Immediately upon the defeat of Jackson, his friends began the agitation which resulted in his overwhelming triumph over Adams, in 1828. Chief among his supporters in this, as in his former contest, was Major Eaton. The untiring devotion of Jackson to his friends is well known. It rarely found more striking illustration than in the selection of Eaton as Secretary of War, and in the zeal with which he sustained him through good and evil report alike, during later years. When it became known that Senator Eaton was to hold a seat in the Cabinet of the new administration, the fashionable circles of the capital were deeply agitated, and protests earnest and vehement assailed the ears of the devoted President. The objections urged were not against Major Eaton, but against his beautiful and accomplished wife. Rumors of an exceedingly uncomplimentary character, that had measurably died out with time, were suddenly revived against Mrs. Eaton, and gathered force and volume with each passing day. It is hardly necessary to say that this hostility was, in the main, from her own sex. To all remonstrances and appeals, however, President Jackson turned a deaf ear. The kindness shown by the mother of Mrs. Eaton to the wife of the President during a former residence, and while he was a Senator, in Washington, had never been forgotten. It will be remembered that during the late Presidential contest not only had Jackson himself been the object of merciless attack, but even his invalid wife did not escape. Divorced from her first husband because of his cruel treatment, she had married Jackson, when he was a young lawyer in Nashville, many years before. As the result of the aspersions cast upon her, the once famous duel was evolved in which Charles Dickinson fell by the hand of Jackson in 1806. After his election, but before his inauguration, Mrs. Jackson died, the victim of calumny as her husband always believed. A few days after he had turned away from that new-made grave, he was in the turmoil of politics at the national capital. With the past fresh in his memory, it is not strange that he espoused the cause of his faithful friend, and the daughter of the woman who had befriended one dearer to him than his own life. Thoroughly convinced of the innocence of Mrs. Eaton, he made her cause his own, and to the end he knew no variableness or shadow of turning.