by Jon Meacham
Andrew Jackson, Jr., a ward of the president’s who took care of the Hermitage in Jackson’s absence, was perennially hapless, running into debt and ultimately dying in a hunting accident.
Sarah Yorke Jackson of Philadelphia married Andrew, Jr., in 1833, and quickly joined Emily as a source of comfort to the aging president.
In 1780, Banastre Tarleton, a brutal British commander, led a massacre of Americans in Andrew Jackson’s Waxhaw.
As a fourteen-year-old during the Revolutionary War, Andrew Jackson refused to shine a British officer’s boots. The officer struck Andrew with a sword, scarring Andrew’s hand and leaving a deep gash in his head, a wound he carried for the rest of his life.
After the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, where Jackson defeated the Red Sticks, a part of the Creek tribe, he adopted an orphaned infant, Lyncoya, and sent him to Rachel at the Hermitage to raise. Lyncoya died of tuberculosis in 1828, the year Jackson was elected president.
Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans on January 8, 1815, transformed him into a figure of national renown. His military fame would ultimately propel him to the presidency.
The ninth anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, in January 1824, brought five of the great figures of the age together in the White House: left to right, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams. Three of them—Jackson, Clay, and Adams—competed against one another for the presidency later that year.
A collector of political gossip and a translator of the classics, John Quincy Adams was James Monroe’s secretary of state before winning the presidency in the House in 1825. Defeated by Jackson in 1828, Adams was elected to the House of Representatives in 1830, where he served for nearly two decades.
Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, presided over the White House from 1825 to 1829. Her letters are witty, perceptive accounts of life in the capital through several decades.
The 1828 presidential campaign was particularly brutal. Jackson was attacked for alleged military atrocities in handbills like this one, while his supporters accused John Quincy Adams of procuring women for the Russian czar and of lavishly spending public money on fancy china and billiards for the White House.
Washington in the age of Jackson was taking familiar shape, with the Capitol (the dome not yet completed) to the right and the White House to the left. This painting, entitled The City of Washington from Beyond the Navy Yard, was done in 1833, the midpoint of Jackson’s White House years.
Jackson takes the presidential oath from Chief Justice John Marshall on Wednesday, March 4, 1829, on the East Portico of the Capitol. John Quincy Adams had not been invited to the ceremony, and learned of the transfer of power when he heard the cannon fire greeting Jackson’s oath.
The White House as it appeared for much of Jackson’s presidency.
Francis Scott Key had thought the stately scene of the huge crowds at the Capitol “sublime”; the storming of the White House later in the afternoon led Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story to lament the beginning of what he called “the reign of King Mob.”
A painting captures the chaos and joy of the post-inaugural festivities at the White House in 1829. Jackson’s aides had to form a protective circle around him and spirit him to safety at his hotel as the crowds cavorted.
Variously known as “the Sly Fox” and “the Little Magician,” Martin Van Buren of New York served as Jackson’s secretary of state, then vice president. He was a critical adviser, a cautious, calculating figure who took regular horseback rides with the president.
John C. Calhoun was Jackson’s vice president from 1829 to 1832, and hoped to succeed to the presidency himself. A nationalist as a younger man, in middle age Calhoun came to believe in the theory of nullification, which Jackson considered a step toward secession. It was rumored that medals emblazoned JOHN C. CALHOUN: FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY were being struck.
Shrewd, secretive, and devoted to Jackson, Amos Kendall was an invaluable adviser, quick with a pen, and a master of political organization in the early stages of the creation of what became the Democratic Party.
“Send it to Bla-ar” was a common order from Jackson once Francis Preston Blair arrived in the capital to edit the Washington Globe, the administration’s newspaper. Jackson grew so close to Blair’s family that he gave Rachel’s wedding ring to one of Blair’s daughters.
Author, social chronicler, and longtime Washingtonian, Margaret Bayard Smith kept an invaluable diary of politics and people in the capital from Jefferson forward.
