Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun and the Petticoat Affair - Paperback

by Patricia G. McNeely (Author)

Beautiful and vivacious Margaret "Peggy" O'Neil Timberlake had been widowed only four months in 1829 when she married newly elected President Andrew Jackson's best friend and Secretary of War John Eaton. Horrified by rumors about her dubious reputation, the ladies of Washington, including the wife of Vice President John C. Calhoun, refused to socialize with Peggy Eaton. Enraged by their rejection, the President called a Cabinet meeting to official examine Peggy's character and virtue and to order them to include her in their social lives. When they refused, Jackson stunned the nation in 1831by dissolving his official Cabinet and killing Calhoun's almost certain chance to be the next president. Newspapers and magazines dubbed the crisis the Petticoat Affair. Widowed again in 1856, 59-year-old Peggy Eaton married a 19-year-old Italian dancing instructor and music teacher who spent all her money before he ran off with her 17-year-old granddaughter. The woman who destroyed Jackson's Cabinet and derailed Calhoun's political ambitions died penniless at age 79 in a home for destitute women.

Author Biography

Patricia G. "Pat" McNeely is Professor Emerita at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina, where she taught writing and reporting for 33 years in the School of Journalism. Before joining the faculty, she was a reporter and editor for three South Carolina newspapers: the State, the Columbia Record and the Greenville News. She is the author of "Sherman's Flame and Blame Campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas... and the Burning of Columbia;" "Eyewitnesses to General Sherman's Campaign in the Civil War;" "Lincoln, Sherman, Davis and the Lost Confederate Gold;" "Knights of the Quill: Confederate Correspondents and their Civil War Reporting;" "Handwritten Recipes and Memories from America's First Families;" "Fighting Words: the History of the Media in South Carolina;" and "Palmetto Press: the History of South Carolina's Newspapers."