What Hath God Wrought (49 page)

Under the Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, the American administrative system had served as an example of honesty and efficiency to would-be administrative reformers in Britain. However, in the years after 1829, the quality of British administration gradually improved while that of the U.S. federal government declined, until by the 1880s, American civil service reformers opposing the spoils system took Britain as their model.

II

Once John McLean left, only one cabinet member remained with significant political stature: Secretary of State Martin Van Buren. Van Buren had just been elected governor of New York, but having run for the office to ward off the Antimasonic threat to his state power base, the Little Magician felt little interest in the job itself. When offered the State Department, he jumped at the chance to get back to Washington, where his presence would counterbalance that of Vice President Calhoun. With Jackson’s ill health and avowed intention to serve but a single term, the Calhoun–Van Buren competition for the succession got under way quickly.
²¹

The other cabinet secretaries were little-known figures who appealed to Jackson in large part because they all hated Henry Clay.
²²
The worst choice proved to be John Henry Eaton, senator from Tennessee, an old friend who had been Jackson’s campaign manager. As secretary of war he would be in charge of Indian Removal, a subject on which he and the president saw eye to eye.
²³
But the most significant thing about Eaton turned out to be his recent marriage to Margaret O’Neale Timberlake.

The daughter of a Scots-Irish innkeeper in Washington, young Peggy O’Neale tended bar and had already attracted many suitors before marrying at the age of sixteen. Her husband, John Timberlake, was a purser in the navy and away at sea for long periods, during which Peggy seldom seems to have been lonely. She bestowed her favors widely, becoming in due course good friends with John Eaton and probably his mistress. Eaton gave money to Peggy’s father and managed the Timberlake family finances so as to facilitate her husband’s absences. People questioned the paternity of her two children. In April 1828 John Timberlake died suddenly on board ship, apparently by suicide. It is still unclear whether his despair was caused by his wife’s infidelities, financial difficulties, or bad asthma. On New Year’s Day 1829, twenty-nine-year-old Margaret (she preferred that name to the more commonly used Peggy) married the middle-aged widower John Eaton. Remarriage within a year of a spouse’s death was considered poor taste, but the couple responded to the wishes of their friend and patron, Andrew Jackson. Jackson told them to marry “forthwith,” in order to forestall gossip. It didn’t. The typical reaction of Washington insiders was that “Eaton has just married his mistress, and the mistress of eleven doz. others!”
²⁴

When the president named John Eaton secretary of war, most of the women in the capital refused to associate with his wife. Led during the past generation by such powerful matrons as Dolley Madison and Margaret Bayard Smith, the women of official Washington had developed a strong collective identity and sense of purpose in transforming their raw young city into a capital worthy of a great nation.
²⁵
A woman who was sexually notorious had no place in their vision. At the inaugural ball, no woman spoke to the new Mrs. Eaton. Floride Calhoun, the aristocratic wife of the vice president, received her when she came calling, but refused to return the call. Soon thereafter the Calhouns departed for South Carolina so Floride could give birth at home, a move that also tactfully avoided further contact with the Eatons.

The newly arrived women who had accompanied Jackson’s other appointees proved no more willing to tolerate the presence of Peggy O’Neale Eaton than were the long-established women. (There is reason to believe that Rachel Jackson, during her lifetime, had been unwilling to acknowledge her.)
²⁶
Brash, demanding, and voluptuous in appearance, Margaret Eaton did nothing to reassure those who met her. None of the wives of Jackson’s other cabinet members would associate with her except Catherine Barry, wife of the postmaster general who had replaced McLean. Most awkward of all for the president, his own official White House hostess supported the boycott. Years before, First Lady Elizabeth Kortright Monroe had closed the White House to Margaret Timberlake, and now Emily Donelson decided to continue that policy. Her husband, Andrew Jackson Donelson, was the president’s private secretary and nephew of his late wife. The Eaton Affair (as it came to be called) put the Donelsons into an excruciating bind, and eventually Jackson sent them back to Tennessee to think about where their loyalties should lie. Although he later recalled them, the Donelsons never regained their former standing in the eyes of their great patron. Some of the foreign diplomats’ wives were willing to socialize with Margaret Eaton because they took for granted the behavior of European courts and the need to set aside morality in the interest of politics. American women were not so trained.

