Rachel felt a great pride in all the honors heaped upon her husband. He became the first citizen of Tennessee. He gave the state its lovely Indian name. He was made a member of the State Supreme Court. He was sent to the United States Senate. In that period Rachel probably enjoyed the glamor of public life, but that happy enthusiasm was short lived. After two years Mr. Overton arrived at Hunters’ Hill with the news that the divorce had never been recorded; whereupon Rachel and Andrew were immediately remarried. Everyone knew that both were entirely innocent of having done anything wrong. Yet this super legal technicality was used by Jackson’s political enemies against him, even to the extent that in the presidential campaign certain pamphlets distributed by the Adams adherents referred to Rachel as an adulteress; and it was the direct cause of the duel in which Jackson killed Charles Dickinson. Through it all Jackson tried to shield Rachel from the calumnies of idle gossips and political foes; but, possessed of an acute understanding, she was aware of it all. In any study of the Jackson saga one is compelled to the view that the seemingly small incident of the divorce not being recorded and the consequent gossip marked a transition in Rachel. The gentle sprightliness of her radiant nature gave ground before those “Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” and a richer but more restrained sweetness emerged, in which she was drawn more closely to her husband and her God. And, too, her sadness was quickened by days and months of waiting at home while her Andrew journeyed to wars and the exciting scenes of the political forum. Truly, none but the lonely heart may appreciate the anguish of those long separations. Rachel’s letters to Andrew Jackson may contain an occasional misspelled word, but they are eloquent in expressing an all consuming devotion welling from a heart heavy with loneliness. Witness this as an example: “_... you have Been absent monthes at a tim ... you (could) always tell when you would be at home but now ... nothing on Erth can give me aney pleasure now But your Letters. I reade them with the tanderness and affection not to be expresst with my pen ... as often as you find a Leasure moment from Every Public business spend that with me as often as I am present with you ... (May God) in time of dainger send a kind guardian angel to guard your sleepe-ing hours ... if my prayers and tears Can avail you will be well...._” Shortly following the news of the flaw in the divorce, financial losses came to Andrew Jackson, on account of which he sold the happy Hunters’ Hill home and bought the Hermitage tract. There Andrew and Rachel started life anew on a reduced scale. The original Hermitage into which they moved was a large block house with an ell and surrounding cabins. It was there that Aaron Burr paid a visit in 1805. And there also in the year 1809 a new light came into their lives.