A Being So Gentle and So Virtuous

There have been innumerable political scandals down through the years, but one of the first to involve romance and gain national attention concerned the marriage of Rachel and Andrew Jackson.  This was a real love story.  And it caused the seventh president more than his share of sorrow.

The pair met when the frontiersman moved to Nashville in 1788 and became a boarder in the Rachel Donelson home.  The owner's daughter, also named Rachel, was already married to Captain Lewis Robards, but their union was notoriously unhappy.  She was very naive and had chosen a man she did not yet know well.  She soon discovered that her new spouse was bossy, irrational, and ill tempered.  In a nutshell, he treated her cruelly, and the girl was experiencing some difficulty in holding the relationship together.  Then Old Hickory, as he was known, entered the picture,

Here was a man popular for his gallantry, bravery, and heroism.  Jackson was of Irish descent, had been orphaned at an early age, remained steadfast in his affection for his mother, and, though hot-headed, behaved respectfully toward women.  Upon observing Robards' treatment of the young woman, he quite naturally felt pity for her.  But this quickly developed into something much stronger.  He not only wanted to rescue Rachel from her troubles, he found himself falling deeply in love with her.  And she returned his affection wholeheartedly.

But here is where the story, though not the outcome, derails.  While they seemed the perfect match--Mrs. Robards was known to smoke a corncob pipe or dip snuff, while her paramour was a hard bitten loner who took on all comers and had already killed more than one man in a duel over principles--a major dilemma presented itself.  How were the pair to get her husband out of the picture?  Marriages just were not undone at this point in time, at least not in the hills of Tennessee. 

But it seems, as well as anyone can tell, that, after one particularly vicious incident in 1789, the captain abandoned his wife and said he would petition the legislature for a bill of divorcement.  Hard to believe that it took a literal act of congress to undo a marital union, but such was the case.  So he rode off into the sunset, leaving the young lovers on their own.  Within a couple of years, the accepted belief is that Jackson heard somehow that the bill had passed, and he and Rachel married while still in their early twenties.

But this was not the happy ending it should have been.  Robards' continued involvement in affairs pertaining to Rachel's property soon made it obvious that the divorce was not final.  So she and Andrew Jackson, though living together as loving husband and wife all along, were not legally married until January of 1794, after she finally obtained the first legitimate divorce in Tennessee.  The couple quietly renewed their vows, but this did not settle the issue.  The groom was a political man, well-known throughout the nation.  And his wife was condemned as a bigamist.

Today, this would make for fantastic tabloid fodder, and even then it was well publicized.  At one point, as Jackson sat drinking with friends in a country tavern, he found himself defending Rachel's honor, and not for the first time.  A stranger remarked on the state of her virtue, or lack thereof, and this led to the inevitable duel.  The offender hit the challenger first, but still took a fatal bullet.  When the wounded Jackson was questioned as to how he could manage to fire a pistol at all, much less kill someone, after suffering such a severe injury, his reply was simple:  "I would have killed him had he shot me in the head."  Such were the obstacles the couple faced.

As time went on, the once gregarious Rachel became withdrawn and quiet, refusing to leave their home any more often than necessary.  When Jackson instigated the Revolution of 1828 with his presidential race, during which he sincerely presented himself as a common "man of the people," he had no prospective first lady along for the ride.  Yet the slander reached a fever pitch.  Almost anything negative that could be said of a woman was thrown in her face, including the charge that her mother's boarding house had actually been a brothel.  And she chose to remain in Nashville, tending her garden.

In spite of all the mud-slinging, Jackson defeated John Quincy Adams and became the newly-elected Democratic president of the United States.  But Rachel had been defeated.  This had not been another battle; it was a fully waged war.  She had taken ill. and in March, 1825, the night before the Inaugural Ball, she died in her bed, holding her husband's hand.

The president was crushed.  This was a love that he had been willing to die for, and now she was gone.  At first, he denied the obvious, demanding more blankets be placed upon her body so that she would not catch a chill.  When she neither warmed nor woke, Jackson sank into a lifelong grief.  He had her entombed in her flower garden, and, in his post-White House years, visited the burial site every morning and every evening.

Rachel's painting hung at the foot of the president's bed so that he could see her face each day, and the monument he had erected in her garden carried a lengthy inscription in tribute.  It read, in part, "Her face was fair, her person pleasing, her temper amiable, and her heart kind.  . . .  Her pity went hand in hand with her benevolence, and she thanked her Creator for being able to do good.  A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound but could not dishonor.  Even death, when he tore her from the arms of her husband, could but transplant her to the bosom of God."

So love can be real and true, even when windblown and tossed about on stormy seas.  While not all survive in a physical incarnation, they live forever in the hearts of their lovers.  Jackson said of Rachel, "Heaven will be no heaven for me if she is not there."  He joined her in 1845.

VK