Andrew Jackson did not countenance defiance. How could his cabinet members work together when the wife of one was shunned by the wives of others? He insisted that Margaret Eaton must be an innocent victim of slander, the same position he had taken in response to the accusations against Rachel. His argument was deductive rather than based on evidence: John Eaton and John Timberlake were both Freemasons like Jackson, and it would be unthinkable for one Mason to cuckold another.
²⁷
Two Presbyterian ministers close to the president tried in vain to persuade him of Margaret Eaton’s guilt. One of them was Ezra Stiles Ely, who had written the pamphlet supporting Jackson as the “Christian” candidate against the Unitarian Adams. On September 10, 1829, the president of the United States summoned his entire cabinet save Eaton, plus his two private secretaries (Donelson and William Lewis) and the two clergymen, to a dramatic meeting to evaluate the sexual morality of Margaret Eaton. Jackson was clearly not open to persuasion: “She is as chaste as a virgin!” he exclaimed, a memorable phrase that became common knowledge. The meeting changed no minds.
²⁸

The Eaton Affair continued to preoccupy Washington and took up more of the president’s time in his first year than any other issue. John Eaton issued dueling challenges to both the secretary of the Treasury and the pastor of the Presbyterian church in Washington (neither accepted). It is difficult for a twenty-first-century person to understand the meaning of the Eaton Affair in nineteenth-century terms. If Margaret Eaton seems appealing in her defiance of prudish convention, one may be disposed to see Jackson’s defense of her as an endorsement of women’s liberation. In its historical context, however, nothing could be further from the truth.

Jackson was not trying to revise the prevailing code of sexual morality but defending his honor as a patriarch. He expected to be able to control his cabinet members and thought they in turn should be able to control their wives. When the cabinet secretaries expostulated that there was a social sphere within which women enjoyed autonomy, Jackson showed no sympathy with women’s rights. “I did not come here to make a cabinet for the Ladies of this place,” he declared.
²⁹
Women had no business meddling in politics. If the president vouched for her, Mrs. Eaton should be accepted and normal social life resumed.

To understand the women’s viewpoint may require even more historical imagination than to understand Jackson’s. The women who ostracized Margaret Eaton did not act out of mere snobbish rejection of a tavern-keeper’s daughter; social mobility was not despised in the Jackson administration. The women saw themselves defending the interests and honor of the female half of humanity. They believed that no responsible woman should accord a man sexual favors without the assurance of support that went with marriage. A woman who broke ranks on this issue they considered a threat to all women. She encouraged men to make unwelcome advances. Therefore she must be condemned severely even if it meant applying a double standard of morality, stricter for women than for men. This conviction was widespread among women, not only in the middle class and regardless of political party. The women who had the courage to act upon it, standing up to Andrew Jackson and risking their husbands’ careers, insisted that expedient politics must not control moral principle. They believed that women acting collectively could advance the moral state of society. Theirs was the attitude that justified women’s role in contemporary moral reform causes like temperance and antislavery. And although most or all of them would have been shocked if had been pointed out, theirs was the attitude that would lead in a few more years to an organized movement on behalf of women’s rights.
³⁰

