Rachel Jackson

First Lady

• Born: June 15, 1767
• Birthplace: Pittsylvania County, Virginia
• Died: December 22, 1828
• Place of death: Nashville, Tennessee

President:Andrew Jackson 1829-1837

Overview

Rachel Donelson Jackson became one of the most famous women in the United States because of her marriage to Andrew Jackson. Divorced in an age when divorce equaled scandal, she became the target of attacks during Jackson’s campaigns for the presidency in the 1820’s. One of the first pioneers in middle Tennessee, Rachel ran their Hermitage plantation with the help of overseers near Nashville during Andrew’s many absences while raising an adopted son and several wards left to their care by family and friends. The central focuses of Rachel’s life, however, were her devotion to Andrew and her Presbyterian faith.

Early Life

Rachel Donelson was born in 1767, in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, the ninth of eleven children. Her parents, Rachel Stockley Donelson and John Donelson II, were members of prominent colonial families in Maryland and Virginia. Donelson was a planter, iron manufacturer, surveyor, and land speculator who made a fortune in frontier land deals. He served as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1769 to 1774, negotiated Indian treaties, and supported the colonies’ separation from Great Britain.

In the 1740’s, Donelson moved his family to the western Virginia frontier. Rachel grew up on a plantation with a large log house, receiving a basic education at home and learning the skills that a farm mistress needed to maintain a household. In 1779, when Rachel was twelve, Donelson again moved his family, this time to the Cumberland settlements in what would become Tennessee. The settlers’ harrowing journey from December 22, 1779, to April 24, 1780, on flatboats down the Tennessee River to the Ohio and then up the Cumberland, included an outbreak of smallpox and attacks by Cherokee warriors.

The Donelsons established a rough camp and planted crops on their land near Nashville, but Indian attacks sent them to Manskers Station for shelter in July, 1780. That November, the warfare between the Indians and pioneers drove the Donelsons to the larger communities in central Kentucky and a new plantation near Crab Orchard. However, in 1785, Donelson determined that his family would return to Tennessee.

Marriage and Family

By 1785, Rachel was a vivacious young woman known for her accomplished horseback riding and love of dancing. The seventeen-year-old girl had met the wealthy Revolutionary War captain Lewis Robards, ten years her senior, and did not wish to return to Tennessee. On March 1, 1785, the dark-eyed, dark-haired Rachel married Lewis, and they moved in with his widowed mother. Rachel’s family moved back to Tennessee; during John Donelson’s journey to join his family in September he was murdered. Rachel’s marriage was soon failing, partly because of her friendship with a male boarder at the Robards’s home, and in 1788, she went to her mother’s home near Nashville. Widow Donelson had a number of boarders, among them Andrew Jackson. Rachel and Andrew became close, and in late 1789, they eloped to Natchez. They returned to Nashville in the summer of 1790, and Robards filed for divorce. After the official divorce was granted in late 1793, the Jacksons were legally wed in January of 1794.

Despite the circumstances of their marriage, the frontier settlement mostly accepted the couple. Andrew was named attorney general for the territorial district in 1791, and when Tennessee became a state in 1796, he was elected to the U.S. Congress. In 1794, Andrew acquired the Poplar Grove farm, and in 1796 he bought additional acreage, where they built Hunter’s Hill, an elegant frame house. In 1804, financial difficulties led them to sell this plantation, and they then bought the nearby farm and log house that Jackson called the Hermitage.

Rachel managed the household work of the farm, overseeing the production of food and clothing for the couple and their slaves. Although Rachel bore no children in either of her marriages, she raised at least seventeen wards left to the Jacksons’ care. In December of 1808, the Jacksons adopted the infant son of her brother and sister-in-law, whom they named Andrew Jackson, Jr. In the fall of 1813, they took in a Creek boy named Lincoya as their son.

In 1802, Andrew became major general of the Tennessee militia, and he spent much of the next twenty years on military campaigns against the Spanish, Indians, and the British. While he was gone, Rachel managed the household and plantation. On occasion, she would join Andrew on campaign and at government posts, notably in Florida and in New Orleans. She was there when the city celebrated General Jackson’s spectacular triumph after the Battle of New Orleans in January, 1815.

Although Andrew’s duty often took him from home, Rachel took little pleasure in traveling. By 1820 she was quite stout and often in ill health, and she came to resent Andrew’s absences. In 1821 Andrew resigned his military commission and the governorship of Florida, planning to retire from public life. His friends, however, urged his candidacy for U.S. president. Rachel wrote a niece,

I do hope they will leave Mr. Jackson alone. . . . He has done his share for his country. How little time has he had to himself or his own interests in the thirty years of our wedded life. In all that time he has not spent one fourth of his days under his own roof.

