[1][2] She lived with him at their home at the Hermitage, where she died just days after his election and before his inauguration in 1829—therefore she never served as first lady, a role assumed by her niece, Emily Donelson.

During the deeply personal prelude to the 1828 election, she was the subject of extremely negative attacks from the supporters of Andrew Jackson's opponent, John Quincy Adams.

Rachel Donelson was born near the Banister River, about ten miles from Chatham, Virginia, in Pittsylvania County on June 15, 1767.

[1] She had seven brothers and three sisters:[1] From about 1770 to 1779, her father operated the Washington Iron Furnace at Rocky Mount, Franklin County, Virginia.

[2] Rachel attracted much attention from suitors because she was very beautiful as a young woman, described by a contemporary as having "lustrous black eyes, dark glossy hair, full red lips, brunette complexion, though of brilliant coloring, [and] a sweet oval face rippling with smiles and dimples.

[1] Rachel Donelson's first marriage to Captain Lewis Robards of Harrodsburg, Kentucky, a landowner and speculator, was not happy, and the two separated in 1790.

[7] In contrast, Ann Toplovich, executive director of the Tennessee Historical Society, writes that Rachel Donelson Robards knowingly left her husband for Andrew Jackson in late 1789, eloping to Spanish-controlled Natchez.

Rachel believed that her husband had obtained a divorce,[1][2] but as it had never been completed, her marriage to Jackson was inadvertently bigamous and therefore invalid.

[11] These complicating factors were understood by locals and the unusual circumstances of the Jackson marriage were not greatly discussed in Nashville society.

[7] This made Rachel a bigamist and an adulteress, as well as making General Jackson, soon a politician on the rise, an adulterer.

[13] In 1813, the Jacksons adopted a Muscogee infant who had been orphaned by troops commanded by Rachel's niece's husband John Coffee at the Battle of Tallushatchee.

[13] According to Toplovich, John Quincy Adams' presidential campaigns targeted Jackson's "passion and lack of self-control" in both 1824 and 1828, "making it central to the argument that he would devastate the integrity of the Republic and its institutions.

"[6] One newspaper ran an article asking, "'Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?

[7] She died suddenly on December 22, 1828, at the age of 61 of a heart attack, given her symptoms according to Jackson: "excruciating pain in the left shoulder, arm, and breast.

[19][20] In the 1936 film The Gorgeous Hussy (a fictionalized biography of Peggy Eaton), Rachel Jackson was portrayed by Beulah Bondi, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.