In one sense, the travel made up for the women’s lack of formal education. Abigail Adams frequently complained that she had not had a single day of schooling in her entire life. Rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation remained mysteries all her life, and in her letters, she made one mistake after another. Wide reading and long sessions with her Grandmother Quincy supplied her with her frequent references to the classics but did not prepare her, Abigail acknowledged, for knowing everything people expected her to know.
The other first presidents’ wives came no better equipped. Dolley Madison had very little schooling, and during her husband’s administration she admitted that she read infrequently. When a young man asked about the Don Quixote volume in her hand, she explained it was just a prop, carried to provide for awkward breaks in conversation. Martha Washington had so much difficulty with spelling that George finally took to writing out her letters for her and having her copy them; but even then she managed to botch the job, carelessly converting his “describe” to “discribe” and using her own quaint versions of “boath” and “occation.”133 Too little is known of Elizabeth Monroe to make a judgment on her education, but neither she nor any of the others made any move to improve women’s education. Abigail Adams’s one daughter had little more schooling than her mother, and Martha Washington raised her granddaughter much as she had been raised, putting more importance on the spinet than on spelling.
Small improvements in women’s schooling in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth did not result from the example or the cajoling of the presidents’ wives. Some Americans argued that their sisters deserved education—it would make them better wives and better people. But the central argument was a practical one. As the country expanded westward, more teachers were needed. When the first girls’ academies opened in the 1780s and 1790s, their founders claimed to offer instruction on the same level as boys’ schools so that the graduates would be prepared to teach. Benjamin Rush, then professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading advocate of better education for girls, explained in 1787 to the first class of the Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia that they were there because of the country’s needs. Since American girls married earlier and assumed more responsibility for tutoring their children than did their European counterparts, they ought to go beyond basic math and reading, Rush said, to learn world history and geography.134 Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa Adams, and Abigail Adams learned their European history and geography first hand.
In assessing how each of the early First Ladies handled the responsibilities imposed on them when their husbands became president, it is safe to conclude that they reacted differently. Only Abigail Adams appears to have shaped the job more than it shaped her. She refused to be silenced, and, with her husband’s encouragement, continued to air her opinions. Whether such activity constitutes “feminism” is beside the point—Abigail demonstrated very early in the republic that the opportunity existed for a substantive role (alongside the ceremonial role) for spouses who wanted it—provided, of course, they had the consent of the president. The others, despite objections and occasional rebellions, acquiesced in limiting themselves to a supportive role reflecting the predominant attitude about femininity.
In many ways, the early presidents’ wives, along with their husbands, form a distinct group. Unlike those who followed them after 1829, the early chief executives are notable for their close personal connections and for their exceptional training. The wives also stand apart from their successors. In attempting to define just what demands their husbands’ jobs imposed on them, they collectively built the foundation for those who followed, and they anticipated most of the problems. With one eye on the rules of protocol and another on their husbands’ popularity, they sought (some more diligently than others) to find the middle ground. They worked to improve the President’s House, which served as their home as well as a national monument, and they struggled with the publicity that focused on them as a result of their husbands’ jobs. In the evident and continuing debate over just how much distance a president should keep between himself and the people, wives took an important part, striking a balance between commoner and queen.
2
Young Substitutes for First Ladies (1829–1869)
ANDREW JACKSON’S INAUGURATION IN 1829 signaled a new mood in the country—one that would affect presidents’ wives for decades to come. Crowds converged on the capital from all over the eastern seaboard, arriving in carriages and carts, wearing silk and homespun. Never one to disappoint crowds, the tall, white-haired war hero gave his speech, took the prescribed oath, kissed the Bible, and then in an immensely popular gesture bent in a low bow to the people. Word immediately went out that the President’s House was now the People’s House and open to all without distinction. Thousands headed towards it.
No precautions had been taken to protect the mansion’s furnishings, but the unexpectedly large crowd would have rendered such measures ineffective anyway. Glasses shattered and furniture broke as the hungry and curious surged towards tables where food, prepared for hundreds, proved insufficient. People filled their pockets as well as their stomachs. When the president was nearly crushed, one Jackson admirer and staunch defender of “people’s rule” decided this was going too far: “Ladies and gentlemen only had been expected at this Levée,” Margaret Bayard Smith, a newspaper editor’s wife, wrote, “not the people en masse…. Of all tyrants, they are the most ferocious, cruel and despotic.”1
Margaret Bayard Smith rebelled against much more than the results of a single election. The 1820s and 1830s introduced changes that eventually altered the entire process by which Americans advanced to the top of the political ladder. Instead of looking to a small party caucus for nomination, anyone hoping to be president had to appeal to a convention of delegates, many of whom were strangers. Most states gradually changed the qualifications for voting so that all adult white males—rather than just property owners—had the suffrage. Old traditions of deference to the rich and the well educated weakened, paving the way for new ideas about who was qualified for high office.
