Peggy Eaton

Margaret O'Neill Eaton in later life

Margaret O'Neale Eaton ( 3 December, 1799 - 8 November, 1879), better known as Peggy Eaton, was the daughter of the keeper of a popular Washington, D.C. tavern, and was noted for her beauty, wit and vivacity and her central role in the Petticoat Affair that disrupted the cabinet of Andrew Jackson. She is oft referred to as "The (First) First Mistress."

About 1823, she married a purser in the United States Navy, John B. Timberlake, who committed suicide while on service in the Mediterranean in 1828. In the following year she married Patrick Henry Eaton (1790-1856), a Tennessee politician, at the time a member of the United States Senate. 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 secretaries, and charges were made against her of improper sexual conduct with Eaton previous to her marriage to him.

The refusal of the wives of the cabinet members to recognize the wife of his friend angered President Jackson, and he tried in vain to coerce them. Eventually, and partly for this reason, he almost completely reorganized his cabinet. The effect of the incident on the political fortunes of the vice-president, John C. Calhoun, whose wife, Floride Calhoun, was one of the recalcitrants, was perhaps most important. Partly on this account, Jackson's favor was transferred from Calhoun to Martin Van Buren, the Secretary of State, who had taken Jackson's side in the quarrel and had shown marked attention to Mrs. Eaton, and whose subsequent elevation to the vice-presidency and presidency through Jackson's favor is no doubt partly attributable to this incident.

After the death of her husband she married a young Italian dancing-master, Antonio Buchignani on June 7, 1859. She was 59 and he was in his twenties. In their seventh year of marriage, 1866, Buchignani ran off with the bulk of her money and her granddaughter. She obtained a divorce from him and died in poverty in Washington D.C. on 8 November 1879.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
• "Eaton, Margaret O'Neale" Notable American Women, Vol. 1, 4th ed., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975
• "Margaret "Peggy" Eaton" The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Tennessee Historical Society, Nashville, Tennessee, 1998

Further reading

• Allgor, Catherine. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.