# Robards–Donelson–Jackson relationship controversy

The circumstances of the end of Rachel Donelson's relationship with Lewis Robards and transition to a relationship with Andrew Jackson resurfaced as a campaign issue in the 1828 U.S. presidential election. The Jackson campaign committee led by John Overton created and publicized an exculpatory narrative to paper over the irregular marriage that had occurred almost 40 years prior. The reality was that Andrew Jackson's wife had been married to another man when they met and "eloped," and the Jacksons would not be legally married to each other until almost five years later. Introducing bigamy and adultery into the discourse was part of the larger no-holds-barred political combat that defined the 1828 election. Overton's timeline and his characterization of the three parties to the "love triangle" was carried forward by later presidential biographers; in the late 20th century historians began to reassess the evidence and charge the Jackson campaign with a less-than-honest rendering of the facts. In current historical analysis, the end of Rachel Donelson's first marriage and the beginning of the Andrew-Rachel relationship is typically framed as a purposeful series of actions intended to free young Rachel from an unhappy household headed by allegedly abusive patriarch Robards.

## A brief history of Andrew & Rachel, and Lewis

* This article is part of a series aboutAndrew Jackson
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Historians including 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. 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. The evidence shows that 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 Rachel's brother-in-law Robert Hays of Haysborough on January 18, 1794.
Representatives of the couple 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, that claim is unconvincing. 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 expedient—and 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." Back in 1887, presidential historian John R. Irelan was unwilling to credit Jackson with any kind of plan whatsoever: "At this date Attorney Jackson had done one other thing which was of great benefit to him, while it never ceased to be the source of most of his troubles; he had married the wife of Lewis Robards. That Jackson's skirts were entirely clear in the circumstances which made this marriage desirable, it may not be easy to demonstrate; but that his conduct was that of a lawyer, or even of a person ordinarily considerate of consequences, it would be useless to maintain." According to all available evidence, young Andrew Jackson and Rachel Donelson were "passionately in love with each other" in their youth and remained wholeheartedly devoted to one another for the rest of their lives. As historian Patricia Brady put it in 2011, "They really still loved each other when he was described as being a toothless skeleton and she was a fat little dumpling."

## Officiant and documentation controversy

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. 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.$^{:5}$ Technically, any marriage of Protestants that took place in the Natchez district prior to November 30, 1792 required a Roman Catholic priest but this law was often ignored and non-Catholic marriages were performed by either Protestant clergy passing through, or simply by friends of the couple.$^{:329–330}$ Regardless of whether a marriage ceremony took place between late 1790 and early 1791, Rachel's last name changed from Donelson to Jackson in records settling her father's estate filed in April 1791.
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." As per Remini, there is also no evidence proving the negative, so the suspicion remains just that.

## Location controversy

One of the key pillars of the pro-Jackson narrative, absolving the couple from violating the moral code of the day, was the assertion that Rachel Robards spent the winter of 1790–91, when Robards filed for divorce, 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. Similarly, claims that Rachel's brother John Donelson II had a house in the Natchez District were questioned because Rachel would have been unlikely to have been sheltered at the Green home if her brother had a plantation of his own in the area.
In 1910, a Mississippi history journal article written by Eron Rowland examined the story, quoting a Mississippi resident whose father, Rev. John Griffing Jones, was born in 1804 in Jefferson County: "I fear Major McCardle's vanity and his connection with the Green family has led him into an error," referring to Robert Lowry and William H. McCardle's 1891 history of Mississippi. Jones' son also quoted a former Green family slave named Allen Collier as saying: "'Twain't so; Ole Marster's house—the Great House warn't built at that time—I 'members it , and Miss Robards don't have to go over thar to be married, when she had a good house of her own right by what da call the Jackson Springs.'"$^{:55–56}$ The Joneses claimed that Rachel owned a small farm sited along the Natchez Trace 1.5 miles (2.4 km) southwest of Old Greenville. The residence on this farm was double log house with an open hall, and the farm had a spring located "in the lower end of her garden was for many years known locally as Jackson's Spring." The spring mentioned by the Jones and Allen Collier was memorable in part because it "was surrounded by very luxuriant mint" which was sometimes collected by residents for use in mint juleps and similar. Regarding the presence of the Jacksons in the lower Mississippi, S. G. Heiskell, a local historian and former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, made a point to attack claims in an old Post-Dispatch article that there had been a "ruined log hut" near Natchez that had been the Jacksons' honeymoon house. Heiskell insisted 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.
The 1938 WPA history of Jefferson County, Mississippi mentions Rachel Donelson's allegedly Natchez-resident brother: "Col. Jas. Payne Green, writing of Springfield in 1922, states...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." A 1985 genealogy of families related to the Greens mentions, "One article says that Rachel Robards had a brother, John, who owned some land near Natchez, who she came to visit. If that is so, it is strange that she stayed at the Greens." There was a Juan Donaldson recorded as a resident of the Villa Gayoso section of the Natchez District in the Spanish colonial census of 1792. A Natchez court record abstract created by May McBee mentions John Donelson II testifying in a 1793 case, "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."

