Margaret O'Neill (or O'Neale) Eaton (December 3, 1799 – November 8, 1879), better known as Peggy Eaton, was the daughter of Rhoda Howell and William O'Neale,[1] the owner of Franklin House, a popular Washington, D.C. hotel. Peggy was noted for her beauty, wit and vivacity. Through her marriage to United States Senator John Henry Eaton, she had a central role in the Petticoat affair that disrupted the Cabinet of Andrew Jackson.[2]
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About 1816, at age 17, Margaret O'Neale married John B. Timberlake, a 39-year-old purser in the Navy. Her parents gave them a house across from the hotel, and they met many politicians who stayed there. In 1818 they met and befriended John Henry Eaton, a 28-year-old widower and newly elected senator from Tennessee. Margaret and John Timberlake had three children together, one of whom died in infancy.[3]
John Timberlake died in 1828 while at sea in the Mediterranean, in service on a four-year voyage. When Margaret married Senator John Henry Eaton (1790–1856) shortly after the turn of the year, there were rumors that Timberlake had committed suicide because of despair at an alleged affair between the two.
Senator Eaton was a close personal friend of President Andrew Jackson, who in 1829 appointed him Secretary of War. This sudden elevation of Mrs. Eaton into the Cabinet social circle was resented by the wives of several of Jackson's appointees. They criticized Mrs. Eaton for allegedly having had an affair with Eaton prior to her marriage.
The wives of the Cabinet members snubbed Mrs. Eaton socially, which angered President Jackson. He tried unsuccessfully to coerce them. Eventually, and partly for this reason, he almost completely reorganized his Cabinet, an event referred to as the Petticoat affair.
The effect of the incident on the political fortunes of the vice president, John C. Calhoun, whose wife, Floride Calhoun, was one of those who snubbed Mrs. Eaton, was perhaps most important. Partly on this account, Jackson transferred his favor to widower Martin Van Buren, the Secretary of State, who had taken the Eatons' side in the quarrel and had shown positive social attention to Mrs. Eaton. Some attributed his subsequent elevation to the vice-presidency and presidency through Jackson's favor as related to this incident.
Three years after the death of her second husband, Margaret Eaton married an Italian music teacher and dancing master, Antonio Gabriele Buchignani, on June 7, 1859.[4] She was 59 and he was 19. The marriage reignited much of the social stigma Margaret had carried earlier in life. In 1866, their seventh year of marriage, Buchignani ran off to Europe with the bulk of his wife's fortune and as well as her 17-year-old granddaughter Emily E. Randolph, whom he married after he and his wife divorced in 1869.[5]
Eaton obtained a divorce from Buchignani but was unable to recover her financial standing. She died in poverty in Washington, D.C. on November 8, 1879.
The Gorgeous Hussy, a 1939 film starring Joan Crawford, was loosely based on the life of Margaret O'Neill.