Marriage, Mayhem, and Presidential Politics: The Robards-Jackson Backcountry Scandal

Marriapie,Mayhem,and Presidential Politics: Tbe RobardsJackson Backcountry Scandal ANN TOPI.OVICI 1 F ar too heavy for her fivefoot frame and short of breath, the womin paused to rest after a fitting with her seamstress for a ballgown. Ahead of her lay a dreaded move to Washington City,for despite her personal wishes her husband had pursued and won the presidency. She had told a friend that she would rather serve in the house of God than live in that palace, the White House,' but events in November 1828 revealed a different fate. Now. in December,she sat sheltered in the newspaper office owned by a kinsnian while she waited for her servants to bring the carriage round. At her elbow lay a pamphlet,and idly she picked it up to pass the time. To her shock,she fc, und descriptions of herself as a Jezebel,an adulteress,a bigamist,rehashing all the horror of her marriage to Lewis Robards and her flight with Andrew Jackson. Why had these attacks been kept from her? Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson felt her chest tightening from the blow. Fleeing Nashville in the carriage,she had her driver st() p at a creek to wash away her tears. This effort to keep her grief from her husband triggered a severe cold on top of the trouble within her breast. It was December 18, and she and Andrew were to leave for Washington on Christmas Day. But four days later,she was dead from a heart broken by the heartless attacks of Jackson's enemies.2 Buried in the white satin gown intended for the Inaugural Ball, Rachel's tombstone would say in part, " being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound but could not dishonor." Since James Parton's masterful biography of Andrew Jackson appeared in 1860,most studies of Andrew Jackson's life have paid attention to the impact on the 1828 presidential campaign of Rachel Donelson's 1793 divorce from Lewis Robards. Although research over the past thirty years has raised doubts about the Jackson party's account of the divorce, new historical examinations of marriage and divorce in the late colonial and early American republic periods suggest that the Jacksonians used the changing moral views on personal, rMinantic choice of a mate between 1790 and 1830 in order to shape their story to their advantage. Indeed, Rachel Dotlelson's WINTER 2005 Rachel Dene/ son Roberts lacksc, n. Cincinnati Museum Center at Unic, n Terniinal,Cincinnati Histc, rical Society Library 4 3 MARRIAGE, MAYHEM, AND PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS marriage to Lewis Robards on the Kentucky frontier,the circumstances of her elopement with Andrew Jackson to Spanish Natchez,and the return of the new couple to the Cumberland settlements offer insight into how divorces were handled, sometimes extralegally ,in the early American republic. Moreover, when considering the Robards side of the story,the RobardsJackson scandal provides evidence of the power of politics in the 1820s, already capable of rendering presidents bigger than life while reducing men like Lewis Robards almost to obscurity. In the fall of 1780,John Donelson took his extended family and thirty slaves from the Indianbeleaguered Cumberland settlements to a slightly more secure Davies Station, located near Crab Orchard, Kentucky. The move ended a journey that had begun a year earlier when Donelson sold his plantation and iron foundry in backcountry Virginia,carried his family into upper East Tennessee and, after leading an adventurous voyage down the Tennessee and up the Cumberland River, set up what proved to be a temporary camp near the future town of Nashville. Donelson,a robust man in his fifties,was a surveyor and former member of the House of Burgesses,an Indian negotiator for Virginia ,and an agent of Richard Henderson. By one estimate, Donelson' s sale of land and foundry in Virginia would have been worth nearly one million dollars in today's dollars. 4 Donelson and his wife,Rachel,and eleven children all moved west, including their youngest daughter and tenth child, Rachel, who was thirteen when the Donelsons arrived in Kentucky. They immediately assumed their place in the backcountry elite,with extensive political and land speculation connections. Crab Orchard lay...