American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  Eaton, a longtime senator from Tennessee and a Jackson strategist, was the friend Jackson chose. Born in Halifax County, North Carolina, in 1790, Eaton attended the University of North Carolina and trained as a lawyer. He moved to Franklin, Tennessee, near Nashville, in 1808, served in the War of 1812 under General Jackson, and married Myra Lewis, a ward of Jackson’s. (William Lewis married a sister of the first Mrs. Eaton; both sisters were dead by the time Jackson became president.) When John Reid, one of Jackson’s military aides, died before completing a biography of the general, Eaton stepped in to complete the work, which was published in 1817. He served as a U.S. senator from Tennessee from 1818 to 1829, and in that decade played a key role in the construction of Jackson’s national political career. Eaton defended Jackson in the Washington debate over the general’s invasion of Florida, and he wrote The Letters of Wyoming, a widely published case for Jackson’s election in 1824. Jackson trusted him implicitly.

  In coming to the Cabinet, Eaton brought Jackson a measure of comfort, the reassurance of years of loyalty, a usually sharp political sense—and a new wife, Margaret, the daughter of a Washington innkeeper named William O’Neale. The O’Neale boardinghouse was popular with visiting legislators like Eaton, and Andrew Jackson himself, who lived at the O’Neales’ during his brief return to Congress from 1823 to 1825.

  Married on New Year’s Day 1829, the Eatons immediately created chaos in the capital. The source of the controversy: the new Mrs. Eaton’s sexual virtue. In the years before their wedding, Kendall wrote Blair, “Eaton boarded at her father’s, and scandal says they slept together.” One of Emily’s first letters home from Washington reported that “there has been a good deal of discontent manifested here about the cabinet and particularly the appointment of Major Eaton.” The crux of the matter: “His wife is held in too much abhorrence here ever to be noticed or taken into society.”

  HER FULL NAME was Margaret O’Neale Timberlake Eaton. Beautiful and brash, aggressive and ambitious, Margaret Eaton seems to have had few impulses on which she did not act, few opinions that she did not offer, few women whom she did not offend—and few men, it appears, whom she could not charm if she had the chance to work on them away from their wives. A contemporary described her almost breathlessly: “Her form, of medium height, straight and delicate, was of perfect proportions.… Her skin … of delicate white, tinged with red.… Her dark hair, very abundant, clustered in curls about her broad, expressive forehead. Her perfect nose, of almost Grecian proportions, and finely curved mouth, with a firm, round chin, completed a profile of faultless outlines.”

  Adept at the barroom art of creating a sense of intimacy with paying customers, Margaret was outspoken and outrageous in an age that tended to value tact. In the months after her marriage to Eaton, Margaret became the subject of rumors about alleged sexual exploits. Her first husband, John Timberlake, a navy purser, died in 1828. It was said that, despondent over her unfaithfulness, he had slit his own throat. She was alleged to have become pregnant while her husband was away at sea. She reportedly passed a man in a hallway with no flicker of recognition—forgetting that she had slept with him. She was supposed to be pregnant by Eaton, who had done the gentlemanly thing and married her; the two were also said to have registered in a New York hotel as man and wife while Timberlake was alive. By her own account, Margaret had been trouble from the beginning, an out-going flirt from childhood forward. “I suppose I must have been very vivacious,” she said in her old age. “I was a lively girl and had many things about me to increase my vanity and help to spoil me. While I was still in pantalets and rolling hoops with other girls I had the attentions of men, young and old, enough to turn a girl’s head.”

  At various points in her youth she was courted by an adjutant general, a major, and a captain—which delighted her. “The fact is, I never had a lover who was not a gentleman and was not in a good position in society,” she said.

  Her passions came and went—urgent one moment, gone the next. Her tongue was ungoverned, and ungovernable. “It must be remembered that I had been raised in the gayest society and was naturally of a mercurial temperament,” Margaret said. “I must have said a great many foolish things. I am sure I did very few wise ones. I was foolish, hasty, but not vicious.” After she married Timberlake she lived in her father’s house when her husband was at sea.