Historians at first emphasized the democratic flavor of the changes and argued that the common man acquired great power, but later scholars concluded that candidates for high political office still came from wealthy backgrounds no matter how humbly they presented themselves.2 Andrew Jackson, so frequently touted as defender and symbol of the common man, possessed enormous personal wealth, and most of the nineteenth-century presidents who claimed to have been born in log cabins actually came from much more prosperous beginnings.
Yet for all the shifting interpretations in American history, the fact remains that presidential styles changed after 1829 so that new importance was put on appearing “natural” rather than “cultured,” and “good” rather than “learned.” Heroes seemed to come from the ranks of the common folk rather than from the obvious elite. John Calhoun had commented in 1817 that the quality of congressmen had declined, a change he attributed to low salaries. Although that may have played some part, the addition of new western states was also relevant since frontier areas frequently elected representatives who had little formal education and even less regard for fixed class differences. Robert J. Hubbard, a congressman from upstate New York, reported with some shock to his wife in 1817 that his colleagues sat through legislative debates with their hats on, removing them only when they addressed the Speaker.3
Much more important than changes in etiquette, the new style in politics altered voters’ ideas about who merited consideration for election to the highest office in the land. After 1829, presidents more frequently owed their elevation to military victories or to mundane political apprenticeships than to diplomatic service abroad or to years of leadership as statesmen. Their wives came to “the head of female society” with entirely different experiences from their predecessors. These later women had not had the opportunity to develop Elizabeth Monroe’s familiarity with French philosophers or Louisa Adam
s’s habit of sprinkling letters with Latin phrases. Nor had they had the pleasure, or pain, of having been presented at the Court of St. James as had Abigail Adams. Many had not ventured far from the town where they were born until they journeyed to Washington.
Thus, presidents’ wives after 1829 lacked some of their predecessors’ training in etiquette, a lack deemed important by a segment of the Washington population that had taken upon itself the responsibility of formulating and enforcing rigid rules of protocol and style. Called the “cave dwellers,” because of their long and continued residence in Washington while elected officials and their families came and went like “a kaleidoscope that changed every four years,”4 the locals did not shrink from claiming prerogatives. Sarah Pryor, wife of a southern congressman and newspaper editor, explained how the “cave dwellers” held themselves apart, separate from the “floating population” of transients, reigning as a “fine society of old residents who never bent the knee to Baal … sufficient to itself, never seeking the new, while accepting it occasionally with discretion, reservations and much discriminating care.”5 Presidents’ wives always counted among the “floaters,” up for critical judgment by the entrenched jury.6
In the middle four decades of the nineteenth century, presidents’ wives frequently chose to abdicate their public roles rather than risk the censure of the “cave dwellers.” Most First Ladies moved to Washington when their husbands were inaugurated, but they delegated responsibility for official entertaining to someone else. From 1829 to 1869, it is the exceptional First Lady who carves out for herself a public role. In the entire time, only Sarah Polk (1845–1849) and Mary Todd Lincoln (1861–1865) achieved any kind of public recognition. The other administrations had stand-in chatelaines in charge at the President’s House.
Three presidents in the forty-year span had no choice but to rely on substitutes. Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren were both widowers and James Buchanan never married. While they could have followed Thomas Jefferson’s example and relied on the wife of a cabinet member or on some other mature woman for official hostessing, each chose, instead, a niece or daughter-in-law, all less than thirty years of age. The other nine presidents in this period did have wives but six of these women (Anna Harrison, Letitia Tyler, Margaret Taylor, Abigail Fillmore, Jane Pierce, and Eliza Johnson) pled poor health or grief and escaped performing the tasks that had come to be seen as traditional for a president’s wife. They turned to daughters or daughters-in-law to serve in their stead. Elizabeth Monroe (1817–1825) had taken a similar course, but what had been an exception during the first few administrations became a pattern now. The long reign of substitutes can hardly be explained away as mere coincidence.
Even the spirited Rachel Jackson, who died while preparing to move to Washington, made arrangements for her niece to take over as White House hostess. Earlier brushes with the “cave dwellers” had soured Rachel on the capital, and she made no secret of her distaste for returning to live there. When word reached her of Andrew’s victory in the 1828 election, she had explained, “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my Lord than live in that palace in Washington.”7 “For Mr. Jackson’s sake, I am glad, for my own part, I never wished it.”8
Staying in Tennessee and not going near Washington would have been Rachel’s preference, but she changed her mind after one of her husband’s supporters informed her that everyone was watching to see what she did. John Eaton, who later became Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war, wrote that if she failed to arrive she would not only disappoint her friends but also allow her “persecutors” to “chuckle” that they had scared her into staying away.9 Whether unwilling to disappoint her fans or stubborn about facing down her critics, Rachel started packing and called in friends to help update her wardrobe. She understood she would have to face the same old charges once again.