The failed architect of a “Christian Party in Politics” and the man who first wrote Jackson about the alleged sexual improprieties of Margaret Eaton, Ezra Stiles Ely was a prominent Presbyterian minister from Philadelphia. John Quincy Adams thought him “a busybody clergyman.” Ely’s interest in fallen women, or at least supposedly fallen women, was perennial: he had written a book about his ministry among prostitutes in New York City.
Joel R. Poinsett was Jackson’s man on the ground in South Carolina in the tense days of the nullification crisis in 1832–1833. “Keep me advised constantly,” Jackson told Poinsett. Both men feared civil war might be imminent.
Known as “the Christian Statesman,” Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey led the Senate fight against Jackson’s Indian policy.
Jackson and the Donelsons, however, were not true provincial revolutionaries. They were sophisticated about the ways and means of society and their connection to the ways and means of politics. Ralph Waldo Emerson—who, in the early years of the Jackson presidency, was a Unitarian minister at the Second Church in Boston—once wrote that “there is properly no history, only biography.” Even at the pinnacle, politics is intensely personal. People who believe they are valued and set apart in the mind of a leader are less likely to be implacable foes. Jackson knew that both men and massive, impersonal forces shaped nations, and he was determined to use his own personality to, if not convert, then at least charm those who shaped the climate of opinion in which he was to govern.
Hence the sweetness to the Smiths on their first visit and the calls on Mrs. Randolph: better to keep the establishment close, or at least off guard, than to alienate it altogether. The fact of a president’s power and the White House itself are the most formidable weapons on the field. It is the unusual political creature who will not be softened, at least briefly, by the gift of attention from the incumbent, especially if the gift is bestowed within the walls of the White House.
LITTLE IN WASHINGTON was as it seemed. John Campbell and Ezra Ely, clergymen who were supposed to be above the social and political fray, were instead spreading stories of sin and scandal. Emily and Andrew, the family Jackson had thought he could count on no matter what, were failing to follow his wishes with enthusiasm. He had a vice president hostile to the supremacy of the Union. John Eaton, far from being the rock on which Jackson could rely in the Cabinet, was the source of chaos.
Martin Van Buren was, for Jackson, a surprising figure of order. They began riding on horseback most days, and the intimacy of those hours created a strong bond between the president and his secretary of state. The diminutive New Yorker and gaunt Tennessean made an unlikely match. “We are getting along extremely well.… The President proves to be in all respects a finer man than I anticipated,” Van Buren wrote a friend.
Van Buren knew that Jackson’s political isolation could be disastrous. Elected by a coalition of regions and interests, Jackson could not afford to cut ties to all who disagreed with him. In Washington, as in capitals everywhere, this afternoon’s foe may become this evening’s ally. Politics is rather like a theatrical company in which a troupe of actors are cast in different roles depending on the moment or the issue at hand.
In this spirit, Van Buren asked Jackson about going to pay a call on John Quincy Adams. Van Buren did not expect Jackson to come along; he simply wanted to clear his course with the president. Such a courtesy toward Adams could not hurt,
and might one day help, for Van Buren’s goal as he took up his duties at the State Department was not only the success of the Jackson years but the elimination of Calhoun as a rival to follow Jackson. Keeping up warm—or at least warmish—relations with the former president from New England was good politics for a New Yorker with national ambitions at a time when the South was inclined in another direction. Jackson heard Van Buren out and approved. Though he hated Adams for what he believed to be the former president’s role in the 1828 attacks on Rachel, Jackson recognized the value of loyalty. If Van Buren wanted to see Adams, then Van Buren should see Adams.
Greeting Van Buren on the first Saturday in April, the former president was at once pleased and sour. Rejected by the voters, ignored by Jackson, struggling to find solace in literature (he was reading the eleventh Philippic of Cicero) and gossip, the former president, remembering his days of power, confided his self-pity to his diary, writing that “all the members” of Jackson’s administration “have been with me upon terms of friendly acquaintance, and have repeatedly shared the hospitalities of my house.” But Adams was no longer either on the rise or at the pinnacle. And so, Adams wrote, “they have all gradually withdrawn from all social intercourse with me.” Receiving Van Buren, Adams was grateful for the attention. “Of the new Administration he is the only person who has shown me this mark of common civility,” Adams noted. The two spoke of the weather, and of ongoing negotiations about American trade with Turkey and access to the Black Sea.
