First Ladies (10 page)

Three presidents in the forty-year span had no choice but to rely on substitutes. Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren were both widowers and James Buchanan never married. While they could have followed Thomas Jefferson's example and relied on the wife of a cabinet member or on some other mature woman for official hostessing, each chose, instead, a niece or daughter-in-law, all less than thirty years of age. The other nine presidents in this period did have wives but six of these women (Anna Harrison, Letitia Tyler, Margaret Taylor, Abigail Fillmore, Jane Pierce, and Eliza Johnson) pled poor health or grief and escaped performing the tasks that had come to be seen as traditional for a president's wife. They turned to daughters or daughters-in-law to serve in their stead. Elizabeth Monroe (1817–1825) had taken a similar course, but what had been an exception during the first few administrations became a pattern now. The long reign of substitutes can hardly be explained away as mere coincidence.

Even the spirited Rachel Jackson, who died while preparing to move to Washington, made arrangements for her niece to take over as White House hostess. Earlier brushes with the “cave dwellers” had
soured Rachel on the capital, and she made no secret of her distaste for returning to live there. When word reached her of Andrew's victory in the 1828 election, she had explained, “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my Lord than live in that palace in Washington.”
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“For Mr. Jackson's sake, I am glad, for my own part, I never wished it.”
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Staying in Tennessee and not going near Washington would have been Rachel's preference, but she changed her mind after one of her husband's supporters informed her that everyone was watching to see what she did. John Eaton, who later became Andrew Jackson's secretary of war, wrote that if she failed to arrive she would not only disappoint her friends but also allow her “persecutors” to “chuckle” that they had scared her into staying away.
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Whether unwilling to disappoint her fans or stubborn about facing down her critics, Rachel started packing and called in friends to help update her wardrobe. She understood she would have to face the same old charges once again.

Rachel's difficulties had begun many years before when she was just a teenager with more than her share of admirers around Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Described by a contemporary as of “medium height, [with a] beautifully moulded form, full red lips rippling with smiles and dimples,”
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she could ride a horse as well as anyone her age, tell the best stories, and dance the fastest.
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Among those who noticed her was Lewis Robards, and when she was eighteen, he married her. The couple went to live with his mother, who reigned as a kind of frontier aristocrat in that part of Kentucky. The elder Mrs. Robards got along well enough with Rachel but Lewis found fault with her every move. Abusive and jealous of even the slightest attention given her by other men, he soon sent her back to her mother. Attempts to patch up the marriage failed, and Rachel resolved to put as much distance as possible between herself and her husband. Neighbors said she feared bodily harm.

On her trip down the Mississippi to stay with relatives, Rachel had the company of two men—an elderly family friend and young Andrew Jackson, a boarder at her mother's and an open admirer of the daughter. After settling her in Natchez, Andrew returned to Nashville but before long was back at her side. Believing that Lewis Robards had secured a divorce, as he had announced he would do, Rachel and Andrew were married in August 1791.

The young couple had anticipated Robards by some years; after obtaining permission from the Virginia legislature to end his marriage, he had failed to follow through. Whether from simple negligence or
from other, more sinister motives, Robards waited three years and then asked for a divorce on the grounds that his wife was then living with another man. As soon as they heard what had happened, the Jacksons promptly remarried, but their mistake furnished their enemies with ammunition for years.

Such legal snags occurred frequently on the frontier and Rachel seems to have troubled herself very little about this one, but Andrew kept his dueling pistols oiled for thirty-seven years. His widowed mother had advised him as a youth not to expect law courts to protect him when words were at issue but to “settle them cases yourself.”
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He may well have smarted from the charge that a gentleman would have verified his bride's divorce before marrying her; but whatever his reasons, his readiness to fight kept the subject alive long after gossip about it might have died out. In the process of defending his wife's reputation, he invited many quarrels and received a bullet which he carried in his shoulder for twenty years.
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Rachel's divorce was more than two decades old when she first accompanied Andrew to Washington in 1815 to celebrate his military victory at New Orleans. The Jackson marriage, although childless, appeared to be a happy one. That the capital gave Rachel such a cool welcome suggests that more than propriety was at issue. Her far bigger sin was her lack of both sophistication and education. As one social arbiter put it, “Mrs. Jackson is … totally uninformed in mind and manners,” adding gratuitously, “although extremely civil in her way.”
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Money was not the issue. Rachel's parents were of some means, and her father, John Donelson, had served several terms in the Virginia House of Burgesses. But Rachel was a child of the frontier. One of eleven children, she had moved with her family from western Virginia to Tennessee and then to Kentucky, where schools were scarce. Nobody claimed her husband had benefited from much education but he had acquitted himself on the battlefield, an opportunity his wife never had. The same qualities of naturalness and strength that had contributed to his immense popularity and had provided his nickname, “Old Hickory,” became in his wife grounds for ridicule and exclusion. Women, especially the mature ones, were expected to represent culture, etiquette, and sophistication—not unstudied naturalness.

In no way did Rachel Jackson approach the accepted model of femininity. Nearing fifty by the time she made her first trip out of the Kentucky-Tennessee area, she had become set in her country ways. Tanned, leathery skin had replaced the creamy complexion of her
youth. She preferred to ride a horse rather than sit in a carriage, and she cared little for fashions and cosmetics. Outside her family and friends, the Presbyterian church constituted her one interest, and a quiet evening at home smoking a pipe with Andrew remained her idea of a good time.