Rachel’s difficulties had begun many years before when she was just a teenager with more than her share of admirers around Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Described by a contemporary as of “medium height, [with a] beautifully moulded form, full red lips rippling with smiles and dimples,”10 she could ride a horse as well as anyone her age, tell the best stories, and dance the fastest.11 Among those who noticed her was Lewis Robards, and when she was eighteen, he married her. The couple went to live with his mother, who reigned as a kind of frontier aristocrat in that part of Kentucky. The elder Mrs. Robards got along well enough with Rachel but Lewis found fault with her every move. Abusive and jealous of even the slightest attention given her by other men, he soon sent her back to her mother. Attempts to patch up the marriage failed, and Rachel resolved to put as much distance as possible between herself and her husband. Neighbors said she feared bodily harm.
On her trip down the Mississippi to stay with relatives, Rachel had the company of two men—an elderly family friend and young Andrew Jackson, a boarder at her mother’s and an open admirer of the daughter. After settling her in Natchez, Andrew returned to Nashville but before long was back at her side. Believing that Lewis Robards had secured a divorce, as he had announced he would do, Rachel and Andrew were married in August 1791.
The young couple had anticipated Robards by some years; after obtaining permission from the Virginia legislature to end his marriage, he had failed to follow through. Whether from simple negligence or from other, more sinister motives, Robards waited three years and then asked for a divorce on the grounds that his wife was then living with another man. As soon as they heard what had happened, the Jacksons promptly remarried, but their mistake furnished their enemies with ammunition for years.
Such legal snags occurred frequently on the frontier and Rachel seems to have troubled herself very little about this one, but Andrew kept his dueling pistols oiled for thirty-seven years. His widowed mother had advised him as a youth not to expect law courts to protect him when words were at issue but to “settle them cases yourself.”12 He may well have smarted from the charge that a gentleman would have verified his bride’s divorce before marrying her; but whatever his reasons, his readiness to fight kept the subject alive long after gossip about it might have died out. In the process of defending his wife’s reputation, he invited many quarrels and received a bullet which he carried in his shoulder for twenty years.13
Rachel’s divorce was more than two decades old when she first accompanied Andrew to Washington in 1815 to celebrate his military victory at New Orleans. The Jackson marriage, although childless, appeared to be a happy one. That the capital gave Rachel such a cool welcome suggests that more than propriety was at issue. Her far bigger sin was her lack of both sophistication and education. As one social arbiter put it, “Mrs. Jackson is … totally uninformed in mind and manners,” adding gratuitously, “although extremely civil in her way.”14
Money was not the issue. Rachel’s parents were of some means, and her father, John Donelson, had served several terms in the Virginia House of Burgesses. But Rachel was a child of the frontier. One of eleven children, she had moved with her family from western Virginia to Tennessee and then to Kentucky, where schools were scarce. Nobody claimed her husband had benefited from much education but he had acquitted himself on the battlefield, an opportunity his wife never had. The same qualities of naturalness and strength that had contributed to his immense popularity and had provided his nickname, “Old Hickory,” became in his wife grounds for ridicule and exclusion. Women, especially the mature ones, were expected to represent culture, etiquette, and sophistication—not unstudied naturalness.
In no way did Rachel Jackson approach the accepted model of femininity. Nearing fifty by the time she made her first trip out of the Kentucky-Tennessee area, she had become set in her country ways. Tanned, leathery skin had replaced the creamy complexion of her youth. She preferred to ride a horse rather than sit in a carriage, and she cared little for fashions and cosmetics. Outside her family and friends, the Presbyterian church constituted her one interest, and a quiet evening at home smoking a pipe with Andrew remained her idea of
a good time.
Rachel Jackson’s additional transgression against prevailing standards of femininity was her stoutness. A miniature painted of her about 1815 shows a plump woman with dark curls under a lacy cap. Her eyes are placid and resigned rather than sharp or alert. She was, one observer noted, “fat, forty, but not fair.”15 Her girth had already provided a source of amusement in New Orleans, where Rachel had gone to help her husband celebrate his military victory. She had been dazzled by the sights of the city, but the local women had exhibited less enthusiasm for her and they had revived an old French saying to describe her: “She shows how far the skin can be stretched.”16 A cartoon made the rounds of New Orleans: it depicted Rachel being laced, without complete success, into a fashionably small-waisted dress. When she danced with Andrew, someone present described her as “a short, fat dumpling bobbing” opposite him.17
Hardly oblivious to the insults, Rachel preferred staying home. She reluctantly accompanied Andrew to Florida where he served as governor, but she caused him to turn down a subsequent appointment as ambassador to Mexico when she refused to go. Although she would have gladly confined herself to their Hermitage plantation the rest of her life, she braced herself for Washington and made her way there again in 1824 when Andrew took his Senate seat amid speculation that he stood next in line for the presidency.
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