The First Ladies Read online

  Fourteen-year-old Rachel Donelson was a hardy girl when her large family moved from Virginia by flatboat and wagon to what is now Nashville, Tennessee. Her formal education was only rudimentary, but her domestic and survival skills compensated. At seventeen, the lively young woman with flashing black eyes married Lewis Robards, a Kentucky planter of considerable means. The marriage was doomed from the outset, since Robards had a violent temper set off by jealous rages. The couple separated on and off.

  It was during one such separation that Rachel met Andrew Jackson, a young attorney new to Tennessee who was boarding with Rachel’s widowed mother. Jackson was kind and sympathetic to the distraught young woman, but all agreed that their conduct was proper and above reproach.

  Robards eventually had a change of heart and came to reclaim his wife. Seeing Jackson on the premises, his fury was obvious to everyone. Nevertheless, Rachel, believing it her duty, returned with her lawful husband and was subsequently subjected to more and more misery. They would separate again, this time for good.

  To ease Rachel’s troubles and protect her from possible retaliation from her abusive husband, Rachel was sent to visit friends in Natchez. Jackson volunteered to be among those in her escort party down the Mississippi River, ostensibly to protect them from Indians. It was on this trip that the young couple fell deeply in love. Jackson returned to Nashville and some months later read a newspaper account that Robards had obtained a divorce. Rachel was now free. Jackson hurried back to Natchez and married the former Mrs. Robards. They were both twenty-four and had known each other for three years. The large Donelson clan (there were ten siblings) adored Mr. Jackson and was delighted their sister was finally happy. And for Andrew Jackson, with not a soul of his own family, the Donelsons filled the void. He was as devoted to them as if they were his own blood. Things went well, and the Jacksons prospered.

  Rachel’s Legacy

  Whether she intended it or not (and probably not), the shadow of Rachel Jackson even in death exerted a consuming INFLUENCE over her dynamic husband. The reclusive, self-effacing, gentle Rachel influenced no one else, but that one person was enough. Andrew Jackson believed to his dying day that the poisoned arrow of slander had killed his beloved wife, and he would openly champion the cause of another maligned woman, Peggy Eaton, in her memory. Cabinet members came and went, and the business of government would stall for two years under the somewhat misplaced influence of Jackson’s deceased wife.

  Three years later they were horrified to learn that the original news of Rachel’s divorce was erroneous, and it was only then that a legal divorce had been granted on the grounds that “Rachel Robards doth live with another man.” The Jacksons immediately remarried, but it was a crushing blow with deep, lifelong scars. Anger and shame overtook them; anger for him, shame for her.

  The incident might have been all but forgotten in Nashville where they were both popular, but Jackson, with a volatile temperament of his own, was destined to become a public man, and public men are destined to make enemies. Those enemies—business, personal, and political—quickly learned that the surest way to Jackson’s spleen was by speaking too freely on the character of Mrs. Jackson. The slightest innuendo, no matter how innocent, would fuel his rage. He fought several duels, barely avoided twice as many, and carried two bullets in his body as souvenirs—all from his unwavering resolve to protect her sacred name.

  Rachel, on the other hand, turned inward. She became more and more reclusive, certain that her barren womb was divine retribution for her failed first marriage. Influenced by a local minister, her religious fervor secluded her even more. In an effort to ease the lonely woman’s heartache, Jackson built her a beautiful mansion, aptly called the Hermitage. A private chapel was added for her daily devotions. A flower garden was planted where it could be seen from the veranda. Dozens of little Donelson nieces and nephews (seemingly and appropriately all named Andrew, Rachel, and Jackson) were encouraged to visit often and at length, which they were happy to do. Eventually the Jacksons adopted one of Rachel’s nephews to raise as their own. But once Andrew had become General Jackson, he was away for weeks and months at a time, which only added to Rachel’s loneliness and sorrow.

