunday, June 26, and was at work at Poplar Grove through July and much of August, awaiting her husband and her eldest son. They left Washington with the president on Sunday, July 10, but were slowed by terrible rains that turned the roads into muddy bogs. Jackson’s horses’ feet were “torn to the quick and left almost without hoofs.” From Salem, Virginia (Jackson usually spelled it “Salum”), a week later, Andrew told Emily: “We reached here today … after a severe drive over the most intolerable roads that were ever travelled. It is as much as we can do to make nigh 18 miles a day and are in constant danger of breaking some part of our carriage or gear. You must not therefore be disappointed if it is the 4th or 5th of August before we reach home.” He added a reassuring report about their son: “Jackson is in fine health and makes a fine traveler.” For Emily, though, the spring and summer of death continued apace: the third week of July brought word that Mrs. Mary Ann McLemore, an old family friend and member of the large Donelson clan, had died. Meanwhile, her own two-year-old daughter, Rachel, was “not so well,” adding to the strain.
Jackson and Andrew finally arrived at the Hermitage on Thursday, August 4. For all his talk about being tired, however, Jackson, like most politicians, could not rest for long. Three weeks later he was working a huge picnic, campaigning for Van Buren, “shaking hands,” he said, “with at least 4,000 people—many from my old friends both male and female.” Andrew had come along, but chose to return home to Poplar Grove rather than traveling on with Jackson to a visit with Mrs. Coffee in Florence, Alabama. It turned out to be a wise decision. He did not have much time to spend with his wife, who was now demonstrably sick. It was, it would turn out, tuberculosis.
ONCE THE BLEEDING began, it seemed to last forever. Hemorrhaging from her lungs, Emily scared those around her. The attack was of a different magnitude than anything she had suffered before. Andrew was terrified and prepared for the worst, remaining with her and the children when Jackson had to return to Washington. From a stop twelve miles south of Louisville on Saturday, September 17, 1836, Jackson wrote Andrew junior, who had also stayed in Nashville, “I will be uneasy until I hear from you—I fear Major Donelson will not be able to leave Emily—indeed I fear Emily will not recover.” Six days later, from Wheeling, at nine in the evening, Jackson found himself without word from Nashville, and the silence exacerbated his fears about Emily. Was she dead already?
“My mind is sorely oppressed by not hearing from you at Louisville or this place—my fears of the situation of our dear Emily have been much heightened from not hearing from you,” Jackson wrote Donelson. “Should this reach you at home I pray you to write me and let me hear how Emily and the dear little children are—I shall not rest until I hear from you.”
Touching as it was, the letter ranged from personal concern for Emily to the politician’s inevitable reports of how he seemed to be playing with the public as he canvassed for Van Buren. “I reached Wheeling about sunset and there was an immense crowd—such a one I have never seen there before,” Jackson told Donelson. “At Cincinnati and everywhere I landed there were immense crowds so that I am nearly worn down with fatigue.” He could not help wondering, too, whether Emily’s illness would keep his private secretary from the White House indefinitely. “Pray write me soon how our dear Emily is and when you will be in the City—present my ardent prayers to her for her speedy recovery.”
So it had always been for Emily and Andrew: their lives depended on Jackson’s, and Jackson depended on them. In his old age, in the last months of a trying presidency, with an Indian war in Florida, plans for the removal of the Cherokees—a chancy business—under way, and Van Buren facing the voters, he had to have the Donelsons as he had had them from the beginning, and while he loved them without question, he also needed them to be able to serve him as they always had. Writing Van Buren, Jackson said, “I pity the Major’s situation—her loss would unman him, and be a lamentable bereavement to her family.” And yet there were the practical considerations, too: “I find much business has accumulated, and if Major Donelson does not come on soon I will find myself greatly oppressed with business.”
In Nashville, Andrew seemed to lose hope. Emily was no longer running a fever, but there were signs, he wrote, of lung disease, and she was, her husband said, in “a kind of stupor.”
Reaching the White House on Saturday, October 1, 1836, Jackson spent the evening, he wrote Andrew, “in melancholy gloom and in forebodings of unpleasant information from our dear Emily.” The next morning he finally received the depressing word from Donelson that Emily was worse. It was “with painful sensations,” Jackson replied to Andrew, that he “read the melancholy information of her continued ill health and forebodings of the result of her disease.” Drawing on his own experience with losing Rachel, Jackson tried to reassure his nephew while preparing the young husband for the end. “I trust in the mercy of a kind superintending providence that He will restore her to health and bless her dear little children … and prolong her life to be a comfort to you in your declining years,” Jackson said. The world, however, had a way of failing to conform to our warmest wishes.
“But my dear Andrew,” Jackson went on, “should providence will it and call her hence you must summon up all your fortitude to meet the melancholy event, keeping in mind how necessary your life becomes to your dear children.…” In conclusion, Jackson tried to strike a more cheerful note: “Still I have a hope that as the hemorrhage has ceased and the fever checked she will soon recover, for which present to her my affectionate regards with my prayer for her speedy recovery and your safe arrival soon here, with all your dear little ones.”