Whether the president really believed in Margaret Eaton’s sexual fidelity is doubtful and not even altogether relevant. He insisted that her case paralleled that of his late wife. Yet he would have known his protestations of Rachel’s innocence of adultery to be untrue. For Jackson, such matters were issues not of fact but of his authority. Jackson demanded loyalty, and to him this meant acceptance of his assertions, whether he was insisting on Peggy Eaton’s chastity or (as he did in the course of another tirade) that Alexander Hamilton “
was not in favor of the Bank of the United States.
”
³¹
In the same spirit of privileging his will over truth, Jackson claimed in 1831 that he had received a message from President Monroe through John Rhea (pronounced “Ray”) authorizing his conduct in the invasion of Florida. Historians working over a period of half a century have carefully proved the story a complete fabrication. Nevertheless, Old Hickory persuaded John Rhea to vouch for its truth!
³²
After all, Jackson had prevailed upon his friends to endorse the story of his 1791 marriage to Rachel in Natchez. And in 1829–30, with no issue save Indian Removal yet defining the administration’s position, personal loyalty to the president meant everything.

One big winner emerged from the Eaton Affair: Martin Van Buren. He understood perfectly Jackson’s conception of loyalty as well as how to exploit the Old Hero’s vanity. A widower like Jackson, Van Buren had no wife to interfere with his pursuit of political advantage. Accordingly, the secretary of state made a point of cultivating the secretary of war and calling upon his wife, thereby scoring many points with the president. Van Buren secured for himself Jackson’s favor as his successor. On the eve of the Civil War, James Parton could write that “the political history of the United States, for the last thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton’s knocker.”
³³

Eventually Van Buren even figured a way out of the seemingly intractable social deadlock. Eaton and his wife would have to go, in order for the administration to get on with the business of government. But the only way the president could save face would be for
all
the cabinet to resign, including the husbands of Mrs. Eaton’s detractors. Van Buren was willing to lead the way, confident that he had secured his place in the president’s esteem. The other cabinet members were harder to persuade (Margaret Eaton urged her husband not to cooperate), but of course they had no real choice. The
Washington Globe
, the administration’s organ, announced the resignations on April 20, 1831, though they were not all consummated until June. The
New York Courier
commented: “Well indeed may Mr. Van Buren be called ‘The Great Magician’ for
he raises his wand, and the whole Cabinet disappears.
”
³⁴

William Barry was exempted from the purge, officially on the grounds that the postmaster general was not then technically part of the cabinet, unofficially as a reward for keeping his wife in line. (He would serve until 1835, when, following congressional investigations into malfeasance in the Post Office, he would resign under a cloud.) The Donelsons resumed their previous positions with the president’s blessing. Mass resignation of a presidential cabinet was unprecedented but came as something of a relief. The opposition had watched the whole fracas with a mixture of disgust and amusement. Upon Margaret Eaton’s departure from Washington, Henry Clay quipped, “Age cannot wither nor time stale her infinite virginity.”
³⁵
Not until the 1990s would another national administration be so absorbed by a sex scandal.

Jackson at first charged that the opposition to Margaret Eaton came from Henry Clay and his “hired slanderers.”
³⁶
In reality, of course, the president’s problem lay not so much with National Republicans as with Democratic Republicans—specifically, Democratic women—but this he could not admit. Opposition to his will could only derive from a conspiracy against him. Before the end of 1829, Jackson had decided that Vice President Calhoun must mastermind the anti-Eaton conspiracy.
³⁷
True, Calhoun had hoped that the War Department would go to a South Carolinian and so might have taken satisfaction if John Eaton had to resign. But he could only lose by a confrontation with the president over the matter. Floride Calhoun, a forceful leader in Washington society, probably made her own decision not to associate with Peggy Eaton, and the other women involved certainly did. The most that can be said is that once Van Buren aligned himself with the Eatons, free-traders who detested Van Buren’s Tariff of Abominations tended to gravitate to the opposite camp, whether they were Calhoun partisans or not.
³⁸
Active opposition to the Eatons always remained with women, supported by some clergymen, and not with any male politicians or journalists. (The press, in fact, did its best to hush the story up; not until the mass resignation of the cabinet did the rest of the country learn what had long been the talk of Washington.) By late 1829, however, Van Buren and his agents had poisoned Jackson’s mind against the absent Calhoun.