THE PEOPLE WOULD rule in the new era of democracy, but how they would rule remained to be seen. Advocates of democracy argued that the people knew their interests better than anyone else and that the people therefore were the best judges of government policy. Skeptics of democracy feared the emotionalism of the masses and worried that the people might be led astray through ignorance, shortsightedness or the conniving of small groups who masked self-interest in appeals to patriotism and other popular causes.
The democrats of the hour, the Jacksonians, seemed to have history in their favor. The tide of democracy had been rising for decades; its latest surge had carried democracy’s tribune, the hero of New Orleans, into the highest office in the land. The Jacksonians had little reason to think the tide would turn. Nor, for that matter, did the skeptics of democracy. The former prepared for the best, the latter for the worst.
NONE PREPARED FOR a problem that afflicted the Jackson administration from the start. The marriage of John and Floride Calhoun had unfolded without surprises but not without difficulty. She bore one child after another, to a sum of ten. Three died early, leaving painful memories but still a full house at the upcountry plantation they called Fort Hill. The plantation was modest by South Carolina standards, and even by the standards of Floride’s family. Without the money she brought to the marriage, Calhoun would have had to devote more of his time to the law, in the manner of Henry Clay and especially Daniel Webster. He built a library, separate from the house, where he did his reading and writing. But often he seemed in his own space, anyway, when he was pondering a point of the Constitution, of policy or of his own path forward.
Floride humored him, without good humor. She had no taste for politics and no tolerance for most of those who practiced it. She kept her distance from Washington, claiming, with cause, that her children needed her more at home than the politicians did at the capital. She eventually sent one of their daughters, Anna Maria—who found public affairs as fascinating as Calhoun did—to stand in for her by her husband’s side.
Calhoun, in turn, humored her, as well as he could. She was difficult and opinionated—a combination, he concluded, that ran in her family. He learned to abide her prejudices, saving his energy for battles he thought he might win. A letter to their eldest son, Andrew, captured the resignation he felt toward his spouse. Mother and son had argued; Calhoun thought Andrew had the better case. But he counseled him to accept less than victory. “As to the suspicion and unfounded blame of your mother, you must not only bear them, but forget them,” Calhoun said. “With the many good qualities of her mother, she inherits her suspicious and fault-finding temper, which has been the cause of much vexation in the family. I have borne her with patience, because it was my duty to do so, and you must do the same, for the same reason. It has been the only cross of my life.”
Floride’s opinions seldom intruded on Calhoun’s career. A fateful exception occurred at the beginning of Andrew Jackson’s presidency. Floride accompanied her husband to Washington for his swearing-in as Jackson’s vice president, and immediately conceived a dislike of Margaret Eaton, the wife of John Eaton, Jackson’s secretary of war. Peg Eaton was generally thought the most beautiful woman in Washington, and she acted the part. She drew the attention of Washington men and the annoyance of Washington women. She had a history that intensified both responses. As the daughter of a Washington innkeeper, Peg had grown up smiling and flirting with the male guests, who included John Eaton and occasionally Andrew Jackson. Eaton, a widower, flirted back, though Peg was married. Her husband was a young naval officer named John Timberlake. Timberlake’s assignments carried him far from Washington for extended periods, leaving Eaton and Peg the opportunity to improve their acquaintance. In 1828, Peg received news that her husband had died. She wasted little time mourning and began seeing Eaton openly. At the end of that year they were engaged; on the first day of 1829 they were wed.
Two months later Jackson was inaugurated and the trouble began. Floride Calhoun, as spouse of the vice president, not to mention a member of the South Carolina aristocracy, was positioned, in the absence of a presidential first lady, to set the social tone in the capital. Tone-setting was deemed by many in Washington to be crucial at this juncture, given the riotous character of the inauguration. Someone must instruct these rowdy Westerners in the protocols of capital life. Someone must keep democracy from descending into anarchy.
Washington looked to Floride Calhoun for cues. Those whom she visited and received would be visited and received by the other women and, with them, their husbands. Floride refused to return a visit from Peg Eaton. She judged that for a woman to carry on so openly while married, to remarry so quickly, affronted the mores on which society rested. Floride didn’t consider herself a prig but rather a defender of the family. It perhaps contributed to her opinion that she had grown quite matronly in appearance and manner, while Peg, not many years younger, still looked and acted the coquette. Floride and the other wives of Washington had always wondered, when their husbands traveled to the capital without them, whether the stories told of the political bachelors were true. Peg Eaton suggested that they were, and if she were not rebutted, all the wives would be tarred. Floride took a stand for decency by taking a stand against Peg Eaton.