  It is impossible at this distance (as it was even then) to assess the truth of the charges against her. Margaret herself offered an interesting defense: “Just let a little common sense be exercised,” she said. “While I do not pretend to be a saint, and do not think I ever was very much stocked with sense, and lay no claim to be a model woman in any way, I put it to the candor of the world whether the slanders which have been uttered against me are to be believed.” What is certain is that the stories were in circulation—and that Margaret’s demeanor made things worse.

  Jackson did not care. A hopelessly romantic matchmaker, he had advised Eaton to marry Margaret after Timberlake’s death. “Why, yes, Major,” Jackson said, “if you love the woman, and she will have you, marry her by all means.” When Eaton said there were rumors that he and Margaret had cuckolded Timberlake, Jackson replied, “Well, your marrying her will disprove these charges.” Loyal to Eaton, unable to keep himself from seeing parallels between the attacks on Rachel and the rumors about Margaret, the president drew on one of his oldest instincts: defend friends against all comers. Of Eaton, Jackson said, “I will sink or swim with him, by God,” and he meant it.

  Down the hall, in the Donelsons’ small suite, Emily took a different view. “The ladies here with one voice have determined not to visit her,” she wrote home. It was a determination that would help change the course of American politics.

  Had the conflict simply been about who was asked to dine at whose tables, or to visit, then the Eaton saga would be interesting but not especially important, an early Washington scandal about sexual mores. As improbable as it sounds, though, the future of the presidency was at stake.

  “The whole will be traced to what I always suspected,” Jackson once told Emily. He believed the campaign against the Eatons to be “a political maneuver by disappointed ambition to coerce Major Eaton out of the Cabinet and lessen my standing with the people so that they would not again urge my reelection.” There was another, equally important possibility: even if Jackson decided not to seek another term himself, he would still have a strong hand in choosing a political heir from within his party. And loyalty to the Eatons was now a test of loyalty to Jackson. “It is odd enough, that the consequences of this dispute in the social and fashionable world are producing great political effects, and may very probably determine who shall be successor to the present chief magistrate,” said Daniel Webster.

  That the race for the White House in a large republic should have been affected by the sexual history of the wife of the secretary of war seems bizarre; yet politics is often driven not only by large ideas about policy and destiny but by affections and animosities. From Helen of Troy to Henry VIII, what Alexander Pope called “trivial Things” in The Rape of the Lock have led to wars, revolutions, and reformations, and so it was to be in the administration of the seventh president of the United States.

  CHAPTER 5

  LADIES’ WARS ARE

  ALWAYS FIERCE AND HOT

  THE EATON CRISIS began, in a way, in the vice president’s boardinghouse, an exclusive enclave run by Mrs. Eliza Peyton on the northwest corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourth Street. Frightened by a spate of sickness among their children the year before—sickness they believed was exacerbated by Washington’s humidity—the Calhouns had given up their Georgetown mansion, Oakly (later known as Dumbarton Oaks), and were planning to move the family back to South Carolina. With the big house above Rock Creek gone, the Calhouns took lodgings at Mrs. Peyton’s.

  The boardinghouse was well known and high toned, home at different times to men such as Webster and Clay. It was here, a dozen blocks from the Whi
te House, that the Eatons, in the weeks after their New Year’s 1829 marriage, came to pay a call on the Calhouns. Even if Margaret had been diffidently charming or subtly ingratiating—and she was neither—she stood little chance of winning Floride over. Mrs. Calhoun was a complex woman, demanding in private one moment, attentive and caring among others the next. “You could not fail to love and appreciate, as I do,” one of her Washington friends wrote of her, “her charming qualities; a devoted mother, tender wife, industrious, cheerful, intelligent, with the most perfectly equable temper.”

  Calhoun himself might have dissented on this last point. Diminutive but powerful, Mrs. Calhoun had what her husband called a “suspicious and fault-finding temper.” She came from South Carolina aristocracy. Each summer her family had climbed into a beautiful coach to be driven from their mansion on the Cooper River to spend the season in Newport, Rhode Island. Calhoun would neither confront nor contradict her. Once, after a quarrel between Floride and the couple’s eldest son, Calhoun wrote the son: “As to the suspicion and unfounded blame of your Mother, you must not only bear them, but forget them.” Floride’s stormy temperament, Calhoun added, had long been “the cause of much vexation in the family,” and “I have borne with her with patience, because it was my duty to do so, and you must do the same, for the same reason. It has been the only cross of my life.”

  As Floride went, so went the Calhoun clan. She had brought the money to the marriage and was the kind of established Southern woman whose embrace and acceptance Emily Donelson, as a daughter of the Southwest, felt she needed to thrive in Washington. Tennesseans could be socially insecure around old South Carolina families. The frontier was newer and rougher, the silver not quite as old, the oil portraits not quite as ubiquitous. Calhoun had married up when Floride accepted him, and felt a disparity in the social calculus of their household. She was not a tyrant, not exactly. The toll she exacted on her husband appears to have been more insidious, more gradual, a sure and certain drain on his emotional reserves.

  Now, sitting alone—the vice president was out—as Floride looked up to find that she had callers, she was about to become a sure and certain drain on his political ones.

  AS THE EATONS entered the room, Floride did not know who Margaret was; the servant had failed to announce the guests by name. It was only when she recognized Eaton, who had served in the Senate over which her husband presided, that she realized who had come to call. The visit does not appear to have lasted long, though it passed decorously enough. “She of course treated them with civility,” Calhoun said of his wife and the Eatons. “She could not with propriety do otherwise.”

  The Eatons left, and when Calhoun returned, as he later drily wrote, “The relation which Mrs. Eaton bore to the society of Washington became the subject of some general remarks”—general remarks, one suspects, that most likely touched on charges of adultery. The conversation was more than idle gossip: Floride had to decide whether to pay a visit to the Eatons—a sign, in the etiquette of the day, that Mrs. Calhoun recognized Mrs. Eaton as a respectable member of the Washington society in which the wives of the great lived.

  She made her decision overnight: she would not return the call. To Floride, who was about to leave town in any event, the rumors about Margaret’s sexual transgressions were credible enough to keep the wife of the vice president of the United States from being on social terms with the wife of the secretary of war. Calhoun acquiesced, a choice that put the vice president in conflict with the president, for the political consequences of one’s decision about whether to accept the Eatons as social equals were already clear. To acknowledge the Eatons was to side with Jackson; to snub the Eatons was to oppose Jackson.

  JOHN QUINCY ADAMS liked to think of himself as a man removed from the strife of party and the scramble for power. Yet for all his scholarly interests—his readings in the classics, his writing of poetry, his meditations on scripture—Adams could never fully control his addiction to politics and public intrigue. His diaries and correspondence are replete with rumors and reports about the White House and the Capitol, the departments and the drawing rooms. In his diary in early 1829, Adams noted that a friend of his was “much scandalized by the ascendancy of Mrs. Eaton; lately Mrs. Timberlake.” Writing his son about the Calhouns and the Eatons, Adams said that the vice president “forsooth was a Man of Morals, and his wife had been the first to exclaim … ‘I so hate a whore.’ ” (Adams marked through the word “whore,” but not so much that it could not be read.) At the time of the inauguration in 1829, in the aftermath of the Eaton call, Adams added, Floride gave “public notice … that sooner than submit to the contamination of [Margaret’s] society, she would not show her face at Washington.”

  Louisa Adams, the former president’s wife, was even more explicit. “War is declared between some of the ladies in the city, and … ladies’ wars are always fierce and hot,” she wrote their son.

  SUCH WAS THE atmosphere when Martin Van Buren arrived at the White House on his first evening in Washington on Sunday, March 22, 1829. Greeting Jackson in the shadows of the president’s office—there was just one candle burning—Van Buren, in town to begin his work as secretary of state, thought Jackson’s health “poor, and his spirits depressed as well by his recent bereavement of his wife.” He was right on both counts. Intuitive about the intricacies of power, Van Buren assessed the reality of life in the White House. “The cast of the Cabinet carried a suspicion to the minds of many … that Eaton and Lewis had exerted a preponderating influence in its construction,” Van Buren recalled. The result: “Jealousies and enmities accordingly sprang up … many of which were never healed.” Andrew Donelson, Van Buren added, “partook largely of this feeling.”

