There is pollution in the touch, there is perdition in the example of a profligate woman,” claimed an editorial in the Massachusetts Journal in 1828. A presidential election approached, with Andrew Jackson campaigning to unseat President John Quincy Adams, and for the first time in the country’s history, the candidates’ wives were being dragged into the fray—especially Rachel Jackson
the “profligate woman”in question. Not only was Rachel a divorcée, but rumor had it that she and Andrew had lived together before she was legally separated from her husband. In papers across the nation she was called a bigamist, an adulteress and a whore, and critics questioned whether her character was suitable for the White House.
“The campaign which preceded this election was the most abusive and slanderous that his enemies could contrive and was not equaled in American history until the 20th century,” writes historian Harriet Chappell Owsley. “The effect on Rachel of being the object of insults and abuse was devastating. The happy, fun-loving woman, saddened by the slanders withdrew from the unfriendly eyes of her persecutors.”
But Rachel was more than a scapegoat for her husband’s political opponents. In an era when women had few choices over their lives, she made a daring choice to leave her first husband and marry the man she loved—a decision that she was never able to escape.
Born on June 15, 1767, Rachel Donelson was among 11 children raised on the edges of the new American nation. Her family moved from Virginia to the western Cumberland area of what is today Tennessee when she was still a child. Her family became some of the first settlers
of Nashville and played an important role in the fledgling city’s business and political base, and at age 18, Rachel aligned herself with another land-owning family on the frontier in her marriage to Lewis Robards. The couple went to live with Lewis’s widowed mother and a number of boarders in modern-day Kentucky.
