Rachel Jackson and Mary Lincoln

RACHEL DONELSON ROBARDS JACKSON

Born:
Born near the Banister River, about ten miles from present-day Chatham, Virginia, Pittsylvania County, in 1767; the exact date of her birth was not recorded at the time, but has been invariably attributed to the month of June, with some sources designating the date as 15 June

Marriage:

First marriage:

18 years old to Lewis Robards (born 1758, Harrodsburg, Mercer County, Kentucky; died, 15, April, 1814, Harrodsburg, Kentucky), land owner, speculator, on 1 March, 1785, at Lincoln County, Kentucky. Lewis and Rachel Robards lived in Harrodsburg with his elderly mother for over three years, until the late summer or early fall of 1788.
Divorce: The ultimate divorce of Rachel Jackson from her first husband would come to shatter all precedent in presidential history. It was the first time that such a deeply personal event would be used against a presidential candidate in a campaign and it was also the first large public consideration of the conceptual ideal of what kind of personal background a First Lady should ideally possess. It thus unwittingly played one of the first and important public debates in the history of First Ladies. Lewis Robards and his defenders would claim that his former wife had shamelessly flirted and that he asked her brother to remove Rachel from her marital home, but that he later sought reconciliation. Upon his return to Nashville, they claimed he found her in an inappropriately close relationship with Andrew Jackson, a circuit lawyer boarding with the Donelsons who then eloped with her in Natchez, Mississippi in an illegal marriage. This resulted in his seeking and gaining a divorce. In contrast, the Donelsons and Jacksons claimed that Robards had physically abused Rachel and that she ran first to her mother's home and then - when word came that Robards was coming to take her back to their Kentucky home - fled for fear of her life to Natchez with friends, a married couple, all of them guided and protected by Jackson. They further claim that when Jackson returned to Nashville alone that he was told that Robards had boasted that he had successfully processed a divorce from Rachel, thus leaving her open to marry Jackson. The Jackson defenders would suggest that Robards had purposely misled them so that if Andrew and Rachel Jackson did marry and live together that it would make the union an adulterous one that was all the proof needed for Robards to then gain a divorce. The Jackson evidence was weakened by the fact that no legal marriage of theirs could be legitimized in then-Spanish-ruled Mississippi because they were Protestant and only Catholic wedding ceremonies were recognized as legal unions. Robards did follow the law by first obtaining a required legislative grant to file a divorce. He then did so based on the fact that Rachel had openly committed adultery, and the divorce was granted on TK to him, she found to be guilty of abandonment as well. The Jacksons remarried legally in Tennessee, but the incident had made Rachel Jackson a bigamist and adulterer.
*Rachel Robards Jackson was the first of three First Ladies who marriages previous to that of a President had ended in divorce.
Second marriage:
26 years old, to Andrew Jackson (born March 15, 1767 in Waxhaws, North Carolina - died June 08, 1845, at the "Hermitage," in Davidson, Tennessee) on January 7, 1794, Nashville, Tennessee at the Donelson home. For the three years following their "Natchez" wedding, Andrew Jackson and Rachel Robards had lived with her mother and the Donelson clan in Nashville. They continued to make their home there until TK, when they began construction of what would be the first building to later comprise their famous Hermitage plantation.

 Presidential Campaign and Inauguration:
Early in the 1828 presidential race, the story of Rachel Jackson's former status as an adulterer, bigamist and divorcee was used against her husband by the press supporting his rival for the presidency, John Quincy Adams. These included an anti-Jackson pamphlet called Truth's Advocate, printed in Cincinnati, and articles in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, National Banner and Nashville Whig. One editorial asked, "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?" Many of Jackson's detractors claimed he was not fit for the presidency based partially on his professional and personal behavior stemming from the circumstances of the Robard's divorce and his marriage.

MARY ANNE TODD LINCOLN

 

Born:  
Place: Lexington, Kentucky
Date: 1818, December 13 

 Marriage:
23 years old, married 1842, November 4 to Abraham Lincoln, lawyer (1809-1865), in the front parlor of the home of Mary Todd's sister Elizabeth and her husband Ninian Edwards, Springfield, Illinois. On 1841, January 1, Abraham Lincoln broke his initial engagement to Mary Todd several months after she had accepted. For the first two years of their marriage, they lived at the Globe Tavern in Springfield. In 1844, they purchased their first and only home at Eight and Jackson Streets in Springfield. 

 Presidential Campaign and Inauguration:Legend claims that as a young woman Mary Todd had announced to friends that the man she married would someday become President of the United States. Her vigorous defense and support of Lincoln's presidential candidacy in 1860, willingness to speak with reporters who came to Springfield to cover Lincoln's campaign, as well as her "speeches," (as a New York Times article termed her overt discussion of political issues), during the transition period between election and inauguration days prove her eagerness to assume a prominent public role in her husband's presidency. Due to the sectional strife and imminent secession of South Carolina, however, Lincoln's 1861 inaugural was overshadowed by threats on his life. Many of the wealthy southern families who had dominated the social-political life of the capital were leaving and those remaining social leaders, including the outgoing First Lady Harriet Lane had pre-judged the "western" Mrs. Lincoln with a regional bias as unsuited to assume a social leadership role. In the 1865 campaign there was a threat that Democratic operatives were planning to make Mrs. Lincoln and her "crockery," meaning the expensive state china she had purchased, an issue; it never materialized. After the 1865 inaugural ceremony at the Capitol, Mrs. Lincoln hosted a large reception in the White House. 

 First Lady:
1861, March 4 - 1865, April 14
42 years old
 
With the difficulty of making medical conclusions about Mrs. Lincoln long after she lived, precise assessment of what mental and physical problems she may have suffered is impossible. She did manifest behavior that suggests severe depression, anxiety and paranoia, migraine headaches, even possibly diabetes. Certainly all of her ills were exacerbated by a series of tragic circumstances during her White House tenure: the trauma of Civil War, including the allegiance of much of her family to the Confederacy and their death or injury in battle; an 1863 accident which threw her from a carriage and knocked her unconscious; the accusations by northerners that she was sympathetic to the Confederacy and the ostracizing of her as a "traitor" by southerners; the sudden death of her son Willie in 1862; and, of course, the worst incident of all, the assassination of her husband as she sat beside him in the Ford's Theater.
 
Mary Lincoln viewed her expensive 1861 White House redecoration and her extravagant clothing purchases (the former over-running a federal appropriation of $20,000 by $6,000, and the latter driving her family into great debt) as a necessary effort to create an image of the stability that would command respect not only for the President but the Union. She felt this most keenly in light of the uncertain neutrality of France and England. Public and press reaction, however, was ridicule and anger. She instead conveyed the image of a selfish and indulgent woman inconsiderate of the suffering that most of the nation's families were enduring as a result of the war her husband was managing. In time, she would even press Republican appointees to pay her debts, since they owed their positions to her husband.