  Small in stature—he was about five feet six inches tall—Van Buren was the son of a tavern keeper and farmer in Kinderhook, New York, near Albany. Born in 1782, he grew up around the politicians who gathered in his father’s establishment—guests included Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr—and, after training as a lawyer, he entered politics himself, serving as a state senator and New York attorney general before becoming a U.S. senator in 1821. A careful dresser, Van Buren was also careful about revealing too much of his own thinking or convictions; it was as though the son of the tavern keeper always wanted to keep his doors open and please as many people as he could. With his gift for building alliances, Van Buren engineered the Jackson-Calhoun victory in 1828 by, as he put it, uniting “the planters of the South and the plain republicans of the North.”

  VAN BUREN WAS a practical man, and his pragmatism faced an immediate test when he arrived in the capital. “You might as well turn the current of the Niagara with a ladies’ fan as to prevent scheming and intrigue at Washington,” he once said, and many intriguers were thinking about life after Jackson.

  The president himself was the architect of the constant campaign: he had begun running for 1828 on his way home from Washington in 1825. In politics, as in so many other spheres of life, success breeds imitation. As 1829 began, many expected Jackson to be a one-term president, if that. He was an old, wounded warrior, scarred, bullet-ridden, susceptible to all sorts of sickness. He suffered intermittent hemorrhages, which he would relieve by cutting his arm with a penknife to bleed himself. It was entirely possible he would not live to see 1833. The rumors of his death before the inauguration had been plausible enough, and he often referred to his own poor health, calling on Providence to see him through.

  Calhoun, Van Buren, and Clay were three of the men who longed for the presidency, obsessed over it, and judged what they did in the light of whether a given issue or question would advance or hinder their path to ultimate power. For them, succession was all. Clay would use any weapon that came to hand, including gossip, in hopes of winning the presidency four years hence. The current administration, Clay believed, was dangerous and usurping; Clay thought Jackson’s election “a calamitous event,” he wrote privately, and Jackson himself to be “feeble in body and mind, and irresolute.
” If he was to lead a restoration campaign, Clay knew he had to keep himself before the people. “We must never forget that we cannot make them lose sight of me,” Clay wrote an ally. “I cannot withdraw from the gaze of the public eye.”

  Inside the administration, the Van Buren–Calhoun contest was obvious to the political world even before Jackson’s inauguration. “Disguise it as we may, the friends of Van Buren and those of Calhoun are becoming very jealous of each other,” Pennsylvania congressman James Buchanan said on Thursday, January 22, 1829. Van Buren, meanwhile, was hearing from sympathetic South Carolinians that Calhoun might be vulnerable on the home front if attacked in Washington. “A display there [in Washington], adverse to him, will enable us to triumph over him and his friends there,” a foe of Calhoun’s, David R. Williams, wrote Van Buren in 1829. It was interesting intelligence for Van Buren, a rival of Calhoun’s.

  But Van Buren fought his wars with subtlety. He would begin his campaign for supremacy indirectly. Seeing the side the Calhouns had chosen, Van Buren—a widower—made the politically rational decision to take up the Eatons’ cause. James Parton looked back from the vantage point of the 1860s and, seeing that Van Buren had made it to the White House while Calhoun, and the South, were ruined, wrote that “the political history of the United States, for the last thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton’s knocker.”

  As Jackson saw things, Margaret was a convenient target for enemies who resented the president and the secretary of war. “If I had a tit for every one of these pigs to suck at, they would still be my friends,” Jackson said of Eaton’s foes. “They view the appointment of Eaton as a bar to them from office, and have tried here, with all the tools of Clay helping them on, to alarm and prevent me from appointing him.” Jackson’s interpretation of the Eaton affair was that he was acting for the common democratic good while aristocratic elites, jealous of his power in Washington, did everything they could to stop him. To Jackson, it was a matter of honor (he would not have his friend’s wife assaulted as his own wife had been) and of power, and he would not be moved.