Petticoat Affair

The Petticoat Affair (also known as the Eaton Affair or the Eaton Malaria) was an 1831 U.S. sex scandal involving members of President Andrew Jackson's Cabinet.

Margaret "Peggy" O'Neale (or O'Neill) was the daughter of a Washington D.C. boardinghouse owner and was renowned for her "vivacious" temperament—the coded implication being that she was overtly flirtatious and sexual at a time when women, as a group, were not—who lost her first husband, sailor John Timberlake to suicide. He was allegedly driven to it because of rumors of Peggy's love affair with Jackson's Secretary of War John Henry Eaton. Peggy and Eaton were married shortly after Timberlake's death, throwing the respectable women of the capital into a tizzy.

The anti-Peggy coalition was led by the wife of John C. Calhoun and a phlanx of other Cabinet wives, while Martin Van Buren allied himself with the Eatons. Jackson was sympathetic to the Eatons, in part, perhaps, because his own beloved late wife, Rachel Donelson Robards had been the subject of equally nasty innuendo. (Her first marriage had not been completely dissolved prior to her wedding to Jackson.) That said, Jackson's First Lady, his niece Emily Donelson, sided with the Calhoun faction.

The scandal was so intense that several members of the Cabinet finally resigned, including Samuel D. Ingham and John Branch, and Van Buren was elevated to a position as Jackson's favorite (replacing Calhoun) and the de facto heir to the Democratic party. Eventually, Eaton also resigned from the cabinet.

References

• The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny and Sex in Andrew Jackson's White House by John F. Marszalek ISBN 0807126349
• The Life of Andrew Jackson by Robert V. Remini ISBN 0060937351

See also

• Kitchen Cabinet
• Political scandals of the United States