“A Being so Gentle And Yet So Virtuous”

Rachel Jackson quietly suffered through Andrew Jackson’s campaign for the presidency as his enemies attacked the circumstances of their marriage. Although he easily won the presidency, she dreaded the gossip of Washington’s social circles. Whether that stress contributed to her death on December 22, 1828, is not known, but Jackson believed that it did. He buried her in her beloved garden and first erected a temporary shelter over her grave until a more suitable monument could be built. In 1831, he commissioned architect David Morrison to design a Greek Revival tomb, a style that for Jackson’s contemporaries symbolized not only political but moral virtue and conveyed his belief in Rachel’s virtue. At the end of his presidency, Jackson returned to The Hermitage, where numerous accounts confirm that he visited Rachel’s tomb daily. When he died on June 8, 1845, he was laid to rest next to her, and his tombstone simply reads, “General Andrew Jackson.”

Nashville-Davidson metropolitan government (balance), Tennessee · United States