The circumstances of the end of Rachel Donelson's relationship with Lewis Robards and transition to Andrew Jackson resurfaced as a campaign issue in the 1828 U.S. presidential election. As Frances Clifton put it in her study of Jackson's long friendship with John Overton, "Jackson's irregular marriage proved good propaganda for the friends of Adams and Clay. The political enemies of Jackson 'saw in his wife a weak spot in his armor through which his vitals might be reached; and they did not hesitate to make the most of it.'"[1]
According to all available evidence, young Andrew Jackson and Rachel Donelson were "passionately in love with each other" and remained wholeheartedly devoted to one another for the rest of their lives.[2] That said, historians Robert V. Remini and Ann Toplovich argue that the official Jackson version of their meeting and marriage, as presented during the election of 1828 was, for the most part, inauthentic. Remini, Jackson's most recent major biographer, included a timeline in the first volume of his biographical series. The entry for Jackson–Donelson reads: "1790/1791: 'Marries' Rachel Donelson Robards" with the scare quotes strongly implying the marriage was Biblical but not legal.[3] For roughly 150 years the party line was that Rachel was "accidentally" a bigamist, or that Jackson was the third party to adultery because they were confused about how divorce law worked in Virginia, but since the 1970s historians have generally agreed that Jackson and Rachel Donelson Robards left Tennessee together to "force" Robards to file for divorce.[4]
As Remini explained in the first volume of his multi-volume biography of Jackson:
The fact trail shows Jackson and Rachel Donelson Robards ran off to Natchez together via Cumberland River to the Mississippi River, or possibly the Natchez Trace, sometime between July 1789 and their return to Tennessee in July 1790, Robards filed for divorce in December 1790, the divorce was granted on grounds of adultery in September 1793, Robards unofficially remarried Hannah Winn in December 1792 and officially remarried her in November 1793. Rachel Donelson Robards and Andrew Jackson were officially married by Robert Hays of Haysborough on January 18, 1794.[5]
Harriet Chappell Owsley wrote that Rachel asked Col. Robert Stark for a ride to the Natchez region in December 1789. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, winter and spring were the traditional slave-trading season, after the harvest was in and before the next season's planting had begun,[6] and Andrew Jackson had a slave-trading business based at a log-cabin tavern or store in Bruinsburg, Mississippi. They later claimed they thought Robards had been granted a divorce when they were allegedly married by a friend at a friend's house, but since Jackson was a lawyer with rank roughly equivalent to a federal prosecutor today,[7] that claim is unconvincing. Suffice it to say, "When the couple discovered that their marriage wasn't actually valid, historian Jon Meacham says they didn't seem to care: 'Their passion for each other was apparently deep enough to lead them, despite their later claims to the contrary, to choose to live in adultery in order to provoke a divorce from Robards'."[8] More than likely, explains Andrew Burstein in The Passions of Andrew Jackson, the Jacksons were "willing adulterers, which sounds harsh, but in fact what they did was reasonable and expedientand not unheard of on the frontier. The desertion and adultery approach was a well-planned stratagem for people living at such a distance from any state capital; it was the easiest (nearly the only nonviolent) justification for a formal divorce. He and Rachel needed to be named as adulterers if she was to be divorced. As prosecutor, Jackson knew the laws of the land well enough to act discreetly to secure his and Rachel's happiness."[9]
In 1854, a resident of Rodney, Mississippi, who went by the pseudonym Idler, wrote, "One of the primitive settlers, who further stated that they were married in either Jefferson or Claiborne county, though Old Mock, the miller, who resided near Danville, Ky., doubts the marriage, and he says Jackson stole Roberts' wife and afterwards paid him for her and that Roberts was delighted to get rid of her on such easy terms. But whether married or not, they lived together happily for many years, and when she died he mourned as one who had lost all that gave value to life."[10]
One of Robards' descendants, grandson William J. Robards, defended his grandfather's honor into the 20th century, as retold by the Louisville Herald in 1904:
In the words of Toplovich, despite diligent search by political allies, enemies, historians, and genealogists for the better part of 200 years, "No credible evidence of a marriage ceremony in Natchez has ever surfaced." Col. Thomas M. Green, who was purported to have performed the marriage ceremony for Mrs. Robards and Jackson, had been named a justice of the peace of Bourbon County, Georgia in 1785.[11] However, the existence of Bourbon County was not recognized by either Spain or the United States, and even Georgia gave up on it by 1788.[12] Technically, any marriage of Protestants that took place in the Natchez district prior to November 30, 1792 required the presence of "Catholic priest and two witnesses...However, the law was frequently violated" and marriages were performed by either Protestant clergy who were not supposed to be there, or simply by friends of the couple.[13]
Harriet Chappell Owsley argues that whatever marriage ritual happened took place in February or March 1791, or at least between October 1790 and April 1791, because over that period Rachel's last name changed from Donelson to Jackson in records of her father's estate.
The absence of any contemporary documentation—in the words of Remini, "nothing official, and nothing in private correspondence," reinforces the "suspicion that no marriage ever took place in Natchez."[14] As per Remini, there is also no evidence proving the negative, so the suspicion remains just that.
