In mental attainments, there was an absolute contrast between Mrs. Adams and Rachel Donaldson, the next President’s wife.
Mrs. Andrew Jackson never entered the President’s house in visible form, for she had passed from earth before her husband became the Chief Magistrate of the Nation. Yet it is doubtful if the wife of any other President ever exerted so powerful and positive an influence over an administration in life as did she in death.
Born and reared on the frontiers of civilization, her educational advantages had been most scanty, and she never mastered more than the simplest rudiments of knowledge. Yet, looking on her pictured face, it is easy to fathom and define the power which, through life and beyond the grave, held the master will of the husband who loved her in sweet abeyance. It was a power purely womanly—the affectional force of a woman of exalted moral nature and deep affections. It was impossible that such a woman should use arts to win love, and equally impossible that she should not be loved. Men would love her instinctively, through the best and highest in their natures.
With the wound of her loss fresh and bleeding, President Jackson entered upon his high office. Thus in death Rachel Jackson became the tutelary saint of the President’s house. Wherever he went, he wore her miniature. No matter what had been the duties or pleasures of the day, when the man came back to himself, and to his lonely room, her Bible and her picture took the place of the beloved face and tender presence which had been the one charm and love of his heroic life.
No other President’s wife looks down upon posterity with so winsome and innocent a gaze as Rachel Jackson. A cap of soft lace surmounts the dark curls which cluster about her forehead, falling veil-like over her shoulders. The full lace ruffle around her neck is not fastened with even a brooch, and, save the long pendants in her ears, she wears no ornaments. Her throat is massive, her lips full and sweet in expression, her brow broad and rounded, her eye-brows arching above a pair of large, liquid, gazelle-like eyes, whose soft, feminine outlook is sure to win and to disarm the beholder. This remarkable loveliness of spirit and person was the source of fatal sorrow to Rachel Jackson. It won her reverence, amounting almost to adoration, but it made her also the victim of jealousy, envy and malice. These made the shadow always flung athwart the sunshine of love which made her life.
She was a woman of deep personal piety, and longed for nothing so much as the time when her husband would be done with political honors, as he had assured her that then, and not till then, could he “be a Christian.” The following anecdote, told by the late Judge Bryan of Washington, illustrates the piety of her character and the profound personal influence she held over the moral nature of her husband:
The father of Judge Bryan, an intimate friend of Mrs. Jackson, was on a visit to the Hermitage. Mrs. Jackson talked to him of religion, gave him a hymn to read that was sung at a late funeral, and said the General was disposed to be religious, and she believed would join the church but for the coming presidential election; that his head was now full of politics. While they were conversing, the General came in with a newspaper in his hand, to which he referred as denouncing his mother as a camp follower. “This is too bad!” he exclaimed, rising into a passion and swearing terribly as our “army in Flanders.” When nearly out of breath, his wife approached him and, looking him in his face, simply said: Mr. Jackson. He was subdued in an instant, and did not utter another oath.
In the same presidential contest this gentle being did not herself escape calumny. When her husband was elected President of the United States, she said: “For Mr. Jackson’s sake, I am glad; for my own, I never wished it.” To an intimate friend she said in all sincerity: “I assure you I would rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God than to dwell in that palace in Washington.” Dearer to her heart was the Hermitage, with the little chapel built by her husband for her own especial use, than all the prospective pomp of the President’s house.
She was a mother to every servant on the estate, and anxious to make every one comfortable during her absence in Washington. She made numerous journeys to Nashville, to purchase, for all left behind, their winter supplies. Worn out, after a day’s shopping, she went to the parlor of the Nashville Inn to rest. While she waited there for the family coach which was to convey her back to the Hermitage, she heard her own name spoken in the adjoining room. She was compelled to hear, while she sat there, pale and smitten, the false and cruel calumnies against herself which had so recklessly been used during the campaign to defeat her husband, and which he had zealously excluded from her sight in the newspapers. Here the arrow came back from the misfortune of her youth, when she married a man intellectually and morally her inferior, from whom she was afterwards divorced, and it entered her gentle heart too deep to be withdrawn. She was seized almost immediately with spasmodic disease of the heart. Everything possible was done for her relief without avail. A few nights afterwards she exclaimed: “I am fainting,” was lifted to her bed, and in a few moments had breathed her last sigh.