The Robards–Donelson–Jackson relationship controversy was a long-running frontier sex scandal that began in the 1790s in what was then the far west of the newly established United States of America. The parties were Lewis Robards of Kentucky and his young wife, Rachel Donelson, daughter of Tennessee pioneer settler John Donelson. After several years of childless and apparently unhappy marriage to Robards, Rachel left him and went to the Natchez District of West Florida (Spanish Mississippi) with a young lawyer from the Carolina Piedmont named Andrew Jackson, who had business in the lower Mississippi River valley, where he traded horses and slaves. Robards later filed for divorce on grounds of abandonment and adultery. Andrew Jackson and Rachel eventually settled in the Nashville area and after the Robards-Donelson divorce was finalized, they were legally married in 1794 and lived happily for many years at a plantation called the Hermitage.
Although the circumstances of the end of Rachel Donelson's relationship with Lewis Robards and her transition to a relationship with Andrew Jackson were publicly known before 1828, the issue was put before the voting public as a campaign issue during the vitriolic 1828 U.S. presidential election that pitted Jackson against incumbent U.S. president John Quincy Adams. Rachel was accused of bigamy and adultery, abetted by Jackson.
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. 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 Lewis Robards and Rachel Donaldson (Rachel Donelson) were married in 1785 in Kentucky, in what was then the legal jurisdiction of the U.S. state of Virginia. (Kentucky would not become a separate state until 1792.) Rachel was about 18, Robards was about 27. The marriage bond was signed by Rachel's father John Donelson with Willis Green clerk of court.
Andrew Jackson did business deals with two of Rachel Donelson's brothers, Stockley Donelson and William Donelson, in the 1780s. The evidence shows that Jackson and Rachel Donelson Robards took a flatboat to Natchez together via Cumberland River to the Mississippi River, sometime between July 1789 and their return to the Cumberland plateau of middle Tennessee in July 1790. John Overton's account of the marriage mentions Rachel traveled south with a Colonel Stark; Spanish records have Stark arriving in the Natchez District in January 1790. Some sort of ritual, or something (handwaves), may have taken place in July 1790 as Robards' complaint states that "Rachel Robards did, on the — July, 1790, elope from her husband, said Lewis, with another man." Natchez resident George Cochran sent his regards to "Mrs. Jackson" in a letter of November 3, 1790. Robards filed for divorce in December 1790. The Jacksons later claimed to have been married in Natchez in 1791, but no documentary evidence of this ceremony has ever been found. Rachel was listed as Rachel Jackson in the January 1791 inventory of her father's estate. The Donelson–Robards divorce was granted on grounds of adultery in September 1793. Robards unofficially remarried, to his second wife, Hannah Winn, in December 1792, and he officially married her in November 1793. Rachel Donelson Robards and Andrew Jackson were officially married by Rachel's brother-in-law Robert Hays of Haysborough, Southwest Territory, on January 18, 1794, approximately five years after they first met, and four months after her divorce was approved. (The Southwest Territory became the U.S. state of Tennessee in 1796.)
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. Adam Rothman, a historian studying Jackson's military and diplomatic exploits of the 1810s noted, as have others before him, "...the tenderness of Andrew Jackson's letters to Rachel contrasts sharply with his harshness toward his own soldiers and, of course, his Red Stick foes." Their marital affection and warmth persisted until her death in 1828; 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."
Historians including Robert V. Remini and Ann Toplovich argue that the official Jackson version of their meeting and marriage, as presented during the U.S. presidential campaign of 1828 was, for the most part, inauthentic. Remini, Jackson's major 20th-century 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.
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. According to historian Andrew Burstein, "A look-the-other-way frontier (or Scotch-Irish) bridal abduction tradition did exist" but as a man of ambition, Jackson likely determined that "the ambiguity (in Nashville) of what they were doing in Natchez made their situation less of a concern" for both his career prospects and the reputation of the Donelson family. More than likely, explains 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." 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."
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 [1790/1791] marriage ceremony in Natchez has ever surfaced."
Plantation owner Col. Thomas M. Green, who was purported by the Nashville Campaign Committee 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 of the local colonial powers (Spain and the United States), and by 1788 even the U.S. state of Georgia gave up claiming that the jurisdiction existed. 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. 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 that were filed in probate court 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
The Jacksonian line for much of the 19th and 20th centuries was that Andrew and Rachel were married 1791ish at Springfield plantation, in the vicinity of Cole's Creek, in what was then Spanish-controlled territory and is today Jefferson County, Mississippi.
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, which included sons Thomas M. Green Jr. and Abner Green, or Peter Bryan Bruin. The crux of this argument was that the Greens 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 had a house in the Cole's Creek neighborhood of 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.