by H. W. Brands
How clean Jackson got the Augean stables is hard to say. His enemies had reason to exaggerate the carnage among the officeholders and to emphasize the virtue of those let go, while his friends had incentive to understate the number of political replacements and cast most removals as dismissals for cause. The best estimate is that between one-tenth and one-fifth of federal officeholders were replaced during Jackson’s tenure other than by ordinary attrition. For obvious reasons, this figure was higher than under Jackson’s immediate predecessors, but it appears to be comparable with the turnover after Jefferson defeated John Adams.
Yet Jackson’s opponents had the last word, even if they stole it from a friend of the president. Governor William Marcy of New York applied the Jacksonian rule to his own state, without apology. “It may be, sir, that the politicians of New York are not so fastidious as some gentlemen are as to disclosing the principles on which they act. They boldly preach what they practice. When they are contending for victory, they avow their intention of enjoying the fruits of it. If they are defeated, they expect to retire from office. . . . They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belongs the spoils.”
Jackson insisted on calling his approach “rotation in office.” But “spoils system” was what stuck.
In the nineteenth century a new president had a long time to adjust to his surroundings before having to deal with Congress in a meaningful way. Each legislative session consisted of two terms: one beginning in December and running till the following summer, the other commencing in December again and lasting only till the end of winter. Jackson, like other presidents, was inaugurated at the tail end of the short session, which meant that he had till the following December—more than a year after he learned that he would be the next president—to prepare to do business with the legislators.
The long interval reflected the leisurely pace of life in those earlier days (compared, of course, with what would come), but it also manifested the limited expectations Americans had of government. The footprint of government in the daily life of the country was far smaller than it would be later. Regulations, taxes, and services that subsequent generations would take for granted simply didn’t exist. And the federal government’s portion of that smaller footprint was especially petite. The great majority of laws that touched the lives of citizens were written by their state legislatures. Politicians in Washington flattered themselves as being at the top of the food chain of government, and in certain respects they were. The great issues of war and peace were reserved to the federal government, as were relations among the states. But the smaller fish in the states collectively consumed far more of the attention—and resources—of the people than the whales in Washington.
With little substantive to consider during its first several months, a new administration could easily be distracted by matters of little substance. In Jackson’s case the distraction came from a direction he could never have expected. Just weeks before the inauguration, John Eaton married Margaret O’Neal Timberlake. Eaton had known Peg O’Neal for a decade, having stayed in the Washington house of her father, along with numerous other paying guests, including at times Jackson. Peg was just a girl during those early years, but she blossomed into a beauty noticed and desired by the boarders and many besides. She appreciated the attention, as did her father, who observed its positive effect on the guest traffic and did little to curtail her naturally flirtatious ways. In time she paired off with John Timberlake, a young naval officer, and the two were wed. But Timberlake’s duties took him from Washington for many months at a time, leaving Peg at her father’s house with the other guests, who found her more attractive than ever. And she was just as friendly as ever, which inevitably set tongues wagging with respect to her faithfulness to her far-off spouse.
In 1828 came news that Timberlake had died, apparently by his own hand. Peg weathered the blow remarkably well, and in fact soon engaged to marry Eaton, himself the loser of a spouse. The proposed union provoked a new round of whispers, with the undercurrent of innuendo being that the lovers had conspired most intimately against Timberlake while he was still alive and that perhaps their conspiracy had pushed him over the edge of self-destruction. Eaton heard the whispers and traveled to the Hermitage to ask Jackson for counsel.
Jackson could demonize male rivals in a moment, but he could never bring himself to think ill of a woman. His female models were his sainted mother, who had died in the service of himself, his brothers, and his cousins, and Rachel, whose virtue had been impugned far longer than Peg O’Neal’s and for no reason beyond the fame of her husband. Eaton arrived at the Hermitage before Rachel’s heart attack but after the stress of the campaign had inflicted its emotional toll, and as he spoke of Peg, Jackson could look across the parlor to where Rachel rocked by the fire, puffing her pipe, and wish for Eaton such happiness as she had brought him. In most definite terms he told Eaton to take Peg to his heart and let their enemies be damned. Eaton valued the encouragement and esteemed the old man more than ever on its account. “It was a matter of infinite satisfaction to me,” he wrote Jackson afterward, “to find that your advice and opinions accorded with my own. From that moment I was inspired with new and fresh decision as to the course to be pursued.”
