in New York or merely sitting on it. The Cabinet sat in speechless embarrassment as the
clergyman droned on, often interrupted by Jackson's exclamations: By the God eternal!' and She is as chaste as a virgin!' Campbell finally rushed out of the room in a rage, saying he would
prove his accusations in a law court, and the Cabinet meeting broke up in confusion.
The episode testifies more to Jackson's irrational loyalty than to his common sense. As might
have been foreseen, he never contrived to force Mrs Eaton on Washington society. She was a
worthless woman anyway. Her black page, Francis Hillery, later described her as `the most
compleat Peace of deception that ever god made, and as a mistres it would be cruelty to put a
dum brute under her Command.' Her ultimate fate was pitiful. When Eaton died in 1856, leaving
her a wealthy widow, she married an Italian dancing-master, Antonio Buchignani, who
defrauded her of all her property and ran off with her pretty granddaughter. But she changed the
way America is governed.
One of the most fascinating aspects of history is the way power shift from formal to informal
institutions. The Cabinet system, which itself began in Britain as an informal replacement of the
old Privy Council, was adopted by George Washington in the 1790s and was still functioning
under John Quincy Adams. Jackson, however, was the first president to be elected by a decisive
popular mandate and, in a sense, this gave him the moral right to exercise the truly awesome
powers which the US Constitution confers to its chief executive. From the outset, an informal
group of cronies began to confer with him in the entrails of the White House. They included
Kendall, his old aide Major Lewis, his adopted son Donelson, Isaac Hill, the former editor of the
New Hampshire Patriot, and two members of the official Cabinet, Eaton and Van Buren.
Jackson's enemies called it the Kitchen Cabinet' and declared it unconstitutional. Jackson began to lean more and more on this group as he became slowly convinced that opposition to Peggy was not just moral but political, orchestrated by Calhoun and his wife Floride, who had finally come to Washington to make trouble. Van Buren encouraged this conspiracy theory. Not for nothing was he known as theLittle Magician.' Behind his spells was
the deep, often hidden, but steadily growing antagonism between North and South. Van Buren
stood for the commercial supremacy of the industrial North, Calhoun for the extreme version of
states' rights. It was not difficult for the Secretary of State to persuade his President that the
notion of sovereignty being peddled by Calhoun was a mortal threat to the Union itself, and that
the VicePresident, using Mrs Eaton as a pretext, was behind a much wider 'conspiracy' to subvert
Jackson's Cabinet. Jackson slowly came to accept this notion and in April 1831 he acted,
following a plan of Van Buren's. To avoid suspicion, Van Buren resigned. Then almost all the
other Cabinet ministers were sacked and replaced, leaving Calhoun isolated to serve the rest of
his term. Van Buren's reward was to be made heir apparent, getting first the vice-presidency
(during Jackson's second term), then the reversion of the presidency itself.
Meanwhile the Kitchen Cabinet governed the country. It had no agenda. Its membership
varied. Outsiders thought its most important figure was Kendall. He certainly wrote Jackson's
speeches. The General would lie on his bed, smoking his fearsome pipe and uttering thoughts.' Kendall would put them into presidential prose. Congressman Henry A. Wise termed Kendall the President's thinking machine, and his writing machine-aye, and his lying machine.' Harriet
Martineau, reporting Washington gossip, said `it is all done in the dark...work of goblin extent
and with goblin speed, which makes men look about with a suspicious wonder, and the invisible
Amos Kendall has the credit for it all.' Very likely Kendall had much less power than was
ascribed to him. But he symbolized what was happening to government. The old Cabinet had