Thinking the matter was settled, Jackson finally held his overdue cabinet dinner in November 1829. While it provoked ‘no very marked exhibitions of bad feeling in any quarter,’ recalled Van Buren, the event was nonetheless awkward and tense. Guests rushed through their meals in order to avoid discussion of or with the Eatons, who had found places of honor near Jackson. The next party, hosted by Van Buren (who had neither daughters nor a living spouse to inhibit his societal intercourse), drew every member of the cabinet–but their wives contrived excuses for staying away.

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By the spring of 1830, Jackson had come to believe that the situation did not result merely from connivances among the gentry, but from scheming by his political foes. Initially he imagined the plot was led by his renowned Kentucky rival Henry Clay, who would doubtless benefit from his administration’s ‘troubles, vexations and difficulties.’ As the president watched his cabinet split over this petticoat affair, however, he couldn’t help noticing that those advisors most opposed to the Eatons were also the strongest followers of John Calhoun–a man he was coming to distrust.

Tall, wiry, and earnest, Calhoun had helped elect Jackson to the White House, and many assumed that he’d be Old Hickory’s successor. Nevertheless, the vice president eschewed the capital during most of the Jackson administration’s tumultuous first year, and what the president remembered from Calhoun’s brief time there–notably, his wife Floride’s refusal to reciprocate Margaret Eaton’s social call–rubbed him the wrong way. One historian, J.H. Eckenrode, argued a century later that it was Calhoun’s ‘vain and silly wife’ who, by spurning Margaret, ruined her husband’s career ‘at its zenith.’ Certainly Floride Calhoun’s obstinacy, when combined with policy differences between her husband and Jackson–especially on the question of whether states should be allowed to nullify federal laws–drove a deep wedge between the nation’s two highest-ranking officials.

At the same time that Calhoun was falling from grace with the president, Secretary of State Martin Van Buren’s fortunes were rising. The former governor of New York, charming in person and a skilled behind-the-scenes strategist (allies and enemies alike called him ‘the Little Magician’), Van Buren had won the president’s regard by showing respect for John and Margaret Eaton. He became Jackson’s ‘dear friend,’ someone the president felt was ‘well qualified’ to one day fill his shoes. Calhoun’s backers realized that Jackson’s dwindling faith in the vice president played to Van Buren’s advantage. Daniel Webster wrote that since Jackson had become so dependent on his secretary of state, ‘the Vice President has great difficulty to separate his opposition to Van Buren from opposition to the President.’ Calhoun could only pray that his public approval or a Van Buren slip-up would still propel him into the presidency.

For two years the press and pundits savaged the administration over Jackson’s support for the Eatons. The nastiest rumors about the couple spread with impunity. One even averred that the war secretary had fathered a child with a ‘colored female servant.’ Van Buren saw as well as anybody how Margaret Eaton had become a liability for the Democrats and a personal burden to Jackson. The president had even sent his nephew and private secretary, Andrew Jackson Donelson, and his wife, Emily, back to Tennessee when they refused to associate with the Eatons. Andrew Donelson expressed his sadness in parting from his uncle, ‘to whom I have stood from my infancy in the relation of son to father.’ Harmony needed to be restored within the administration. Yet if the president discharged the anti-Eaton minority from his cabinet, he risked alienating Calhoun’s contingent of the party, and if he dumped his secretary of war after all this time, he would seem to have caved in to his critics.

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