Congratulating himself that he had been “very cordially received by Mr. Adams,” Van Buren believed that his mission to Meridian Hill, the Adams home in Washington, to “reestablish friendly relations” between Jackson and Adams had a “good prospect of success.”
Writing in his diary that evening, Adams assessed Van Buren coldly and accurately: Van Buren was, Adams said, “by far the ablest man of them all, but wasting most of his ability upon mere personal intrigues.… His principles are all subordinate to his ambition, and he will always be of that doctrine upon which he shall see his way clear to rise.”
VAN BUREN LIKED everyone to like him. Toward the end of a visit with Emily and Mary Eastin one day in the spring, Margaret’s name came up in conversation. Though Van Buren was in the Eatons’ camp, he knew Emily’s views and had therefore kept his own opinions on the matter to himself when he was in her company. In the Washington of that time, though, it was impossible to go long without talking over what Van Buren called “the Eaton malaria,” and Emily, anxious to know Van Buren’s thinking, could not stand his diplomatic silence any longer. In a tone that Van Buren thought “conveyed, tho’ gently, a complaint of my reserve,” Emily “expressed her surprise that whilst almost every tongue in the city was canvassing [Margaret’s] merits and demerits, she had never heard me say anything upon the subject.” Van Buren had to leave, but agreed to come back another day to take up this most sensitive of subjects.
Returning, he heard Emily explain herself in terms that were consistent with her earliest letters on the subject. It was not Margaret’s virtue that worried her, she said; it was, rather, Margaret’s abrasive personality. Van Buren heard Emily out, then, in a failed avuncular maneuver, committed the same sin Eaton had in his letter by suggesting that Emily was “being controlled in her course by persons” whom she esteemed—the established families in Washington again—and who had “unduly influenced” her.
At this Emily’s rage began to rise. Failing to detect her anger, Van Buren charged forward. This was about more than society, he lectured: it was about “the situation of her Uncle” and “the difficulties he had to contend with in the performance of his public duties”—as though Emily did not already appreciate the political stakes. Van Buren then pushed yet further. Emily’s decisions, he said, were affecting “the peace and harmony” of the family circle Jackson loved, causing Jackson “misery.” Mary Eastin, who had been listening to Van Buren’s speech, was horrified by his candor. Grasping Emily’s fury, Mary “sought to hide her emotions by gradually withdrawing herself from sight in the embrasure of the window,” Van Buren recalled, and she “sobbed aloud.” At this point, at the sound of Mary’s crying, Van Buren realized the effect his words were having on Emily. Suddenly he saw that Emily, far from benefiting from his counsel, was “deeply agitated” and “offended.”
Van Buren nearly panicked. “I rose from my seat, begging her to excuse whatever I might, under the excitement of the moment, have said to hurt her feelings,” Van Buren recalled. Retreating, he “asked her permission to drop the subject”—which they did.
IT WAS A tense time. Living in close quarters, in daily if not hourly contact with Jackson, Andrew and Emily knew how important the Eaton question was to the president. They were there to comfort and to serve, not to antagonize, yet they had made their choice and they were as subject to the paralyzing force of pride as Jackson was.
On an excursion aboard the steamboat Potomac to Norfolk, Virginia, a few months later, in July, the Eatons joined Jackson, the Donelsons, and others for the trip. At Alexandria an artillery company fired a salute to the president; crowds of admirers awaited on the beach at Norfolk. Emily was nearly eight months pregnant, and the midsummer voyage proved too much for her. As the boat moved south, she began to feel faint. Margaret offered her fan and cologne bottle, essential tools for a fainting woman in the early nineteenth century. Even in distress, though, Emily remained consistent in her aversion to Margaret—an aversion that was by now visceral. She would not accept Margaret’s help, and in her refusal made it obvious that she would rather collapse in a heap than be indebted to Margaret Eaton for anything.
