Emily Donelson
In her amber-colored Inaugural Ball gown, the 21 year old Emily Donelson attracted great attention from the beginning of the Jackson Administration. In the White House, her responsibilities were primarily that of a traditional hostess, overseeing guest lists, menus, and entertaining, as well as that of housekeeper, managing the Jackson family slaves brought from Tennessee and a dozen and a half other servants who were hired to work in the mansion, and the washing, cooking and health care for the presidential family. A.J. Donelson served as the President's private secretary and maintained a close relationship with his wife, fully discussing the complications of his own role. Three of her four children were born in the White House. President Jackson was godfather to two of them and future Presidents Martin Van Buren and James Polk were godfathers for the other two. In the first two years of the Administration, work on their plantation house Poplar Grove, which bordered the Hermitage commenced; it was later to be known as Tulip Grove.
She limited her social life to returning social calls. Particularly impressed by the quality of education provided to young women at the Georgetown Visitation School, run by Catholic nuns, Emily Donelson encouraged relatives to send their daughters out of Tennessee to enroll at the school and stated that a solid course of study for women "ought to be prized above everything." On a number of occasions, Emily Donelson entertained one of her predecessors, then-Washington resident Martha Randolph; she was the daughter of the late president and widowed Thomas Jefferson who had served as his hostess during two brief periods in his presidency. She also attended a dinner hosted by Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, at his Maryland estate. At the 1830 New Year's Day reception, Emily Donelson wore a dress of calico as a political statement: the cloth had been adopted as a symbol of Jacksonian democracy during the 1828 campaign.
Increasingly weakened by what would soon manifest itself as tuberculosis, she left the White House in June of 1836 for her Tennessee home. She died there 19 December, 1836, two days before her husband was able to reach her, he being on route from Washington.
