The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackson's White House

National Review, Feb 23, 1998 by Florence King

The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackson's White House, by John F. Marszalek (Simon & Schuster, 296 pp., $25)

Go back before Monica Lewinsky, before JFK's harem, before Nan Britton and Warren Harding, and you will find a woman named Peggy Eaton. There the comparison ends, for the tarnished escutcheon in her case was not that of a President recumbent but a President rampant.

It took very little to make Andrew Jackson fly into a rage, but chief among his many sore points was the sanctity of womanhood. As a young frontier lawyer he settled his obsessive chivalry on Rachel Donelson Robards, the estranged wife of the pathologically jealous Lewis Robards, whose mother ran the boardinghouse where Jackson lived. Rachel helped her sympathetic mother-in-law with the work, but her friendly, outgoing manner with the boarders so enraged her unstable husband that he deserted her. He claimed that he had gotten a divorce, but in fact he had only petitioned the legislature. The decree did not become final until Rachel and Andrew Jackson had been married for two years.

They went through a second ceremony but Jackson's political enemies never forgot. He fought two duels over Rachel's honor, killing one man, and tried futilely to shield her against the slurs of adulteress and prostitute heaped on her in the vicious presidential election of 1828. He won the election, but a month later Rachel had a fatal heart attack, leaving this most uxorious of men to be inaugurated as a widower seething with unspent rage at scandalmongers.

The epitaph on Rachel's tomb, "A being so gentle and virtuous that slander might wound but could not dishonor," was written by Jackson's political ally and surrogate son, Sen. John Henry Eaton, slated to be his Secretary of War, who had just married a pretty young Washington widow named Margaret O'Neale Timberlake.

Peggy O'Neale had started life sitting on the laps of the politicians who lived at her family's boardinghouse and drank at their adjacent tavern. The proverbial cute kid who sings and dances for guests, she liked being the center of male attention and by 14 had broken her first heart: a nephew of the Secretary of the Navy attempted suicide out of unrequited love for her. After causing a couple of fights between young officers she tried to elope with an aide to Gen. Winfield Scott, but her father caught her as she climbed out the window. At 16 she enchanted a naval purser, John Timberlake, who proposed the day he met her. Anxious by now to get her safely married, her parents agreed to the match and the young couple wed in 1816.

Buxom and russet-haired, Peggy helped out at the boardinghouse and tavern, joining in the political talk with the ease of a woman used to large numbers of men. Her open manner made her a special favorite of Sen. Andrew Jackson, who boarded at O'Neale's, as did Tennessee's other senator, John Eaton, a friend of Timberlake's who had promised to look after her while her husband was at sea. He kept his word; they were seen together socially.

In April 1828 Timberlake died suddenly aboard ship off the coast of Spain. The first vague reports said he was felled by a "fever" but it soon came out that he had cut his own throat. Rumors flew, gathering steam when Eaton and the inconsolable widow of eight months were married with Jackson's blessing on New Year's Day, 1829.

The scandal became official when Peggy called on the Vice President's wife and Mrs. John Calhoun did not return the call. All of the other Washington ladies followed suit, including the other Cabinet wives, and even Jackson's niece and official hostess, Emily Donelson, who snubbed Mrs. Secretary of War Eaton at the Inaugural Ball.

Next, an unctuous Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Ezra Stiles Ely, wrote Jackson that Peggy's two daughters had been fathered by Eaton, not Timberlake, and that she had had a miscarriage while Timberlake was at sea. Rising to the bait, Jackson demanded to know the source of the miscarriage rumor. He had heard it, Ely said, from another Presbyterian minister, the Rev. John Campbell. Jackson summoned Campbell to the White House and grilled him until he confessed that he had heard the story from a Dr. Elijah Craven, who had since died. Fleeing Jackson's presence, Campbell hired a lawyer--Francis Scott Key --to depose Dr. Craven's widow. Meanwhile, some old lady told him that she had heard that Peggy delivered twins during Timberlake's absence.

Morphing this new, faux Rachel onto the image of his beloved wife, Jackson bombarded the Navy with demands for records and affidavits on the dates of Timberlake's voyages. Worried by the way affairs of state were being ignored, Alexander Hamilton's son told Martin Van Buren, "We did not make him President to work the miracle of making Mrs. Eaton an honest woman."

With the Timberlake file in hand, a now-molten Jackson ordered his Cabinet and both Presbyterian divines to the White House where they sat in terrified silence as he roared: "She is as chaste as a virgin!"