Rachel Jackson's additional transgression against prevailing standards of femininity was her stoutness. A miniature painted of her about 1815 shows a plump woman with dark curls under a lacy cap. Her eyes are placid and resigned rather than sharp or alert. She was, one observer noted, “fat, forty, but not fair.”
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Her girth had already provided a source of amusement in New Orleans, where Rachel had gone to help her husband celebrate his military victory. She had been dazzled by the sights of the city, but the local women had exhibited less enthusiasm for her and they had revived an old French saying to describe her: “She shows how far the skin can be stretched.”
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A cartoon made the rounds of New Orleans: it depicted Rachel being laced, without complete success, into a fashionably small-waisted dress. When she danced with Andrew, someone present described her as “a short, fat dumpling bobbing” opposite him.
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Hardly oblivious to the insults, Rachel preferred staying home. She reluctantly accompanied Andrew to Florida where he served as governor, but she caused him to turn down a subsequent appointment as ambassador to Mexico when she refused to go. Although she would have gladly confined herself to their Hermitage plantation the rest of her life, she braced herself for Washington and made her way there again in 1824 when Andrew took his Senate seat amid speculation that he stood next in line for the presidency.

At first, Rachel Jackson tried to keep to herself in the capital and, except for church twice a week, rarely left her rooms at Gadsby's Hotel. But on January 8, 1825, a party honoring her husband required her attendance. The hostess did little to make Rachel feel comfortable and the party became an ordeal for her. The other guests singled her out as “stout, vulgar, illiterate” and according to one who was present, they made “many repetitions of her ungrammatical speeches … the favorite form of spite.”
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Andrew Jackson later confessed that he had no idea his enemies would stoop so low as to treat “a woman in her declining years … [with such] wickedness.”
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By the time of the 1828 presidential campaign, Rachel's fitness to occupy a conspicuous place had become a political issue. A North Carolina paper, admittedly hostile to Andrew Jackson, advised voters to consider carefully the wisdom of putting Rachel “at the head of the female society of the United States.”
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When rumors about her
character multiplied, the Jackson camp sent out investigators to line up supporting evidence for its version of the divorce. Rachel understood that the attacks on her were politically motivated, but that hardly eased her discomfort. “The enemys of the Genls have dipt their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me,” she wrote, adding in her curious spelling, “thay had no rite to do [it].”
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Rachel Jackson died of a heart attack in December 1828, before her husband's inauguration in March. At sixty-one, she was older than any previous president's wife. Her decision just before her death to ask her niece, Emily Donelson, to substitute for her might have been based on her own failing health.

But that explanation fails to suffice when it becomes clear that Emily Donelson is only the beginning of a long list of youthful chatelaines. After Emily's untimely death at twenty-eight, another Jackson niece came from Tennessee to take her place; and in the subsequent administration, Angelica Van Buren, wife of Martin's son, played a similar role. She was followed by Jane Harrison (daughter-in-law of William), Priscilla Tyler (daughter-in-law of John), Bettie Bliss (daughter of Zachary Taylor), Mary Abigail Fillmore (daughter of Millard), Harriet Lane (niece of James Buchanan), and Martha Patterson (daughter of Andrew Johnson). They presented a stark contrast to the earlier White House chatelaines. All were sweet, young models of girlish innocence, and they fit well the mood of a nation that expected little more of prominent women than cheerful acquiescence.

Respect for age and experience had begun to fall away in America between 1790 and 1820. According to the historian David Hackett Fischer, men felt the effects of the emphasis on youth more than women did. In his book,
Growing Old in America,
Fischer dated the change before the advent of both industrialization and urbanization. Towns changed seating arrangements in the late eighteenth century so that the oldest residents no longer automatically received the choice seats at meetings but had to compete with everybody else in bidding for places. Some state constitutions added mandatory retirement ages so that officeholders, especially judges, had to step down at a prescribed age rather than serve for life as had been the practice. John Adams, for one, thought the age limitations despicable and fumed to Thomas Jefferson that he could “never forgive New York, Connecticut, or Maine for turning out venerable men.”
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The new respect for youth enticed people to shave a few years off their real ages. “Rounding off” became common so that forty-five often translated into “early forties” and moving from the one decade
to the next involved special reluctance. The temptation to remain thirty-nine rather than celebrate a fortieth birthday proved particularly irresistible.
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Concurrent developments in fashion reinforced the advantages of youth. The white wigs and powdered hair, favored by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, disappeared. Knee breeches, which had flattered the older man by exposing his legs, often the last part of the anatomy to go, gave way to leg-concealing trousers. Men's jackets, which formerly featured a rather egg-shaped form with small shoulders and rounded middle, took on an entirely new outline which was considerably more difficult for the elderly man to wear: small-waisted with pronounced shoulders and a very straight, broad back.
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The United States did not originate the mode—France already led in clothing design—but Americans enthusiastically adopted the new styles.

Women's fashion after 1800 also changed to feature first the straight-skirted, high-waisted line of the Empire style and then, the hoopskirt. Although it may be accurate, as David Hackett Fischer has argued, that women's clothes all through the nineteenth century reflected the subjection of the entire sex to men, it is also true that changes after 1800 gave new importance to a youthful figure. The large posterior and sagging bodice, styles of the late eighteenth century, accommodated more comfortably a matronly figure than did the high-waisted, slim-hipped styles of the early 1800s. Women's clothes in the early nineteenth century resembled children's frocks: thin muslin that clung to the body and shorter skirts that revealed the white stockings and flat slippers so often associated with little children.
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The ribbons and curls of the 1820s and the hoopskirt and the simpler hairstyles of the 1830s all worked to the advantage of the young woman.

The English language also reflected a decreased respect for the elderly in the early nineteenth century. Words once flatteringly applied to older persons became pejorative or at least less complimentary. “Gaffer,” formerly a contracted, but affectionate term for “Grandfather,” changed to mean an old man deserving of contempt, and “fogy” went through a similar metamorphosis.