Rachel's Death | Andrew Mourns| Retaliation
Nashville Mourns | Obituaries | Her Memory Honored

Newspapers around the country reported
Rachel Jackson's death, the wife of the President-elect.

As in The National Banner obituary, the focus was usually on two points that would come to symbolize Rachel's sixty-one years of life, her basic goodness and the slander that tore her life apart.

Even in death, her name was still slandered, as in this New Hampshire paper obituary.

The National Banner:

DEATH OF MRS. JACKSON
We are called on this morning to announce an event of the most awful and melancholy nature. In the midst of preparation for festivity and mirth, the knell of death is heard and on the very day when it was arranged and expected that our town should be a scene of general rejoicing, we are suddenly checked in our career, and are called on to array ourselves in garments of solemnity and woe, MRS. RACHEL JACKSON, wife of General Andrew Jackson, President Elect of the United States, died last night at the Hermitage in this vicinity.

The intelligence of this awful and unlooked for event has created a shock in our community almost unparalleled. It was known, a few days since, that Mrs. Jackson was violently attacked by disease, which however, was supposed to have been checked so as to afford a prospect of immediate restoration to health. This day, being the anniversary of an interesting and important event in the last war, was appropriately selected to testify the respect and affection of his fellow citizens and neighbors to the man, who was so soon to leave his sweet domestic retirement, to assume the responsibilities and discharge the important duties of Chief Magistrate of the nation. The preparations were already made. The table was well nigh spread, at which all was expected to be hilarity and joy: and our citizens had sallied forth on the happy morning with spirits light and buoyant, and countenances glowing with animation and hope - when suddenly the scene is changed, congratulations are converted into expressions of condolence, tears are where, but a moment before, universal happiness and public rejoicing prevailed. But we have neither time nor room at present to indulge in further reflections on this melancholy occurrence. Let us submit with resignation and fortitude to the decrees, however afflicting, of a just and merciful, though mysterious and inscrutable Providence.

Source: National Banner, and Nashville Whig., Tuesday, December 23, 1828, p.3 col. 3

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New Hampshire Statesmen and Concord Register:

Letters and papers from Nashville, confirm the intelligence of the death of Mrs. Jackson, wife of Gen. Andrew Jackson, at the Hermitage, at 9 o'clock, on the evening of Dec. 22. Her death was quite unexpected at Nashville, though it is said she had been ill for some days. The nature of her disease is not stated. Preparations had been made for a splendid public dinner at Nashville, in honor of the General, on the 23d.

It is far from our wish to disturb the repose of the dead, or needlessly to inflict a wound on the feelings on the living. We would 'tread lightly' on the ashes of the lady whose decease is announced above and would gladly erase from our memory, and from the records that we may have been instrumental of giving to the world, any and every reflections upon the frailties and foibles of her early existence. Of these we have said less than some others, but we have probably said something. Of her maturer life—knowing nothing either for or against it—we have not presumed to speak. If called upon to say any thing, it would, from recent testimony, be decidedly favorable.

After saying thus much, we are constrained to remark, that the maxim, 'nil de mortuis nisi bonum,' seems to us to have been carried in the present case to an unwarrantable extent. We are content that newspaper editors should say nothing of the dead, if they cannot speak well—but that they should task their vocabulary, as on the demise of Mrs. Jackson they seem to have done, to furnish out the most high-sounding and superlative epithets to proclaim her exemplary virtues—and should, as the editors of the Boston Statesman and some other papers have done, dress their sheet in the habiliments of mourning—is at once derogatory to the fearless independence of a free press, and a wanton reflections upon real living worth and excellence. The standard of female character in our country can hardly be thought sufficiently elevated, if Mrs. Jackson, under the known circumstances of the case, is to be spoken of as exhibiting the most "exemplary virtues and exalted character"— or if the inflated panegyric of the Washington Telegraph—contrasted with the unpretending notice of thousands who in truth live and die Mrs. Jackson's superiors in every accomplishment— is to go forth to the world as the test of comparative merit. "A nation," says the Telegraph, "mourns in sympathy with her 'favorite' son. Society has lost one if its brightest ornaments. The friend of the widow and the orphan; the pious Christian, the amiable wife, the consort of Andrew Jackson is no more." But enough of such flummery. In plain truth, Mrs. Rachel Jackson is dead.

Source: New Hampshire Statesmen and Concord Register, January 17, 1829

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Sources :

Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson, Volume Two, The Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) Chapter 8, "Triumph and Tragedy"

National Banner, and Nashville Whig., Tuesday, December 23, 1828, p.3, col. 3

New Hampshire Statesmen and Concord Register, January 17, 1829