Young Donelson was educated at Cumberland College (University of Nashville), Transylvania University at Lexington, and at West Point. Throughout his college life he was an outstanding student, and at the Military Academy he distinguished himself by finishing the four-year course in three years and graduating second in his class. Upon his graduation he was appointed an aide-de-camp to General Jackson, at the latter’s special request, and served with him in the Florida wars. After his return to Nashville he practiced law for a short while, but soon abandoned this and began to take an active and useful part in General Jackson’s political activities. Jackson had a genuinely high regard for young Donelson. “I have reared and educated him as my son,” he wrote a friend on one occasion; and that the old General had the most unlimited ambitions for him is shown by a letter he wrote to him while he was at Transylvania College encouraging him to seek his associates and friends among the better class of students and concluding: “I look forward, if you live, to the time when you will be selected to preside over the destinies of America.” Donelson did not climb that high on the political ladder, but he did achieve distinction in his own right in public affairs; and there were many of his friends who thought that his star might have shone with greater brilliance had it not been dimmed by the too-close effulgence of his famous guardian and friend. By the time Jackson was elected President in 1828 the young man had reached such a place in his confidence and affection that he was his spontaneous choice as private secretary, and he went with him to Washington in this capacity. The Jackson administration, however, had not been afloat very long before it ran on the rocks of the Peggy Eaton embroglio, that tempest in a teapot that threatened for a while to upset the government; and Major Donelson and his wife became the storm centers of this furious affair. Mrs. Donelson was a niece of Mrs. Jackson’s, the major having married his own first cousin, Emily, daughter of Captain John Donelson; and Jackson felt for her a very real avuncular affection when he installed her as mistress of the White House. Red-headed Miss Emily, however, was a spunky individual with a spirit of her own; and, although she reluctantly consented to receive Peggy Eaton coldly but courteously as an official guest at the White House, she flatly refused to visit Mrs. Eaton or to have any other social contacts with her. This brought about strained relations in the White House family, but the affair was temporarily kept from coming to a head; and the President and the Donelsons returned in amity together to Tennessee to spend the summer of 1830. There had almost been a flare-up before leaving Washington. The Eatons had been invited to dine at the White House, and the petulant Peggy had refused to enter the house while the Donelsons