The First Ladies: Rachel Jackson
Rachel Jackson is unique among presidential wives in that, much like Moses and the promised land, she was with her husband Andrew Jackson when he won election to the presidency in 1828, but died prior to his inauguration, so she never got to act as first lady. Her death following a bitter election left Jackson very resentful at those who had made his beloved wife a target of their attacks during the campaign.
She was born Rachel Donelson. Her birthplace was about ten miles from present-day Chatham, Virginia, in Pittsylvania County sometime in 1767. TThe exact date of her birth was not recorded at the time, but has been subsequently estimated to be sometime in June, with some sources giving the date as June 15. He father was
Colonel John Donelson, a Revolutionary War soldier, member of the Virginia Assembly, and a co-founder of Nashville, Tennessee. Colenel Donelson was murdered in 1786 by unknown assailants, coming back from Virginia and going to Tennessee. Her mother was Rachel Stockley Donelson who was born in Accomac County, Virginia, 1730, married there in 1744; died, Nashville, Tennessee, 1801.
Rachel was the Tenth of eleven children. She had seven brothers and three sisters. She was a short woman with brown hair and brown eyes and was a Presbyterian. There is no record of Rachel Jackson having received a formal education. In keeping with the traditions of the time, she was likely taught the basics of reading and writing as well as housekeeping duties such as sewing, spinning, weaving, embroidery, and preserving foods. She played musical instruments and was an accomplished horsewoman. Although most of her correspondence was destroyed in an 1834 fire at the Hermitage, the letters of hers which still exist show that while her spelling and grammar were poor, she expressed herself intelligently. Most of her reading was of the Bible and other religious works, but she also had an extensive collection of poetry.
Rachel left Pittsylvania County at age 12 when her parents moved to what would later become part of Tennessee. The Donelson family and other families totaling about 600 people, were led by her father, transported on flatboats and canoes for almost 1000 miles to the new settlement of Fort Nashborough, later to be named Nashville. The Donelsons were on the largest boat, the Adventure. Settling in April 24, 1780, the Donelsons were among the first and most prominent settlers of Nashville. Rachel Jackson's extended family, totaling 63, would go on to dominate the city's business, civic and political power base for generations.
Whe Rachel was 18 years old, she married Lewis Robards, a land owner and speculator. They were married, on March 1, 1785, at Lincoln County, Kentucky. Lewis and Rachel Robards lived in Harrodsburg with his elderly mother for over three years, until the late summer or early fall of 1788. She divorced Robards, the circumstances of which whould later become the subject of political gossip. Lewis Robards claimed that his former wife had shamelessly flirted and that he asked her brother to remove her from her marital home, but that he later sought reconciliation. Upon his return to Nashville, he claimed that he found her in an inappropriately close relationship with Andrew Jackson, a circuit lawyer boarding with the Donelsons. He accused them of eloping to Natchez, Mississippi in an illegal marriage. This resulted in his seeking and gaining a divorce. In contrast, the Donelsons and Jacksons claimed that Robards had physically abused Rachel and that she ran first to her mother's home and then. When word came that Robards was coming to take her back to their Kentucky home, she fled for fear of her life to Natchez with friends, guided and protected by Jackson. They further claimed that when Jackson returned to Nashville alone that he was told that Robards had boasted that he had successfully obtained a divorce from Rachel, thus leaving her open to marry Jackson. Jackson believed that Robards had purposely misled them so that if Andrew and Rachel Jackson did marry and live together that it would make the union an adulterous one. Robards was able to obtain a divorceon grounds that Rachel had openly committed adultery. The Jacksons remarried legally in Tennessee, but the incident had made Rachel Jackson a bigamist and adulterer.
Rachel was 26 years old when she married Andrew Jackson. Their legally recognized marriage took place on January 7, 1794, in Nashville, Tennessee at the Donelson home. For the three years following their "Natchez" wedding, Andrew Jackson and Rachel Robards had lived with her mother and the Donelson family in Nashville. They began construction of what would later become their famous Hermitage plantation.