JOHN CALHOUN APPRECIATED the implications of Floride’s decision. Andrew Jackson’s sentimental view of women was well known; the two women who had been most important to him—his mother and his wife—he revered as angels. Particularly after the death of Rachel under the weight of slander, he could be expected to take the part of Peg Eaton. It was credibly reported around Washington that John Eaton, a longtime Jackson friend, had sought Jackson’s blessing before marrying Peg and had obtained it. Jackson was known to be loyal to a fault. The more a friend of his was attacked, the more ardently he defended him—and his wife.
Calhoun weighed the risks of crossing Old Hickory against those of crossing Floride. He opted for household peace. He accepted Floride’s explanation that the fault in the Eaton affair, if any, was not hers. “She said that she considered herself in the light of a stranger in the place,” Calhoun later recounted, referring to the capital; “that she knew nothing of Mrs. Eaton, or the truth or falsehood of the imputations on her character; and that she conceived it to be the duty of Mrs. Eaton, if innocent, to open her intercourse with the ladies who resided in the place and who had the best means of forming a correct opinion of her conduct, and not with those who, like herself, had no means of forming a correct judgment.”
Calhoun’s explanation persuaded no one. Of course a husband would defend his wife. The boycott spread. Other cabinet wives followed Floride’s lead and pulled their husbands after them. At first the effects were merely social: awkwardness at receptions and dinners and occasionally on the sidewalks of the capital. But political consequences followed. Washington divided into pro-Peg and anti-Peg camps. Jackson’s cabinet became paralyzed as the boycotters refused to attend meetings with the defenders. The affair invaded Jackson’s own home when the wife of Andrew Donelson, Jackson’s nephew, surrogate son and private secretary, joined the anti-Peg crowd. Andrew and Emily Donelson lived in the White House with Jackson, helping allay the depression that dogged him after Rachel’s death. But when Emily took the side of Floride Calhoun against Peg Eaton, Jackson sent her away. Her husband, forced to choose between his wife and his uncle, chose his wife. Jackson was left alone in the mansion, without family or friend.
Yet the president didn’t waver. “Mrs. Eaton is as chaste as those who attempt to slander her,” Jackson declared. He would stand by her, and by her husband. “I would sink with honor to my grave before I would abandon my friend.”
ONE WHO JOINED Jackson by the side of the Eatons was Martin Van Buren, the secretary of state. Van Buren had been a senator from New York during the tortuous maneuverings that produced the tariff of 1828; he had choreographed the feints and ploys that allowed Jackson to seem a supporter of the tariff in the North and an opponent in the South. Jackson’s victory that year owed much to Van Buren, who was rewarded by receiving the state department. Van Buren’s cleverness allowed him to play both sides of most streets he traveled, but in the Peg Eaton case he stood squarely with the accused—and beside the president.
As the boycott spread, Van Buren intensified his efforts on Peg’s behalf. He had a weakness for pretty women, and he sincerely sympathized with Peg. Yet he also perceived Peg as a vehicle for ingratiating himself with Jackson. He called on the Eatons personally and made sure to invite them to the receptions he hosted as secretary of state. He defended Peg to foreign diplomats and let them know they must treat her with the dignity due any cabinet spouse.
His approach prospered. “I have found the President affectionate, confidential, and kind to the last degree,” Van Buren wrote to a friend. “I am entirely satisfied that there is no degree of good feeling or confidence which he does not entertain for me.”
Jackson himself couldn’t speak too highly of Van Buren. “I have found him every thing that I could desire him to be, and believe him not only deserving my confidence, but the confidence of the nation,” the president told John Overton, a Tennessee friend. “Instead of his being selfish and intriguing, as has been represented by some of his opponents, I have ever found him frank, open, candid, and manly. As a counsellor he is able and prudent, republican in his principles and one of the most pleasant men to do business with I ever saw.
“I wish I could say as much for Mr. Calhoun,” Jackson continued. “You know the confidence I once had in that gentleman.” Calhoun’s actions in the Eaton affair caused Jackson to see him in a different light. Calhoun was working at cross-purposes to the administration, the president judged, though Calhoun left the actual obstruction to other hands. “Most of the troubles, vexations and difficulties I have had to encounter since my arrival in this city have been occasioned by his friends.” And by his wife, Jackson might have added, had he been less respectful of women as a group.