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Show ; Ji ii 3i 1 tJ L0 .. -.v. 1 - . ' I Andrew Jjckson's love a!tair laste mere tan thirty years. It was rr.ar'el by a duel, scandals; It was used as a weapon B?alnst fcltn when te was a candidate can-didate for the Presidency cf the United States. Yet It was one long:, eweet song to him. r.achel Donolson was the woman whom Andrew Jackson loved and married. In the latter part cf the eighth decade of the eighteenth century Andrew Jackron, a young- Tennessee lawyer, boarded with Mrs. Donelson In Nashville. In the same house lived Capt. and Mrs. Lewis r.otarda. Jlrs. P.obards had been Rachel Donelson. . ' - Capt. r.obards was a good deal of a ruffian, and In 1739 hli wife left him. Later In the year he obtained from the Virginia Legislature an act giving him permission to sue his wife for divorce on the ground of infidelity. Jackson, himself a lawyer, and his advisers, read the act as granting a divorce, di-vorce, and he married Mrs. Robards at once. After waiting two years Robards took advantage of the act and brought suit against his wife. The case went against her, and In December, 17S3, Robards got a formal divorce. di-vorce. In January, 1734, Jackson remarried his wife. . , "And they lived happily ever after." But the romance of the marriage was not ended.' For thirty-seven years Jackson kept a pair of pistols In condition for Immediate use against "any man who dared to breathe his wife's name except In honor." In ISO 6he fought a duel witn Charles Dickinson and killed him for words reflecting on Mrs. Jackson. The ircumstances of their marriage were forgotten until Jackson became a candidate for the Presidency. Then they were remembered and published to the world with every detail exaggerated. . Robards, who seems to have acted a be did simply out of hatred for hi former wife, was responsible for much of the scandal that was made during the campaign of 1828. In November of that year Jackson was elected triumphantly. News traveled slowly in those days, but about the middle of December It was known as a eery .talnty that he had been successful. ,On December 17, 1S28, Mrs. Jackson was stricken with heart disease, caused, there' Is little doubt, by the slanders of the campaign. Gen. Jackson did not leave her bedside. She Gled on December 22. "Andrew Jackson grew twenty years older In a night." a biographer wrote. When the women came tolay out his wife the old soldier left the room. But he stopped to speak' to the oldest woman, and this is what he said to her: "Spread four blankets on the table. If she comes to, she will lie so hard upon It" . ' He had tried to make the world less hard for her always. |