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by nkurz
3122 days ago
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If you are interested in the role of "honor" in American culture, and up for lengthy academic treatise filled with incredible tidbits of knowledge, David Hackett Fischer's book "Albion's Seed" is delightful. For example, here's an excerpt that stuck with me regarding President Andrew Jackson's approach to marriage: The border custom of bridal abduction was introduced to the American backcountry. In North and South Carolina during the eighteenth century, petitioners complained to authorities that “their wives and daughters were carried captives” by rival clans. Even future President of the United States Andrew Jackson took his wife by an act of voluntary abduction. Rachel Donelson Robards was unhappily married to another man at the time. A series of complex quarrels followed, in which Rachel Robards made her own preferences clear, and Andrew Jackson threatened her husband Lewis Robards that he would “cut his ears out of his head.” Jackson was promptly arrested. But before the case came to trial the suitor turned on the husband, butcher knife in hand, and chased him into the canebreak. Afterward, the complaint was dismissed because of the absence of the plaintiff—who was in fact running for his life from the defendant. Andrew Jackson thereupon took Rachel Robards for his own, claiming that she had been abandoned. She went with Jackson willingly enough; this was a clear case of voluntary abduction. But her departure caused a feud that continued for years. For a cultural historian, the responses to this event were more important than the act itself. In later years, Jackson’s methods of courtship became a campaign issue, and caused moral outrage in other parts of the republic; but in the backcountry he was not condemned at the time. Historian Robert Remini writes, “One thing is certain. Whatever Rachel and Andrew did, and whenever they did it, their actions did not outrage the community.” |
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