One of the key pillars of the pro-Jackson narrative, absolving the couple from violating the moral code of the day, is the assertion that Rachel Robards spent the winter of 1790–91 (when they were supposed to have met and married, although Toplovich argues they were already in Natchez in 1789) as a guest of either the Green family or Peter Bryan Bruin. The crux of this argument was that Thomas M. Green and/or Bruin were such morally upstanding men that they never would have allowed an adulteress to live under their roofs. As such, assertions that Jackson and Mrs. Robards (separately or together) had their own housing, in the vicinity of Natchez, were subject to attack by Jackson defenders.
In 1910, a Mississippi history journal article written by Eron Rowland approached the story from the housing angle:
As it happens, there is a surviving description from a Mississippi River travelogue of a "double log house with an open hall" being built in the vicinity of St. Catherine's Creek (in what is now Adams County, Mississippi) circa 1789–1790: "The place had a small clearing and a log house on it, and he put up another log house to correspond with it, about fourteen feet apart, connecting them with boards, with a piazza in front of the whole. The usual term applied to such a structure was that it was 'two pens and a passage.' This connecting passage made a fine hall, and altogether gave it a good and comfortable appearance."[15]
Similarly, S. G. Heiskell, a local historian and former mayor of Knoxville, made a point to address this issue in his article about "Gen. Jackson and the Natchez Country," writing, 'But probably the most unscrupulous thing in the Post-Dispatch article is this: 'Near Natchez, there used to stand a ruined log hut which was pointed out to strangers as the spot they (Jackson and Mrs. Robards) had passed their honeymoon. This was no doubt the spot to which he carried her when they first ran away, for she was kept in a place of safety says one historian until after Robards applied for a divorce.'" Heiskell then goes on to insist that if the couple ever stayed together at Bruinsburg or environs, where Jackson traded in slaves and whiskey, it was definitely after they were properly introduced and married under the oversight of Southern gentlemen, etc.[16]
The 1938 WPA history of Jefferson county quotes one Green family member on the controversy: "Col. Jas. Payne Green, writing of Springfield in 1922, states: 'Col. Green's (Thomas) family were the first settlers of this section now known as the Maryland Settlement (Church Hill). He gave his oldest son, Thomas Marston, the plantation now known as Springfield...Jackson became acquainted with the Springfield Green by commercial transactions made at Bruinburg, and his wife became acquainted with the Greens through the brother, who was a wealthy planter in Adams County, near Natchez. She was on a visit to the Springfield home of Thomas M. Green, the third, and was married by Col. Thomas Green, the second. All of the above statements are matters of re-cord," but the WPA editor notes that the informant does not claim it was "in the house now standing."[17] The 1941 Natchez Trace Parkway survey stated, "Legend has associated Springfield with the marriage of Andrew Jackson and Rachel Robards. Although this seems historically inaccurate, it has lent a romantic background to the place."[18]
There is also the question of Jackson's store or tavern or trading post, as it is variously described. There are no contemporary or early descriptions of it as a building, if it was even a physical structure at all. The closest description, which is only scantingly evidential, is by traveler Fortescue Cuming that in 1808 the settlement at Bruinsburg Landing had a "tolerably high bank and a good landing which has only been productive of a cotton gin, a tavern, and an overseer's house."[19] Whether this tavern had anything whatsoever to do with Jackson is unknown. Cuming later stopped at a tavern in the territorial capital of Washington, about which he wrote, "This tavern (as I find is the custom in this country) is kept in a front building by Mr. Hill, assisted by some negro servants, while Mrs. Hill and her daughters live in a detached building in the rear, where I was received by them kindly, in remembrance of their having descended the Ohio and Mississippi in my boat with me." Whether or not this general description of local tavern styles has anything correlation to Jackson's circumstances is also unclear.
A 1985 genealogy of families related to the Greens includes a list of conflicting statements regarding the Jackson–Donelson association with the family and Springfield. One item on the three-page-long list reads, "One article says that Rachel Robards had a brother, John, who owned some land near Natchez, whon she came to visit. If that is so, it is strange that she stayed, at the Greens."[20] A Natchez court record abstract created by May McBee states that in a court case of 1793, "Dist. of Villa Gayoso. Personally appeared John Donelson, who, on oath, deposed that John Jarrett told him that he had rented from Mr. Thomas Green, senior, his place upon the bluff, at the rent of six chair frames, and the said Jarratt was also to take care of Mr. Green's hogs and stock on sd plantation and other property on the place."[21]
Rachel Jackson died of a heart attack at age 61, shortly before Andrew Jackson was to take office as President of the United States. Jackson blamed his political opponents for her death, but she had started showing signs of heart disease at least three years earlier.
Political enemies of Jackson resurfaced the beginning of his romance with Rachel when he ran for president in 1828 (the second of three times). An East Tennessee Congressional candidate named Thomas Dickens Arnold "brought the marriage question into the open by publishing an article stating that Jackson, a 'lump of naked deformity,' had 'tor[n] from a husband the wife of his bosom,' that he had 'driven [Robards] off like a dog, and had taken his wife.'"
According to historian Donald B. Cole, surfacing the issue of Jackson's marriage brought to the fore questions about changing social mores:
Historian Ann Toplovich, in her article about the love triangle, wrote about the impossible situation in which Rachel Stockley Donelson Robards found herself in 1789: