Rachel Jackson

Rachel Jackson was never First Lady. She died weeks after her husband won the presidency, broken by a campaign of slander so vicious it drove her to her grave. This early 20th-century biography rescues from obscurity a woman whose love for Andrew Jackson was absolute, whose faith was quiet and deep, and whose life ended in tragedy she never deserved. Born Rachel Donelson, she married Lewis Robards before meeting the young soldier who would become the seventh president. She eloped with Jackson believing herself free, only to discover her first divorce had never been finalized, making her technically a bigamist. The humiliation and legal ordeal that followed haunted her. At their Tennessee home, The Hermitage, she tended to her husband through military campaigns and political ambitions, a devout Presbyterian who found peace in prayer while he sought it in battle. When Jackson ran for president in 1828, his opponents unleashed attacks of unprecedented cruelty on Rachel, questioning her character, her marriage, her virtue. Jackson blamed these calumnies for the illness that killed her in December 1828, just months before his triumph. This biography restores her humanity and examines how women in early America were destroyed by the very political machinery their husbands powered.