  By the late eighteen-teens, Andrew Jackson was not only a public man but a war hero, and there was talk of the presidency in his future. Society demanded an appearance by the reluctant Mrs. J. She was loath to participate, but Old Hickory wanted her near, and as always, she wanted to please him. Each time she made the dreaded venture into Society with a capital “S”, she was uncomfortable and a misfit. She had grown stout, dressed unfashionably, and her conversation was awkward and limited. In a phrase, she was out of place anywhere but in the confines of her own sheltered environment, surrounded by people who dearly loved their warmhearted Aunt Rachel.

  During Jackson’s presidential campaigns, the dredged-up divorce scandal resurfaced, compounded by snide comments that Mrs. Jackson was unfit to live in the White House. It was too much for the sixty-year-old woman’s failing heart. She collapsed in tears. Jackson never left her side, claiming that she had nursed him tenderly through his many illnesses and injuries over the years, and it was now his turn to tend to her. When she rallied slightly, she begged him to go rest in the next room. Then she died, sparing him the pain of witnessing her last breath.

  Rachel Jackson was buried in her beloved flower garden, wearing the white gown she had intended for Jackson’s inauguration. Her husband said that he forgave his enemies, but those who slandered his beloved Rachel would have to look to God alone for forgiveness.

  Postscript: ANDREW JACKSON WORE RACHEL’S MINIATURE ON A CHAIN AROUND HIS NECK FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE. HER PORTRAIT AND BIBLE WERE ON A TABLE NEXT TO HIS BED, SO IT WOULD BE THE LAST THING HE WOULD SEE AT NIGHT AND THE FIRST THING UPON AWAKENING. HE PLANTED A MAGNOLIA TREE ON THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN IN HER MEMORY. IT STILL STANDS THERE TODAY.

  JULIA TYLER

  1820–89

  FIRST LADY: 1844–45

  The Rose of Long Island

  When John Tyler became president in 1841, the White House had been without a First Lady for twelve years. Widower Andrew Jackson had invited nieces to do his honors. The daughter-in-law of widower Martin Van Buren did his honors. Anna Harrison, pushing seventy, planned to wait for the spring thaw before she plodded east from Indiana, but her plans were scrapped when her equally aged husband died only a month into his presidency.

  Vice president-turned-president Tyler came to the White House with seven children between eleven and twenty-five and a bedridden wife, who would succumb some months later. Into the void whirled Julia Gardiner, the Rose of Long Island, a soubriquet given her by a New York merchant when he used her likeness on an advertising handbill.

  Julia was pretty, cultured, spoiled, trained to charm— and very, very rich. She could and did have her pick of suitors among Washington’s bigwigs. It would be the sitting president himself who picked her, even though he was thirty years her senior. As was fashionable, Julia played hard to get, turning him down just as she had deterred other elderly suitors. But Tyler, at fifty-four, was still attractive, athletic, financially comfortable, and an ardent Southern courtier, romantic to the core. He kept pursuing. She kept fluttering her fan and demurring. But the seeds had been planted. Being president, even the unpopular one that he was, ranked high on the plus side.

  The turning point came via a terrible accident. The gunboat Princeton was demonstrating its new weaponry on a presidential party cruise down the Potomac when the gun misfired and killed several people, including Julia’s father. The president’s solicitous attentions and condolences finally won over the daddy’s girl who had just lost her daddy, and the two eloped a few months later. Naturally, tongues wagged throughout Washington over the May-December marriage, calling Tyler either an old fool or “Lucky John.” It seems he was Lucky John. It would prove to be a happy and productive union. Seven more little Tylers would make appearances.

  With the new, beautiful, an
d very wealthy Mrs. Tyler gracing the White House, things began to change. Gardiner money poured in, renovating and refurbishing a place that had been neglected since the Monroe administration a quarter of a century earlier. “I have commenced my auspicious reign and am in quiet possession of the Presidential Mansion,” she wrote. Despite observing the decorum of her bereavement, genteel receptions, dinners, and parties of all sorts, which had been characteristic of Tyler’s Southern hospitality, now became cosmopolitan and elegant. She introduced waltzes and polkas, hitherto considered shocking—at least in Washington. Copying the trends of Europe, which Julia had experienced firsthand (when her family whisked her away after the scandalous Rose of Long Island business), she invited friends and relatives to serve as her maids of honor at receptions. They all dressed in color-coordinated gowns and posed dramatically as the living centerpiece for the event. Very la-di-dah.

