Margaret O'Neill (or O'Neale) Eaton (December 3, 1799 – November 8, 1879), better known as Peggy Eaton, was the daughter of Rhoda Howell and William O'Neale,[1] the owner of Franklin House, a popular Washington, D.C. hotel. Peggy was noted for her beauty, wit and vivacity. Through her marriage to United States Senator John Henry Eaton, she had a central role in the Petticoat affair that disrupted the cabinet of Andrew Jackson.
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Background
About 1816, at age 17, Margaret O'Neale married John B. Timberlake, a 39-year-old purser in the United States Navy. Her parents gave them a house across from the hotel, and they met many politicians who stayed there. In 1818 they met and befriended John Henry Eaton, a 28-year-old widower and newly elected senator from Tennessee. Margaret and John had three children together, one of whom died in infancy.
John Timberlake died in 1828 while at sea in the Mediterranean, in service on a four-year voyage. When Margaret married Senator John Henry Eaton (1790-1856) shortly after the turn of the year, there were rumors that Timberlake had committed suicide because of despair at an alleged affair between the two.
Senator Eaton was a close personal friend of President Andrew Jackson, who in 1829 appointed him Secretary of War. This sudden elevation of Mrs. Eaton into the Cabinet social circle was resented by the wives of several of Jackson's appointees. They criticized Mrs. Eaton for allegedly having had an affair with Eaton prior to her marriage.
The wives of the cabinet members snubbed Mrs. Eaton socially, which angered President Jackson. He tried unsuccessfully to coerce them. Eventually, and partly for this reason, he almost completely reorganized his cabinet, an event referred to as the Petticoat affair.
The effect of the incident on the political fortunes of the vice-president, John C. Calhoun, whose wife, Floride Calhoun, was one of those who snubbed Mrs. Eaton, was perhaps most important. Partly on this account, Jackson transferred his favor to the widower Martin Van Buren, the Secretary of State, who had taken the Eatons' side in the quarrel. He had shown positive social attention to Mrs. Eaton; some attributed his subsequent elevation to the vice-presidency and presidency through Jackson's favor as related to this incident.
Years later after the death of her husband, Margaret Eaton married a young Italian dancing-master, Antonio Buchignani, on June 7, 1859. She was 59 and he was 19. The marriage reignited much of the social stigma that Margaret had carried earlier in life within Washington society. In 1866, their seventh year of marriage, Buchignani ran off with the bulk of her money and her granddaughter Emily to Europe.
Eaton obtained a divorce from him but was unable to recover her financial standing. She died in poverty in Washington, D.C. on November 9, 1879.
Notes
- ^ Coit, p. 546.
Further reading
- "Margaret 'Peggy' Eaton", The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Tennessee Historical Society, Nashville, Tennessee, 1998.
- Allgor, Catherine. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
- Coit, Margaret L. "Eaton, Margaret O'Neale", Notable American Women, Vol. 1, 4th ed., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975 (reprinted from 1911).
External links
- "Little Friend Peg", Founders of America
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