As Emily fainted, the spurned Margaret grew furious. Andrew, who was elsewhere on the Potomac, was summoned, and once Emily was made comfortable, he saw Margaret “betray an extraordinary discomposure of temper,” as he put it. Puzzled about what had happened—but sure that something had—Andrew escorted Margaret off the boat once it had docked for, he said, “the purpose of ascertaining the cause” of her latest fit of anger. “She informed me … that Mrs. Donelson had … showed a disposition not to be intimate with her,” Andrew recalled.
Hot and humiliated, Margaret overplayed her hand. Rather than letting the events of the day speak for themselves—that she had acted charitably when faced with a crisis, and Emily had been cold and possibly rude—Margaret let her hatred for the couple overwhelm her. As Donelson recalled it, she announced that she felt “pity” for Andrew and Emily, for Jackson “had agreed that if we did not behave differently … to send us back to Tennessee.”
Her presumption infuriated Andrew, but even he, as close as he was to Jackson, could not be certain whether Margaret had the power to displace Jackson’s closest family. The fear of a woman’s secret hand at court had ancient roots, and the worry about what Duff Green, the editor of the Telegraph, called Margaret’s “secret influence” over not only society but politics was making a nervous capital even more so. “The interference of the lady in matters of public concern, her active interference in appointments, and the success of applicants who threw themselves on her influence, soon provoked inquiry and much speculation as to her private character, and rumor was again busy with her reputation,” Green said.
It is unlikely that such charges were true. Eaton and Lewis certainly had influence with Jackson, and observers inclined to do so could attribute the Eaton-Lewis faction’s victories in the administration to Eaton’s wife. In political terms, however, the facts mattered little. It was said that Margaret “flatters up the old General in great style and it runs down even to the hem of his garment like oil.” People believed Margaret to be a power, and the idea that appointments were decided, even in part, “as the means of gratifying the private pique of a vain and indiscreet, if not a guilty woman,” Green said, made life more complicated and difficult for Jackson.
ON THE EVENING of Wednesday, August 19—the weather was lovely—Jackson again boarded the Potomac to retreat to the Rip Raps, Virginia, a sea
side military enclave near Norfolk. On the trip south through the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, his mind returned, as it did often, to Rachel and to Tennessee. He was worried about the only thing he could do for her now: the tending of her grave. Writing to Andrew Jackson, Jr., Jackson wondered “whether the weeping willows that we planted” around the tomb were “growing, or whether the flowers reared by her industrious and beloved hands have been set around the grave as I had requested.” It was not an idle question. “My dear son, inform me on this subject,” Jackson wrote. “You know it is the one dearest to my heart, and her memory will remain fresh there as long as life lasts.”
Within his circle, matters of the heart, from love to jealousy, were bringing him only misery. Amid everything else Jackson had to deal with, Andrew junior had been troubling the president with a debate about whether to marry a girl he was courting in Tennessee. Jackson was cool to the idea, hoping that the twenty-year-old Andrew would wait to wed. Writing from aboard the Potomac, though, Jackson had only a small hope that his son would heed him. No one else he loved seemed to be listening to him on personal matters. “I beg you, my son, enter into no more love affairs until you see me,” Jackson wrote. “You have many years yet for the improvement of your mind and to make a selection of a companion.”
Finishing his fatherly admonition, Jackson arrived at the Rip Raps, where the military was building a fortress named after Calhoun in recognition of the vice president’s service as secretary of war under Monroe. Steaks, English cheese, turtle soup, veal, ducks, and a gallon of whiskey were ordered in over the ten-day stay. Newspapers reported Jackson’s relaxing routine, telling readers that the president had been “inhaling the salubrious ocean breeze, and daily taking the salt water bath.” Jackson also dealt with correspondence and, the Richmond Enquirer said, “is at all times accessible and affable to those who call on him merely en passant, and appears to enjoy a fine flow of spirits for an invalid.” The only seaside peril he encountered: a sea-nettle jellyfish stung him, inflaming his forehead.