The couple had two adopted sons. The eldest was Andrew Jackson, Jr. born, December 4, 1808 in Davidson, Tennessee. He was actually Rachel Jackson's nephew, one of a pair of twins born to her brother Severn Donelson. Since both of his parents were alive at the time of his adoption, the reason he was given to them is not clear. A second adopted son was Lyncoya Jackson born sometime around 1811. He was a Native American child found by Jackson on a battlefield beside his dead mother, and raised by the Jacksons from the age of two.
The Jacksons were also legal guardian for six boys and two girls: John Samuel Donelson, Daniel Donelson and Andrew Jackson Donelson were all nephews of Rachel Jackson, the sons of her brother Samuel Donelson who died in 1804. The last of the three, another namesake of the president served as his private secretary in the White House, and married his cousin, Rachel Jackson's niece Emily.
Through her husband's public career in the military, business and politics, Rachel Jackson largely remained at home, at the Hermitage Plantation, supervising the large number of slave families that carried out the household tasks, farming and maintenance. Jackson was a lawyer, circuit judge, land speculator, farmer and businessman. He later moved into politics, was a soldier of national renown, especially for his victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Rachel Jackson disliked his frequent absences and their lengthy separations. She once wrote to him: "Do not, my beloved husband, let the love of country, fame and honor make you forget that you have me. Without you I would think them all empty shadows. You will say this is not the language of a patriot, but it is the language of a faithful wife, one I know you esteem and love."
When news broke about the scandal of her being married to two men at the same time, it caused Rachel Jackson to withdraw from public activity. But she joined her husband during his most important political endeavors and was in the capital for the House vote in the contested 1824 election. Some considered her to have a backwoods manner, marked by her smoking a long-stem clay pipe, but in spite of this, she was befriended by the sophisticated First Lady Elizabeth Monroe. Rachel also hosted regular gatherings for Jackson's political supporters.
As for her influence on Andrew Jackson, there are several reports that she was able at times to shut down his impulse to respond to an insult or a political remark with which he disagreed. During Jackson's short stint as Governor of Florida, Rachel persuaded him to declare edicts banishing alcohol sale and consumption on Sundays. He also resigned the governorship "as Mrs Jackson is anxious to return home." Senator Thomas Hart Benton stated that she also had "a faculty - a rare one of retaining names and titles in a throng of visitors, addressing each one appropriately."
Rachel Jackson had a direct role in designing and managing their famous home "the Hermitage." The acreage, outbuildings, and main house, along with the number of slaves bought to maintain it, grew over the next decade and a half. By 1821, an 8-room, two-story brick mansion was the Jackson home. In the main stair hall, Rachel Jackson selected scenic wallpapers imported from France that depicted themes from Greek mythology.
Early in the 1828 presidential race, the story of Rachel Jackson's former status as an adulterer, bigamist and divorcee was used against her husband by the press supporting his rival for the presidency, John Quincy Adams. These included an anti-Jackson pamphlet called Truth's Advocate, printed in Cincinnati, and articles in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, National Banner and Nashville Whig. One editorial asked, "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?" Many of Jackson's opponents argued that he was not fit for the presidency based partially on his professional and personal behavior stemming from the circumstances of the Robard's divorce and his marriage.
The Jackson campaign organized a counter-offensive to clarify his "domestic relations in reference to his fitness for the presidency." Numerous pro-Jackson orators, like Thomas Kennedy made stump speeches that avoided the details of the Robard's divorce but attacked the lack of chivalry and "abominable" conduct of using the "affectionate partner" of Jackson for political purposes. The Nashville Central Committee produced a thirty-page booklet prepared and written by Robert Coleman Foster. It incorporated testimony from many different sources including a large contribution from Jackson's longtime friend, law partner and campaign contributor Judge John Overton, who had also known the Robards family. Nevertheless Rachel Jackson's controversial marital history was sensationalized in the opposition press that year.