The wedding took place in Washington on the first day of the new year, giving the capital gossips something to twitter about pending Jackson’s arrival. Their attention gradually strayed to such other topics as who would receive the plum appointments in the incoming administration, till the newlyweds hoped that the worst was over. But then Eaton himself landed the War Department, throwing him right back into the cauldron of political attack. His appointment reeked of favoritism, the critics said aloud, while behind their hands they murmured that a man who would steal another’s wife, driving the cuckold to kill himself, couldn’t be trusted with public money, the lives of America’s soldiers, or anything else important. Even some of Jackson’s allies, alarmed at the damage that might be done his presidency, gently encouraged him to reconsider Eaton’s nomination.
By now Rachel was dead, and Jackson deeply despondent. He had difficulty rousing himself for anything, including battle with his enemies. But the attacks on Peg Eaton, which appeared of a piece with those that had just killed his own beloved, stirred the old spirit. He rose to the defense of Peg. “Mrs. Eaton is as chaste as those who slander her,” he proclaimed. Of the tale that Timberlake had killed himself on account of Eaton, he thundered, “There never was a baser lie told.” He vowed never to listen to these “most unblushing and unfounded slanders” or to waver in his support for Eaton and Peg. “I would sink with honor to my grave before I would abandon my friend.”
Jackson succeeded in silencing some of the criticism. But for each rumor suppressed, another appeared. The most lurid asserted that Peg had become pregnant by Eaton and that the two, to hide their secret and their guilt, arranged an abortion. The rumors inspired a social boycott of the Eatons. Cabinet secretaries, being fewer in those days than they would become, were great men in Washington, and their wives were accustomed to visits by the wives of the influential and aspiring. But few women visited Peg Eaton. The wife of John Calhoun led the boycott, and the wives of several of Eaton’s cabinet colleagues joined it. Even Emily Donelson, the wife of Jackson’s nephew and personal secretary, refused to greet Peg Eaton.
Their behavior sorely tested Jackson’s faith in female virtue. He railed at the “ridiculous attitude” of those women who shunned Peg and called them “a group of gossips . . . whose principal business it is to run about the country and point to the mote in their brother or sister’s eye without being conscious of the beam that lurks in their own.” To a Nashville friend he declared in frustration, “I did not come here to make a cabinet for the ladies of this place, but for the nation.” He had never been in a more maddening predicament. There wasn’t a thing he could do about Floride Calhoun or most of the other women who were persecuting Peg Eaton. But he did send the Donelsons back to Tennessee till
they reassessed Emily’s priorities. And he longed more than ever for Rachel, who would have taken Peg’s part and, as White House hostess, shamed the rest of the capital into following suit.
Jealousy of Peg, who was still one of the most beautiful women in Washington, inspired much of the campaign against her, but political rivalries sustained the boycott far longer than it would have lasted on personal grounds. John Calhoun still wanted to be president, especially after having been elected vice president twice. But the vice presidency wasn’t a promising springboard in those days, and Calhoun wasn’t close to Jackson either politically or personally. His best hope, he apparently thought, was to undermine those who were, starting with Eaton. Floride Calhoun’s honest dislike for Peg Eaton became his instrument for attacking John Eaton and the larger principle of Jacksonian favoritism.
