[Pg 97] At that time there was no divorce law in Virginia, and each separate divorce required the passage of an act of the legislature before a jury could consider the case. In the winter of 1791, Captain Robards obtained the passage of such an act, authorising the court of Mercer County to act upon his divorce. Mrs. Robards, hearing of this, understood that the passage of the act was, in itself, divorce, and that she was a free woman. [Pg 98]Jackson also took the divorce for granted. Every one in the country so understood the matter, and at Natchez, in the following summer, the two were married. [Pg 98] They returned to Nashville, settled down, and Jackson began in earnest the career that was to land him in the White House, the hero of the nation. In December of 1793, more than two years after their marriage, their friend Overton learned that the legislature had not granted a divorce, but had left it for the court to do so. Jackson was much chagrined when he heard of this, and it was with great difficulty that he was brought to believe it. In January of 1794, when the decree was finally obtained, they were married again. It is difficult to excuse Jackson for marrying the woman without positive and absolute knowledge of her divorce. He was a lawyer, and could have learned the facts of the case, even though there was no established mail service. Each of them had been entirely innocent of [Pg 99]any intentional wrong-doing, and their long life together, their great devotion to each other, and General Jackson’s honourable career, forever silenced the spiteful calumny of his rivals and enemies of early life. [Pg 99] In his eyes his wife was the soul of honour and purity; he loved and reverenced her as a man loves and reverences but one woman in his lifetime, and for thirty-seven years he kept a pair of pistols loaded for the man who should dare to breathe her name without respect. The famous pistol duel with Dickinson was the result of a quarrel which had its beginning in a remark reflecting upon Mrs. Jackson, and Dickinson, though a crack shot, paid for it with his life. Several of Dickinson’s friends sent a memorial to the proprietors of the Impartial Review, asking that the next number of the paper appear in mourning, “out of respect for the memory, and regret for the untimely death, of Mr. Charles Dickinson.”
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