Such widespread dissemination of her personal life created emotional pressure on her. She spent much of the campaign crying and depressed, which exacerbated a strained heart condition that had first arisen in 1825. The sudden June 1828 death of her sixteen year old son Lyncoya, then working at the Hermitage added to her stress. She was later quoted as stating after her husband's election that she would "rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God than live in that palace in Washington." She also wrote a statement of spirited self-defense to a Jackson campaign manager declaring her innocence against the enemies of her husband who she said had "dipped their pens in wormwood [poison]." There was a concerted effort by the Jackson campaign managers to encourage women whose husbands had supported Jackson or who were western to arrange to be in Washington, D.C. for the Inauguration as a concerted show of support for Rachel Jackson.
Rachel planned on attending her husband's inauguration and had even purchased a gown and white slippers for the traditional ball. But her physical and mental health deteriorated so drastically that by the fall of 1828 she had a near fatal heart attack. She seemed to recover but died suddenly three days before Christmas. According to one account, the president-elect was so stunned that he held her dead body in hopes that she could be revived.
Rachel Jackson was 61 years old when she died at the Hermitage Plantation, Nashville, Tennessee on December 22, 1828. She was buried at the Hermitage Plantations Garden in Nashville, Tennessee. Her death was used by Jacksonian Democrats in the drama of conflict between the established Eastern seaboard ruling elite - as embodied by the defeated incumbent President John Quincy Adams - and the new power of the rustic western block from the frontier territories. Following news of Rachel Jackson's death, the mayor and the board of alderman of Nashville voted a resolution urging the people of the region to abstain from their ordinary business on the day of her funeral (December 24th), and that church bells be tolled from one to two o'clock during the hour of her burial. On the day of her funeral, some 10,000 people turned up, according to newspaper accounts, coming not only from the area but also drawing Jackson political supporters from around the country. Among the pall bearers was Tennessee Governor Sam Houston, who led the procession to the burial site, followed by Jackson, then the Donelson clan, and finally the Hermitage slaves. She was buried in the gown and white slippers she planned to wear to her husband's Inauguration.
Jackson spoke at the ceremony: "I am now President of the United States and in a short time must take my way to the metropolis of my country; and, if it had been God's will, I would have been grateful for the privilege of taking her to my post of honor and seating her by my side; but Providence knew what was best for her. For myself, I bow to God's will, and go alone to the place of new and arduous duties."
She was born Rachel Donelson. Her birthplace was about ten miles from present-day Chatham, Virginia, in Pittsylvania County sometime in 1767. TThe exact date of her birth was not recorded at the time, but has been subsequently estimated to be sometime in June, with some sources giving the date as June 15. He father was
Colonel John Donelson, a Revolutionary War soldier, member of the Virginia Assembly, and a co-founder of Nashville, Tennessee. Colenel Donelson was murdered in 1786 by unknown assailants, coming back from Virginia and going to Tennessee. Her mother was Rachel Stockley Donelson who was born in Accomac County, Virginia, 1730, married there in 1744; died, Nashville, Tennessee, 1801.
Rachel was the Tenth of eleven children. She had seven brothers and three sisters. She was a short woman with brown hair and brown eyes and was a Presbyterian. There is no record of Rachel Jackson having received a formal education. In keeping with the traditions of the time, she was likely taught the basics of reading and writing as well as housekeeping duties such as sewing, spinning, weaving, embroidery, and preserving foods. She played musical instruments and was an accomplished horsewoman. Although most of her correspondence was destroyed in an 1834 fire at the Hermitage, the letters of hers which still exist show that while her spelling and grammar were poor, she expressed herself intelligently. Most of her reading was of the Bible and other religious works, but she also had an extensive collection of poetry.
Rachel left Pittsylvania County at age 12 when her parents moved to what would later become part of Tennessee. The Donelson family and other families totaling about 600 people, were led by her father, transported on flatboats and canoes for almost 1000 miles to the new settlement of Fort Nashborough, later to be named Nashville. The Donelsons were on the largest boat, the Adventure. Settling in April 24, 1780, the Donelsons were among the first and most prominent settlers of Nashville. Rachel Jackson's extended family, totaling 63, would go on to dominate the city's business, civic and political power base for generations.
