For the most drastic measures he could take to strengthen himself and to weaken his enemies left those enemies still very formidable. Of the leading politicians, only Calhoun, who had been chosen as Vice-President, was his ally, and that alliance was not to endure for long. The beginning of the trouble was, perhaps, the celebrated "Eaton" affair, which is of historic importance only as being illustrative of Jackson's character. Of all his Cabinet, Eaton, an old Tennessee friend and comrade in arms, probably enjoyed the highest place in the President's personal affections. Eaton had recently married the daughter of an Irish boarding-house keeper at whose establishment he stayed when in Washington. She had previously been the wife of a tipsy merchant captain who committed suicide, some said from melancholia produced by strong drink, others from jealousy occasioned by the levity of his wife's behaviour. There seems no real evidence that she was more than flirtatious with her husband's guests, but scandal had been somewhat busy with her name, and when Eaton married her the ladies of Washington showed a strong disposition to boycott the bride. The matrons of the South were especially proud of the unblemished correctitude of their social code, and Calhoun's wife put herself ostentatiously at the head of the movement. Jackson took the other side with fiery animation. He was ever a staunch friend, and Eaton had appealed to his friendship. Moreover, his own wife, recently dead, had received Mrs. Eaton and shown a strong disposition to be friends with her, and he considered the reflections on his colleague's wife were a slur on her, whose memory he honoured almost as that of a saint, but who, as he could not but remember, had herself not been spared by slanderers. He not only extended in the most conspicuous manner the protection of his official countenance to his friend's wife, but almost insisted upon his Cabinet taking oath, one by one, at the point of the sword, that they believed Mrs. Eaton to be "as chaste as a virgin." But the Ministers, even when overborne by their chivalrous chief, could not control the social behaviour of their wives, who continued to cold-shoulder the Eatons, to the President's great indignation and disgust. Van Buren, who regarded Calhoun as his rival, and who, as a bachelor, was free to pay his respects to Mrs. Eaton without prejudice or hindrance, seems to have suggested to Jackson that Calhoun had planned the whole campaign to ruin Eaton. Jackson hesitated to believe this, but close on the heels of the affair came another cause of quarrel, arising from the disclosure of the fact that Calhoun, when Secretary for War in Monroe's Cabinet, had been one of those who wished to censure Jackson for his proceedings in Florida--a circumstance which he had certainly withheld, and, according to Jackson, deliberately lied about in his personal dealings with the general. Private relations between the two men were completely broken