  Julia’s own trousseau was expensive, extensive, and glamorous. Her trademark jeweled tiara, which she wore across her forehead, became the rage. She was as much a style setter as the aging and legendary Dolley Madison, whom Julia was thrilled to host on numerous occasions.

  The new Mrs. T. was drawn to the spotlight like a moth to flame. She appeared on the streets of Washington walking an Italian greyhound on a leash. If she drove, it was in an elegant coach pulled by six white horses, certain to attract attention. She sat in the visitors gallery to attend congressional debates, making an entrance with her usual flair. She was also known to solicit political appointments. President T. occasionally obliged. He was as delighted with his trophy wife as she was with her trophy husband. He was happy to indulge her at every opportunity.

  Julia T.’s Legacy

  Julia Tyler was young and pretty and rich. She brought a PANACHE to the White House that would not be seen again until Jacqueline Kennedy became First Lady more than a century later. Whether it was wearing a diamond tiara across her forehead, walking greyhounds down Pennsylvania Avenue, or creating fatuous French tableaux, if it was stylish, Julia T. would embrace it to the hilt. Glitz and glamour have long been associated with the seat of power, but few First Ladies had the ability to dazzle. Julia T. could dazzle.

  The country might have enjoyed this revival of flamboyance, but Julia’s time as First Lady only lasted nine months. Tyler’s independent politics left him a man without a party, despite some grand-scale partying. Their last big shindig was said to have cost Tyler more than 10 percent of his yearly salary. But it did not make him any more popular. Not only was he not reelected, he wasn’t even renominated.

  Disappointed but far from crushed, ex-President and Mrs. Tyler moved to his beautiful plantation in tidewater Virginia, where the Rose of Long Island transformed herself into an adopted daughter of Dixie. Despite the neighbors looking askance at the Yankee transplant at first, she fit in with her usual confident style, happy to host her turn at the barbecues, suppers, and picnics. Fifteen years of plenty followed. Plenty of money, plenty of travel, plenty of happiness, and plenty of children. Even plenty of hope that the ex-president might once again be called upon to lead the country. Then came the Civil War, and seventy-one-year-old Tyler was elected to the Confederate Congress, but he promptly died before taking his seat.

  Fifteen years of ruin followed. Two of her sons, still in their teens, served in the Rebel army. With her younger children still babies, she was persuaded to “flee North” to her family when George B. McClellan’s army threatened the Virginia Peninsula not far from her beloved Sherwood Forest plantation. She was by then not only a proud rebel but a loud one, and she made herself totally obnoxious in New York by her openly Confederate sympathies and overt activities. The war also proved hazardous to her Virginia home, which was left a sorry mess. She lost most of her money. Relatives died or were estranged. Legal chaos was still to be untangled. Poor Julia. Literally. She spent years lobbying Congress for reparations and a pension as a presidential widow (not withstanding her avowed affection for the Confederacy). Congress took its own sweet time about it. As the infirmities of age (nearly seventy) and misfortune took its toll, she left her plantation in the hands of her children and moved a short distance away to Richmond. In a stroke of irony, she died in the same hotel her husband had died in nearly thirty years earlier.

  Postscript: THE COUNTRY SEEMED TO REMEMBER HER FLAMBOYANCE AND FORGET HER CONFEDERATE SYMPATHIES IN HER LATER YEARS. SHE ACTUALLY WAS INVITED TO A FEW SHINDIGS AT THE WHITE HOUSE.

  SARAH POLK

  1803–91

  FIRST LADY: 1845–49

  Sarah, Straight and Strong

  Modern historians, especially female ones, love to claim Sarah Polk as an unheralded First Lady whose abilities, intelligence, and four years of wearing two hats go largely unnoticed. They are, of course, absolutely right to do so.