## Death of Rachel Jackson controversy

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.

## Jackson's marriage in politics: 1828 election and beyond

When Jackson ran for president in 1828 (the second of three times), his political enemies revived the story of how his romance with Rachel began. 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.'" When the issue resurfaced in 1828, Jackson's friend John Overton wrote a long testimonial misrepresenting the timeline and rationalizing the couple's behavior. At least one historian has compared the construction of this account to how Jackson lied "that he had received a message from President Monroe through John Rhea...authorizing his conduct in the invasion of Florida" and then convinced Rhea to "vouch for its truth." In both 1884 and 1936, historians proved Jackson's story about the Rhea letter to be "a complete fabrication". 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.'"$^{:31}$
In 1834, three years after Jackson's relationship with U.S. Senator George Poindexter had disintegrated following the latter's objection to the former's proposed appointment of nephew Stockley D. Hays to a Land Office job, Jackson accused Poindexter of having lured his wife into marriage with a promise of $20,000 but "her dowry has been stripes." Poindexter responded in a public letter, "If the assertion made by Mr. Jackson, was as true as it is ridiculously false that I induced my wife to marry me by a promise of twenty thousand dollars as her dower—I have at least the consolation to know that I did not steal her from the lawful owner!! perhaps Mr. Jackson may understand the illusion [sic]."

## Other aspects: Economic, moral, social, feminist aspects

According to historian Donald B. Cole, increasing urbanization and changing social mores made room for the "romantic...view that such acts were private in nature and that love should be allowed to triumph over legalisms."
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:
   Unlike men, women did not have recourse to the divorce process as a means of recovering honor. If her petition failed, a woman's husband would still control her life because of coverture; a wife had no legal entity separate from her husband. And if she won, a woman's character suffered damage. Marriage to a man to whom she had been linked before the divorce was seen as a confession of illicit sexual relations. That a woman of Rachel Donelson's status chose the extralegal recourse of desertion to end her marriage is extraordinary.
Historian Melissa Gismondi has suggested that Rachel's mother, John Donelson's widow, Rachel Stockley Donelson, played a poorly understood but key role in the breakup and remarriage. Gismondi argues that Lewis Robards' struggles with his personal finances, especially in a frontier economy where kinship networks were coequal with business relationships, were concerning to his in-laws. Further to the point, Robards was a Kentuckian and the Donelsons and their business interests were centered in Middle Tennessee. Given that the marriage was both childless and "miserable", a move to Tennessee benefitted Rachel the younger emotionally and positioned her for a new partnership, one that may have been preferred by both Mrs. Donelson and her adult children as it offered both the prospect of happiness for Rachel and the prospect of increased profit for the various family businesses.$^{:29–33}$ This conclusion is not inconsistent with other analyses of the interdependence between kinship and trade in the frontier south. In 2017, Natalie Inman wrote, "Their marriage epitomized what was possible in familial networking. Jackson gained an army of brothers, literally."