n, blankets, and bacon were yet to be paid for,
and enjoying in the evening the festivities planned in his honor by
grateful citizens. His pleasure in the gala affairs of the time was
doubled by the presence of his wife, who one day arrived quite
unexpectedly in the company of some Tennessee friends. Mrs. Jackson
was a typical frontier planter's wife--kind-hearted, sincere,
benevolent, thrifty, pious, but unlettered and wholly innocent of
polished manners. In all her forty-eight years she had never seen a
city more pretentious than Nashville. She was, moreover, stout and
florid, and it may be supposed that in her rustic garb she was a
somewhat conspicuous figure among the fashionable ladies of New
Orleans society.

But the wife of Jackson's accomplished friend and future Secretary of
State, Edward Livingston, fitted her out with fashionable clothes and
tactfully instructed her in the niceties of etiquette, and ere long
she was able to demean herself, if not without a betrayal of her
unfamiliarity with the environment, at all events to the complete
satisfaction of the General. The latter's devotion to his wife was a
matter of much comment. "Debonair as he had been in his association
with the Creole belles, he never missed an opportunity to demonstrate
that he considered the short, stout, beaming matron at his side the
perfection of her sex and far and away the most charming woman in the
world."[4] "Aunt Rachel," as she was known throughout western
Tennessee, lived to see the hero of New Orleans elected President, but
not to share with him the honors of the position. "I have sometimes
thought," said Thomas Hart Benton, "that General Jackson might have
been a more equable tenant of the White House than he was had she been
spared to share it with him. At all events, she was the only human
being on earth who ever possessed the power to swerve his mighty will
or soothe his fierce temper."

Shortly before their departure the Jacksons were guests of honor at a
grand ball at the Academy. The upper floor was arranged for dancing
and the lower for supper, and the entire building was aglow with
flowers, colored lamps, and transparencies. As the evening wore on and
the dances of polite society had their due turn, the General finally
avowed that he and his bonny wife would show the proud city folk what
_real_ dancing was. A somewhat cynical observer--a certain Nolte, whom
Jackson had just forced to his own terms in a settlement for