YET EVEN NOW, in a dark personal hour, Jackson could not stay away from politics. “I have no doubt of every republican state in the union going for Van Buren,” Jackson told Andrew; Jackson so yearned for vindication through the election of his chosen successor that he willed himself into an optimistic frame of mind. To Van Buren himself, Jackson wrote, “I can say to you that the political horizon is bright and cheering.” The facts were rather different. The election was close, and Jackson was simultaneously anxious for Emily and for Van Buren. He would have seen little distinction between the two concerns, for to him the country was family, too.
Andrew, who had despaired of Emily in the letter Jackson had read on October 2, nevertheless decided to leave her alone with her mother and children ten days later. The pull of Washington, and of Jackson, was too great. The president’s neediness was evident to those around him. He made no effort to hide it. Mulling a farewell address, he asked Roger Taney for help: “I am so harassed with business and company, and deprived as I am of the aid of Major Donelson that I am compelled to ask the aid of friends in maturing the address I have in contemplation.” As these words were written, Donelson was already on the road to Washington, and he was already trying to assuage his own guilt with assertions of good cheer.
“Words cannot express the pain which the separation from you at this time has occasioned me,” Andrew wrote Emily—though the pain was not so significant that it prevented him from returning to Jackson’s service. “Be assured my dear Emily that not a moment will be lost that can hasten my return.… From what Dr. Laurence told me I feel the strongest hopes that your strength will be gradually recovered.… Remember me affectionately to your Mother who is so good and kind to you and our dear children. Her remaining with you places me under obligations which I can never forget.”
According to
family tradition, Emily approved of Andrew’s return to the White House, and perhaps she did. She had been feeling better since the terror of the long hemorrhage. She understood the claim Jackson had on her and her husband, and for her, as for Andrew, Washington remained irresistible. Still, when Andrew suggested that he might not be back at Poplar Grove until Congress met in March 1837—five months hence—Emily reacted badly. Family tradition has her “in tears” at the thought that Andrew would not return in December; in a letter to Andrew, her brother William said, “I would judge it would be best for you to be back at the time appointed.”
It was about eleven o’clock on the evening of Thursday, October 20, 1836, when Andrew arrived at the White House, and as he sat down to write Emily the next day he knew what she would want to hear: “Your numerous friends in the City inquire with the greatest affection and solicitude about your health and express an earnest hope that it will be in your power to come on here in the course of the winter.” Warm words, and calculated, for he had had little opportunity to field a large number of inquiries about her. To his credit, he tried to be reassuring. “I will see that all your dresses and other articles are properly attended to,” he said. “You shall hear from me again in a few days. In the meantime I trust I shall receive a letter from you and that the inquietude of mind which I have [had] since I left you may be less afflicting.”
Andrew had two duties at hand. Though he served as the president’s private secretary, he earned a salary signing public land warrants for the General Land Office, and he had forty thousand documents awaiting him. Jackson, meanwhile, needed him to work on his annual message. Trapped between duty to his wife and his White House obligations, Andrew struck pleading notes in his letters home:
I trust, my dear Emily, that you will not allow my necessary absence from you at this time to prey on your spirits. The business which made it incumbent upon me to come here I am dispatching as fast as possible, and I shall certainly be able to join you in the course of the first week of December.… There is nothing, my dear, that I possess that will not be fully given to secure the recovery of your health, for without you neither life nor property can be worth anything to me.
Summoning her strength, Emily wrote to Andrew and, struggling to act as though things were normal, enclosed a list of clothes the children needed purchased in Washington.
Perhaps prodded by Donelson, Jackson wrote Emily, too, emphasizing the significance of Donelson’s mission in the White House, arguing that Donelson would have been subject to attack if he had not come on to Washington—an appeal that had a good chance of resonating with the politically sensitive Emily. “The Major is working night and day to get his work in signing patents so that he may return to you—he had upwards of 40,000 when he reached here to sign all prepared for his signature. He will be with you the first moment after he can close this absolutely necessary duty, and my dear Emily you must bear his absence with patience as it is a very necessary … one … as these grants without his signature would have been entirely lost to the public and he subject to the censure of a vindictive world for the same.” Andrew, meanwhile, wrote with more straightforward sympathy and love: “I am constantly filled with apprehension lest something untoward should arise to lessen your comforts and interrupt the recovery of your health,” he told her. Perhaps most important, a date of departure for Andrew was fixed: he was to leave Washington for Nashville on Tuesday, November 22.
IN HER SICKROOM in Tennessee, Emily, between bouts of coughing and worries about fever, was sentimental about the flow of good wishes and prayers from Washington. Writing to Andrew on Friday, November 11, she “was so filled with gratitude for your constant attention and the solicitude and anxiety you all feel about me” that she said she “could not help crying.” She had been strong all autumn, refusing to succumb to self-pity.