Rachel hoped that she and Andrew would settle into a quiet life, enjoying the new brick mansion and formal garden they had built in 1819. From 1821 to 1823, Andrew was a gentleman farmer, and these were likely the couple’s happiest days. Nevertheless, in October, 1823, Jackson left for Washington, D.C., as a U.S. senator, and he returned as a presidential candidate in June, 1824.

Presidency and First Ladyship

In November, 1824, Andrew learned that he had received more of the popular and electoral vote than the other candidates for president but had not gotten the majority needed for election. He and Rachel left for Washington, D.C., so he could be present as the House of Representatives chose the new president. They arrived in December. Andrew and his supporters were stunned when the House elected John Quincy Adams.

In April, 1825, Andrew and Rachel returned to Nashville, and the following month they entertained the Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought in the American Revolution. The war hero’s meeting with the hero of New Orleans added to Jackson’s immense popularity. In October, the Tennessee General Assembly officially nominated Jackson for president, and he began to direct his election campaign from the Hermitage.

The 1828 campaign became especially nasty as Adams’ supporters attacked Jackson for his “theft” of Rachel from her first husband. Although Rachel’s friends tried to shield her, she wrote a friend in July, 1828:

The enemies of the General have dipped their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me. Almighty God was there ever any thing to equal it. . . . To think that thirty years had passed in happy social friendship with society, knowing or thinking no ill to no one—as my judge will know—how many prayers have I offered up for their repentance.

An additional blow to Rachel that summer was the death of her son Lincoya, despite her best efforts to nurse him.

In November, Jackson won the presidency in a resounding victory. As her family and friends celebrated Andrew’s election, Rachel was reported to say, “For Mr. Jackson’s sake, I am glad, but for myself I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my Lord than to live in that palace in Washington.” Although she had reservations, Rachel agreed to leave for Washington on December 23.

After a shopping trip to Nashville to prepare for the inauguration, Rachel returned disturbed. She had overheard gossipers talking about her backwoods ways and her “bigamy.” She told her niece:

Listening to them, it seemed as if a veil was lifted and I saw myself, whom you have all guarded from outside criticism and surrounded with flattering delusions, as others see me, a poor old woman. I will not go to Washington, but stay here as often before in Mr. Jackson’s absences.

Rachel’s words proved prophetic, for on December 20, 1828, she suffered a heart attack. Andrew was constantly at her side, but he left her for a short while on the evening of December 22. As her maid helped her prepare for bed, Rachel collapsed. She died before Andrew could return to her.

Legacy

On Christmas Eve, 1828, ten thousand people attended Rachel’s funeral at the Hermitage. In her garden, she was laid to rest in the white dress she had planned to wear to Andrew’s inauguration as president. Newspapers across the United States reported the death of the First Lady-elect, extolling her goodness but also reporting the rumors that had caused her pain. The tablet Andrew placed on Rachel’s grave stated in part, “A being so gentle and so virtuous slander might wound, but could not dishonor.”

Although Rachel’s niece Emily Donelson and her daughter-in-law Sarah Yorke Jackson would share duties as White House hostess, President Andrew Jackson never forgot his devotion to Rachel or the treatment she received. Later, his defense of another maligned woman, Peggy Eaton, would tear his cabinet apart. He looked at Rachel’s portrait each night, and when he was at the Hermitage, he visited her grave each evening until when, in June, 1845, Jackson was laid to rest beside his beloved Rachel.

Bibliography

Burke, Pauline Wilcox. Emily Donelson of Tennessee. 2 vols. Richmond, Va.: Garrett and Massie, 1941. With illustrations and bibliographical notes.

Caldwell, Mary French. General Jackson’s Lady. Nashville: M. F. Caldwell, 1936. The first full-length biography of Rachel Jackson includes previously undocumented anecdotes.

Moser, Howard D., et al., eds. The Papers of Andrew Jackson. 5 vols. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981-1996. The first five volumes include correspondence to and from Rachel Jackson through 1824; more are planned.

Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson. 3 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Reprinted in 1998 with a new introduction. The definitive biography of Andrew Jackson, with significant insights into Rachel Jackson and their marriage.

Sawyer, Susan. More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Tennessee Women. Helena, Mont.: Falcon, 2000. Written for young adults, primarily an account of Rachel Jackson’s divorce and remarriage.