  Sarah Childress was brought up akin to Abigail Adams in a prosperous household where education—including for women—was encouraged. She learned early on all the domestic skills needed for household management, but just as early on, she decided that housekeeping was not her thing. She attended one of the best female academies in the South, learning the classics and developing a sincere interest in politics. In early nineteenth-century Tennessee, where she was born and raised, rough-and-tumble politics was as popular as a sporting event.

  When twenty-something James Knox Polk was considering matrimony, his mentor, none other than Old Hickory himself, counseled him to “look no further than Miss Sarah Childress.” It was sound advice. Not only did the couple marry, but they were particularly well suited and enjoyed a happy union for a quarter of a century.

  There would be no Polk offspring, and like many childless couples, they drew closer together. Lack of children (something Sarah never seemed to miss like Aunt Rachel) also kept her untroubled by the various birthing-related ailments that plagued many of her contemporaries. With good health and no family needs at home, Sarah was free to travel frequently with her husband who enjoyed her companionship, especially since he was another one of our presidents who was notably lackluster in the social department.

  Social or not, Polk served in Congress (and was even Speaker of the House for a while) throughout Jackson’s presidency, and Sarah and he took up boardinghouse residence, as was customary. She was one of the few women who accompanied their congressional husbands, but she made friends readily, even with the grande dames, those Washington residents who remained permanently while officialdom came and went. Polk’s colleagues seemed to like Sarah well enough too—usually better than they liked him. He was a small, unimposing man, a bit like Madison in appearance. He was a hard worker, no question, but he was primarily a loner.

  Polk’s political career was unremarkable and had its ups and downs: after his time in Congress, a single term as Tennessee governor, and then two reelection losses. By 1844 he was all but forgotten. In a last ditch effort to keep from practicing law (which he disliked almost as much as John Quincy Adams did), he “encouraged” others to float his name as candidate for vice president, an honorable position, but requiring no heavy lifting. Politics being politics, he became president instead, the country’s first successful dark horse candidate. That this unknown managed to win against political icon Henry Clay puzzled many, and it is generally believed that Clay lost, rather than that Polk won. Nevertheless, James Knox Polk became the eleventh president and pledged to pursue a monumental agenda, all to be completed in a single term.

  Sarah was a handsome woman of forty-two with no inclination for housekeeping. Now she was mistress of a great house and promptly hired someone to manage the day-to-day chores. A thrifty soul, she had no plans to redecorate the mansion. “What’s good enough for the Tylers is good enough for us,” she supposedly said, although she did splurge and had gaslights installed to replace the old-fashioned candles, which she kept anyway—just in case.

  Herein lies part of the reason that Sarah, for all her political acumen and intelligence, fails to make the First Lady A-list: she was as humorless as he
r husband, and nondomestic or not, she bowed to the conventional mores of the 1840s. Not a feisty bone in her body. She behaved exactly as society expected: quietly charming and gracious without calling undue attention to herself. Her opinions were reserved for her husband’s ears alone. Deeply rooted in her Presbyterian faith, she nixed dancing, billiards, wine, music, and card playing in the White House. She was also a devout Sabbatarian. No guests on Sundays, unless they wished to accompany the Polks to church.

  Above all, the Polks were frugal to the point of being stingy. James Polk hoped to bank a large portion of his annual $25,000 salary, which was considered sumptuous in a day when $1,200 a year could raise a family comfortably. Since all expenses for entertaining, travel, and secretarial assistance came from the presidential purse, there was plenty of fat to be cut.

  Neither of them approved of or took spirits, for instance, ergo they felt no need to provide it for others. As it would be thirty years later, the White House was bone dry. They also believed that their public receptions and meet-and-greet events were a part of the job, performed as an agenda item rather than a social courtesy. They did not believe that providing refreshments was on that agenda. Not only would there be no spirits, but there would be no coffee, tea, or fruit punch. No food, no cakes, no cookies. The traditionally generous hospitality of other Southern first families was lost on the Southern-ish Polks. In summer, however, they made an exception. If any visitor was foolish enough—like themselves—to stay in the disease-ridden sweltering climate of Washington, the Polks were kind enough to offer them ice water. People said nice things about Sarah, but they also said her parties were deadly dull.