Whe Rachel was 18 years old, she married Lewis Robards, a land owner and speculator. They were married, on March 1, 1785, at Lincoln County, Kentucky. Lewis and Rachel Robards lived in Harrodsburg with his elderly mother for over three years, until the late summer or early fall of 1788. She divorced Robards, the circumstances of which whould later become the subject of political gossip. Lewis Robards claimed that his former wife had shamelessly flirted and that he asked her brother to remove her from her marital home, but that he later sought reconciliation. Upon his return to Nashville, he claimed that he found her in an inappropriately close relationship with Andrew Jackson, a circuit lawyer boarding with the Donelsons. He accused them of eloping to Natchez, Mississippi in an illegal marriage. This resulted in his seeking and gaining a divorce. In contrast, the Donelsons and Jacksons claimed that Robards had physically abused Rachel and that she ran first to her mother's home and then. When word came that Robards was coming to take her back to their Kentucky home, she fled for fear of her life to Natchez with friends, guided and protected by Jackson. They further claimed that when Jackson returned to Nashville alone that he was told that Robards had boasted that he had successfully obtained a divorce from Rachel, thus leaving her open to marry Jackson. Jackson believed that Robards had purposely misled them so that if Andrew and Rachel Jackson did marry and live together that it would make the union an adulterous one. Robards was able to obtain a divorceon grounds that Rachel had openly committed adultery. The Jacksons remarried legally in Tennessee, but the incident had made Rachel Jackson a bigamist and adulterer.
Rachel was 26 years old when she married Andrew Jackson. Their legally recognized marriage took place on January 7, 1794, in Nashville, Tennessee at the Donelson home. For the three years following their "Natchez" wedding, Andrew Jackson and Rachel Robards had lived with her mother and the Donelson family in Nashville. They began construction of what would later become their famous Hermitage plantation.
The couple had two adopted sons. The eldest was Andrew Jackson, Jr. born, December 4, 1808 in Davidson, Tennessee. He was actually Rachel Jackson's nephew, one of a pair of twins born to her brother Severn Donelson. Since both of his parents were alive at the time of his adoption, the reason he was given to them is not clear. A second adopted son was Lyncoya Jackson born sometime around 1811. He was a Native American child found by Jackson on a battlefield beside his dead mother, and raised by the Jacksons from the age of two.
The Jacksons were also legal guardian for six boys and two girls: John Samuel Donelson, Daniel Donelson and Andrew Jackson Donelson were all nephews of Rachel Jackson, the sons of her brother Samuel Donelson who died in 1804. The last of the three, another namesake of the president served as his private secretary in the White House, and married his cousin, Rachel Jackson's niece Emily.
Through her husband's public career in the military, business and politics, Rachel Jackson largely remained at home, at the Hermitage Plantation, supervising the large number of slave families that carried out the household tasks, farming and maintenance. Jackson was a lawyer, circuit judge, land speculator, farmer and businessman. He later moved into politics, was a soldier of national renown, especially for his victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Rachel Jackson disliked his frequent absences and their lengthy separations. She once wrote to him: "Do not, my beloved husband, let the love of country, fame and honor make you forget that you have me. Without you I would think them all empty shadows. You will say this is not the language of a patriot, but it is the language of a faithful wife, one I know you esteem and love."
When news broke about the scandal of her being married to two men at the same time, it caused Rachel Jackson to withdraw from public activity. But she joined her husband during his most important political endeavors and was in the capital for the House vote in the contested 1824 election. Some considered her to have a backwoods manner, marked by her smoking a long-stem clay pipe, but in spite of this, she was befriended by the sophisticated First Lady Elizabeth Monroe. Rachel also hosted regular gatherings for Jackson's political supporters.
As for her influence on Andrew Jackson, there are several reports that she was able at times to shut down his impulse to respond to an insult or a political remark with which he disagreed. During Jackson's short stint as Governor of Florida, Rachel persuaded him to declare edicts banishing alcohol sale and consumption on Sundays. He also resigned the governorship "as Mrs Jackson is anxious to return home." Senator Thomas Hart Benton stated that she also had "a faculty - a rare one of retaining names and titles in a throng of visitors, addressing each one appropriately."