Yet in attacking the Eatons, Calhoun opened the door for Martin Van Buren. The secretary of state’s sympathies lay with Peg Eaton. As a bereaved widower and a thorough gentleman—like Jackson in both regards—he closed his ears to the vile things said against any woman. But Peg Eaton wasn’t just any woman. She had become the president’s cause, and the president her champion. It didn’t take Van Buren long to realize he could cement his standing with Jackson by standing firm for Peg. He visited her at her house, and he invited her to his own house and, most conspicuously, to the dinners and receptions at the State Department. He let it be known to the ministers of other countries that Mrs. Eaton was to be treated with all the respect due any gentlewoman. The British minister cooperated, as did the Russian minister. The Dutch minister—or rather, the Dutch minister’s wife—proved more troublesome. At a dinner hosted by the Russian minister, the Dutch matron approached the table only to discover that her assigned chair was next to Peg Eaton’s. Having heard and apparently credited the stories about Peg, she refused to take the seat, instead gathering her husband and departing in horror. Van Buren bid them good riddance.
The secretary of state’s strategy worked. “I have found the President affectionate, confidential, and kind to the last degree,” Van Buren wrote a friend. “I am entirely satisfied that there is no degree of good feeling or confidence which he does not entertain for me.” Jackson said as much himself. “I have found him every thing that I could desire him to be,” the president told John Overton of Van Buren, “and believe him not only deserving my confidence, but the confidence of the nation. Instead of his being selfish and intriguing, as has been represented by some of his opponents, I have ever found him frank, open, candid, and manly. As a counsellor he is able and prudent, republican in his principles and one of the most pleasant men to do business with I ever saw.”
With each new story that surfaced about Peg, and with each new variant on the old stories, Van Buren’s solicitude for her made Jackson more appreciative of him. Whether this caused Van Buren himself to contribute covertly to the pot’s continued boiling is impossible to say. The stories came from everywhere and nowhere.
The Eaton affair consumed far more of Jackson’s time than he should have let it. For months he collected evidence attesting to Peg Eaton’s virtue and to the vice of those who traduced her. His obsession was demonstrably unhealthy for his administration, as would become apparent before long. It was also hurtful in a distinctly personal way. Jackson forced his nephew Andrew Donelson to make a choice: between his wife, Emily, and his uncle, the president. Jackson refused to allow Emily to return to the White House so long as she shunned Peg Eaton, which meant that Andrew could either live with his wife or work for his uncle, but not both. Not surprisingly, Andrew chose Emily, which pained and angered Jackson. “That my nephew and niece should permit themselves to be held up as the instruments and tools of such wickedness is truly mortifying to me,” he wrote William Lewis.
The anger and mortification were public; the pain was private. Donelson was a second son to Jackson, and by blood as close to him as his adopted son, Andrew Jr. For Jackson to banish Donelson was to deprive himself of one of the dwindling number of things in life that gave him any hope of personal happiness. As long as the Eaton affair continued, Jackson pleaded with Donelson to come back to the White House, even as he refused to let Emily return. “I never knew any thing but disgrace to a family, where it united with strangers to disgrace its own kindred,” he wrote accusingly to Donelson.
Some of Jackson’s closest friends realized the old man had lost his perspective on this point. “He is wholly wrong,” John McLemore told Donelson, by way of sympathy. But he went on to urge the young man to show understanding. “Let me implore you to be mild in your correspondence with the General. His feelings are not in a situation to bear irritation.”
Marital problems of another sort intruded on Jackson amid the Eaton affair. “I have this moment heard a rumor of poor Houston’s disgrace,” the president wrote in April 1829. “My God, is the man mad?”
In fact Sam Houston was mad, from love gone wrong. By the second half of the 1820s Houston was being spoken of around Tennessee as the heir apparent to Jackson. Houston’s two terms in Congress had been devoted to making Jackson president, and Jackson reciprocated by helping Houston become Tennessee governor. When Jackson entered the White House, Tennesseans began talking of a dynasty for the state akin to that once enjoyed by Virginia, with Houston following Jackson into the presidency. The one thing lacking from the Houston résumé was a wife. Houston had played the field of love with storied success for some years but at thirty-five was beginning to be considered rather old for such carefree behavior. With Jackson’s encouragement he started courting seriously and found a likely partner in Eliza Allen, the daughter of a distinguished family of Gallatin, near Nashville. The wedding was the event of the social season in Tennessee. Every paper reported the nuptials of the towering, handsome Houston, with military valor in his past and perhaps the presidency in his future, and the beautiful, vivacious Eliza, the belle of the Cumberland.
