ly period of Jackson's life was his
marriage. It was first solemnized early in 1791, and a second time in
January, 1794. The second ceremony was due to the painful discovery that
at the time of the first his wife was not fully released from a former
marriage. She was Rachel, daughter of John Donelson, the pioneer, and
when Jackson first came to Tennessee she was already married to one
Lewis Robards. Robards was a jealous husband. He made charges against
his wife concerning several men, and finally concerning Jackson,
although the facts that have come down to us and the opinions of those
who knew most about the affair all go to show that Jackson acted as a
chivalrous protector of a distressed woman, and never knowingly
committed any offence against his accuser's home. Robards and Rachel
Donelson had been married in Kentucky, then a part of Virginia, and
Virginia had no law of divorce. In 1790 the Virginia legislature, acting
on a petition of Robards, authorized the supreme court of Kentucky to
try the case and grant him a divorce if it should find his charges
against his wife and Jackson to be true. Somehow, Jackson and Mrs.
Robards were persuaded that this act of the Virginia legislature was
itself a divorce, and so they were married. In 1793, however, Robards
brought suit before the Kentucky court, and the court, finding on the
facts as they then existed, when the accused couple were living together
as man and wife, granted the decree. In order, therefore, to make sure
of a legal marriage, Jackson had the ceremony repeated.

It was a most unfortunate situation for an honest man and an honest
woman, and saddened a union which was otherwise pure and beautiful; for
to the day of her death Jackson and his wife loved each other most
tenderly. It brought into his life a new element of bitterness and
passion. Whoever, by the slightest hint, referred to the irregularity of
his marriage, became his mortal enemy. For such he kept his pistols
always ready, and more than one incautious man found to his cost what it
meant to breathe a word on that forbidden subject. One such man was no
less a person than John Sevier, "the Commonwealth Builder," who struck
such a good blow for American independence at the battle of King's
Mountain in the revolutionary war, and who was Governor of Tennessee
when the trouble with Jackson occurred.

The painful facts of his marriage, and the criticism of his wife, had
another effect on Jackson which i