Rachel Jackson had a direct role in designing and managing their famous home "the Hermitage." The acreage, outbuildings, and main house, along with the number of slaves bought to maintain it, grew over the next decade and a half. By 1821, an 8-room, two-story brick mansion was the Jackson home. In the main stair hall, Rachel Jackson selected scenic wallpapers imported from France that depicted themes from Greek mythology.
Early in the 1828 presidential race, the story of Rachel Jackson's former status as an adulterer, bigamist and divorcee was used against her husband by the press supporting his rival for the presidency, John Quincy Adams. These included an anti-Jackson pamphlet called Truth's Advocate, printed in Cincinnati, and articles in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, National Banner and Nashville Whig. One editorial asked, "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?" Many of Jackson's opponents argued that he was not fit for the presidency based partially on his professional and personal behavior stemming from the circumstances of the Robard's divorce and his marriage.
The Jackson campaign organized a counter-offensive to clarify his "domestic relations in reference to his fitness for the presidency." Numerous pro-Jackson orators, like Thomas Kennedy made stump speeches that avoided the details of the Robard's divorce but attacked the lack of chivalry and "abominable" conduct of using the "affectionate partner" of Jackson for political purposes. The Nashville Central Committee produced a thirty-page booklet prepared and written by Robert Coleman Foster. It incorporated testimony from many different sources including a large contribution from Jackson's longtime friend, law partner and campaign contributor Judge John Overton, who had also known the Robards family. Nevertheless Rachel Jackson's controversial marital history was sensationalized in the opposition press that year.
Such widespread dissemination of her personal life created emotional pressure on her. She spent much of the campaign crying and depressed, which exacerbated a strained heart condition that had first arisen in 1825. The sudden June 1828 death of her sixteen year old son Lyncoya, then working at the Hermitage added to her stress. She was later quoted as stating after her husband's election that she would "rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God than live in that palace in Washington." She also wrote a statement of spirited self-defense to a Jackson campaign manager declaring her innocence against the enemies of her husband who she said had "dipped their pens in wormwood [poison]." There was a concerted effort by the Jackson campaign managers to encourage women whose husbands had supported Jackson or who were western to arrange to be in Washington, D.C. for the Inauguration as a concerted show of support for Rachel Jackson.
Rachel planned on attending her husband's inauguration and had even purchased a gown and white slippers for the traditional ball. But her physical and mental health deteriorated so drastically that by the fall of 1828 she had a near fatal heart attack. She seemed to recover but died suddenly three days before Christmas. According to one account, the president-elect was so stunned that he held her dead body in hopes that she could be revived.
Rachel Jackson was 61 years old when she died at the Hermitage Plantation, Nashville, Tennessee on December 22, 1828. She was buried at the Hermitage Plantations Garden in Nashville, Tennessee. Her death was used by Jacksonian Democrats in the drama of conflict between the established Eastern seaboard ruling elite - as embodied by the defeated incumbent President John Quincy Adams - and the new power of the rustic western block from the frontier territories. Following news of Rachel Jackson's death, the mayor and the board of alderman of Nashville voted a resolution urging the people of the region to abstain from their ordinary business on the day of her funeral (December 24th), and that church bells be tolled from one to two o'clock during the hour of her burial. On the day of her funeral, some 10,000 people turned up, according to newspaper accounts, coming not only from the area but also drawing Jackson political supporters from around the country. Among the pall bearers was Tennessee Governor Sam Houston, who led the procession to the burial site, followed by Jackson, then the Donelson clan, and finally the Hermitage slaves. She was buried in the gown and white slippers she planned to wear to her husband's Inauguration.
Jackson spoke at the ceremony: "I am now President of the United States and in a short time must take my way to the metropolis of my country; and, if it had been God's will, I would have been grateful for the privilege of taking her to my post of honor and seating her by my side; but Providence knew what was best for her. For myself, I bow to God's will, and go alone to the place of new and arduous duties."