Attention turned discreetly away from the newlyweds on their honeymoon, only to be riveted back when reports began circulating that Eliza had retired to her parents’ house just weeks after the wedding. Shortly thereafter Houston submitted a letter of resignation of the governorship to the Tennessee legislature. He offered nothing by way of explanation beyond a vague reference to being “overwhelmed by sudden calamities.” And then, while Nashville was absorbing these stunning developments, he disappeared down the Cumberland, heading west for parts unknown.
Nor did Houston ever explain what had caused the rupture in his marriage and the consequent implosion of his political dreams. The first thought that occurred to many in such circumstances—that Houston had discovered on his wedding night that Eliza wasn’t a virgin—was contradicted by his own assertion that the break reflected nothing ill on Eliza’s virtue and by his vow to write any libel against Eliza in the heart’s blood of the libeler. A less lurid explanation is more likely: that Houston discovered that Eliza hadn’t really wanted to marry him but had done so to please her ambitious parents. Houston was a romantic to the core, and the knowledge that she loved another crushed his spirit. Humiliated before the world, he threw over his career and fled the scene of his mortification.
For months Jackson heard only rumors about Houston. They weren’t reassuring. One had Houston raving drunkenly about going to Texas and conquering that Mexican territory with the help of Cherokee Indians. Jackson certainly wasn’t opposed to expanding the American domain, as his actions in Florida amply demonstrated. And he had had his eye on Texas for decades. But he was currently planning negotiations with Mexico to purchase Texas, which would be less controversial and, in the long run, probably cheaper than conquest. A Houston filibuster would spoil things.
In June 1829 Jackson finally received a letter from his wayward protégé. The letter, posted at Little Rock, Arkansas Territory, made clear by itself that the reports of heavy drinking weren’t unfounded, for none but a sot could have rambled as incoherently as Houston did. “Tho’ an unfortunate, and doubtle
ss, the most unhappy man now living, whose honor, so far as depends on himself, is not lost,” he declared, “I can not brook the idea of your supposing me capable of an act that would not adorn, but rather blot the escutcheon of human nature.” Houston seemed to be referring to the Texas boast, and he denied contemplating anything that would embarrass the president. He wallowed some more in self-pity. “What am I! An exile from my home and my country, a houseless, unsheltered wanderer among the Indians! Who has met, or who has sustained, such sad and unexpected reverses?” Yet he refused to admit defeat. “I am myself, and will remain, the proud and honest man! I will love my country and my friends”—including Jackson. “You, General, will ever possess my warmest love and most profound veneration!”
Jackson could only shake his head at such a performance. None of his protégés had shown more promise than Houston; none seemed a likelier political heir. And now Houston had thrown it all away. Jackson didn’t know what caused the break with Eliza, but he did know that no challenge ever yielded to flight. The honest man, the brave man, stood his ground and fought for what he believed in. Houston instead took refuge in distance and drink. It was disgraceful and horribly disappointing.
Disappointments came in multiples that year. Andrew Hutchings was the son of a friend and business partner who had died, leaving to Jackson the boy’s care. Hutchings should have been old enough by now to start taking responsibility for himself, but he stubbornly refused. He wouldn’t go to school or learn a trade. “His conduct has filled me with sincere regret,” Jackson told John Coffee, who managed the boy’s inheritance at Nashville. “I know not what to do with him.” Jackson thought of bringing Hutchings to Washington, to the college at Georgetown the Jesuits had founded. “Perhaps under my own eye I might be able to control him and convince him of the impropriety of his ways.” Yet he wondered if Hutchings would come if summoned. At times he was tempted to wash his hands of the boy. But he couldn’t get himself to do it. “I cannot think of letting him be lost. . . . When I reflect on the charge given me by his father on his dying bed, and the great anxiety he had about him, I am truly distressed.”
