His pleasure in the gala affairs of the time was
doubled by the presence of his wife, who one day arrived quite
unexpectedly in the company of some Tennessee friends. Mrs. Jackson
was a typical frontier planter's wife--kind-hearted, sincere,
benevolent, thrifty, pious, but unlettered and wholly innocent of
polished manners. In all her forty-eight years she had never seen a
city more pretentious than Nashville. She was, moreover, stout and
florid, and it may be supposed that in her rustic garb she was a
somewhat conspicuous figure among the fashionable ladies of New
Orleans society.
But the wife of Jackson's accomplished friend and future Secretary of
State, Edward Livingston, fitted her out with fashionable clothes and
tactfully instructed her in the niceties of etiquette, and ere long
she was able to demean herself, if not without a betrayal of her
unfamiliarity with the environment, at all events to the complete
satisfaction of the General. The latter's devotion to his wife was a
matter of much comment. "Debonair as he had been in his association
with the Creole belles, he never missed an opportunity to demonstrate
that he considered the short, stout, beaming matron at his side the
perfection of her sex and far and away the most charming woman in the
world.
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