Now, with these tears and with the promise of Andrew’s return, she indulged herself a bit. “I believe it is the first time I’ve been so foolish since you went away,” she said, and gave herself credit for her own steeliness: “Indeed I have borne your absence like a heroine [and] have not been low-spirited unless it was a very gloomy day.” She took her mind off her illness with activity, knitting stockings. The prognosis was mixed. “I have no pain, no night sweats, no flushing, but still I get my strength very slowly,” she said, though on a particularly good early November day she “did not lay down all day and rode out twice.”
In the White House, Donelson at last finished signing the patents, only to discover that Jackson “has made but little progress with his message”—and then, on the evening of Saturday, November 19, Jackson suffered his own hemorrhage attack. “Under the circumstances considering the near approach of Congress, and the great public responsibility resting upon him at this juncture, it would have been inexcusable for me to have left him,” Donelson told Emily on November 20. “My dear Emily do not allow yourself to be disturbed by the delay.… It will only be a few days of increased pain and anxiety to me—but if my prayers can avail anything—they will be days of returning power and strength to you.” Jackson came first. He always had.
From his own sickbed, Jackson reassured Emily on November 27 that all would be well: “You are young, and with care and good treatment, will outgrow your disease.” He then fell back on religious imagery, linking his own illness with hers:
My dear Emily—this chastisement by our Maker we ought to receive as a rebuke from Him, and thank him for the mildness of it—which was to bring to our view … that we are mere tenants at will here. And we ought to live daily so as to be prepared to die; for we know not when we may be called home. Then let us receive our chastisements as blessings from God, and let us so live that we can say with the sacred poet:
What though the Father’s rod
Drop a chastising stroke,
Yet, lest it wound their souls too deep,
Its fury shall be broke.
Deal gently, Lord, with those
Whose faith and pious fear,
Whose hope, and love, and every grace,
Proclaim their hearts sincere.
I must close with my blessing to you and the children. May God bless you all. Emily, farewell.
Emily waited, but still Andrew did not come. There was always something to detain him. On Thursday, December 1, Jackson wrote in a note to young Jackson Donelson, “Your dear papa … was to have left this morning, but owing to my debility remains today and tomorrow to have my Message copied well and prepared for transmission to Congress next Tuesday—say to your dear Mama that I regret that he should be thus one moment detained from her.” In this difficult moment another ancient dynamic was at work: the avuncular encouragement of great ambitions for a young Donelson by Andrew Jackson. While Andrew Donelson the father worked on the presidential message, while Emily Donelson the mother lay ill, possibly dying, Andrew Jackson the uncle was urging their son to think of high station. “I wish you to attend to your education … recollect that you never can become a great man (which I wish you, and fondly hope you will become) without a good and liberal education.… I hope you will become a great good and enlightened man.”
In a few lines jotted to Emily, Jackson added: “Your dear husband is well—was to have left us this morning but on yesterday it was determined to abridge part of my Message and from my debilitated state he has determined to wait until Saturday [December 3]…. I am slowly mending—take care of yourself and I am sure you will outgrow your attacks, which may God grant is the prayer of your affectionate uncle.”
Andrew left for Nashville on that Saturday, December 3, but Emily had already begun to fail. “Emily grows worse and worse, weaker and weaker daily, and to hope is almost hopeless,” wrote her relative James Glasgow Martin. “Major Donelson is not at home, which is a matter of regret to us all, tho’ expected by the 15th of this month, this may be in time to see his beloved once more, but is uncertain.”
As Andrew drew closer to Nashville, Emily slipped ever further away. The sto
ry is told that a small bird flew into Emily’s room at sunset one December day, and she stopped the children from trying to capture it. “Don’t disturb it, darling,” Emily said. “Maybe it comes to bid me prepare for my flight to another world.… Don’t forget mama; love her always and try to live so that we may all meet again in heaven.” On Friday, December 16, she thought the end had come, and she said good-bye to the children. She asked to be settled in bed with a view of the road.
She would wait, she said, until her husband reached home.
EMILY’S DEATH CAME to Jackson in a dream. Asleep in his bedroom in the White House on that winter Friday, he awoke from a vision of Emily in heaven, and he quickly wrote Andrew, who was still en route to Nashville. “I grow more anxious about the fate of our dear Emily—I had an extraordinary dream last night,” Jackson said, “that adds to my anxiety on her account.” He wrote these words on the eighth anniversary of Rachel’s initial collapse inside the Hermitage in 1828—the collapse that marked the beginning of her final days. His message to Donelson is virtually breathless with his fright at the vision of Emily’s death: “If Providence has called her home I am persuaded she has a happy immortality—still I hope our … redeemer has spared her for the benefit of her dear children, and a comfort and consolation to you—we all join in prayers for her speedy recovery.”
The sleeping Jackson, however, was closer to the truth than the waking one. On Monday, December 19, 1836, her husband still on his way to Nashville, Emily Donelson died. She was twenty-nine years old.
HER MOTHER DELAYED the burial, and finally, two days later, on the morning of Wednesday, December 21, Andrew Donelson arrived. “I thanked her from the bottom of my heart, for it was some relief to its desolation to have the privilege of beholding once more the being it had loved almost to idolatry,” Donelson wrote Jackson.