Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. I.djvu/313

ANDREW JACKSON 257 henceforth they thought it best to leave the Ten nessee settlements in peace. With the rapid in crease of the white population which soon followed, the community became more prosperous and more orderly. In the general prosperity Jackson had an ample share, partly through the diligent practice of his profession, partly through judicious pur chases and sales of land. With most men marriage is the most important event of their life; in Jackson s career his marriage was peculiarly important. Rachel Donelson was a native of North Carolina, daughter of Col. John Donelson, a Virginia surveyor in good circum stances, who in 1780 migrated to the neighborhood of Nashville in a very remarkable boat- journey of 2,000 miles down the Holston and Tennessee rivers and up the Cumberland. During an expedition to Kentucky some time afterward, the blooming Rachel was wooed and won by Capt. Lewis Robards. She was an active, sprightly, and inter esting girl, the best horsewoman and best dancer in that country; her husband seems to have been a young man of tyrannical and unreasonably jealous disposition. In Kentucky they lived with Mrs. Robards, the husband s mother; and, as was com mon in a new society where houses were too few and far between, there were other boarders in the family among them the late Judge Overton, of Tennessee, and a Mr. Stone. Presently Robards