But the wife of Jackson's accomplished friend and future Secretary of State, Edward Livingston, fitted her out with fashionable clothes and tactfully instructed her in the niceties of etiquette, and ere long she was able to demean herself, if not without a betrayal of her unfamiliarity with the environment, at all events to the complete satisfaction of the General. The latter's devotion to his wife was a matter of much comment. "Debonair as he had been in his association with the Creole belles, he never missed an opportunity to demonstrate that he considered the short, stout, beaming matron at his side the perfection of her sex and far and away the most charming woman in the world." π "Aunt Rachel," as she was known throughout western Tennessee, lived to see the hero of New Orleans elected President, but not to share with him the honors of the position. "I have sometimes thought," said Thomas Hart Benton, "that General Jackson might have been a more equable tenant of the White House than he was had she been spared to share it with him. At all events, she was the only human being on earth who ever possessed the power to swerve his mighty will or soothe his fierce temper." π Buell, History of Andrew Jackson, Vol II, p. 97. Shortly before their departure the Jacksons were guests of honor at a grand ball at the Academy. The upper floor was arranged for dancing and the lower for supper, and the entire building was aglow with flowers, colored lamps, and transparencies. As the evening wore on and the dances of polite society had their due turn, the General finally avowed that he and his bonny wife would show the proud city folk what real dancing was. A somewhat cynical observer--a certain Nolte, whom Jackson had just forced to his own terms in a settlement for war supplies--records his impression as follows: "After supper we were treated to a most delicious pas de deux by the conqueror and his spouse. To see these two figures, the General, a long haggard man, with limbs like a skeleton, and Madame la GÈnÈrale, a short fat dumpling, bobbing opposite each other like half-drunken Indians, to the wild melody of Possum up de Gum Tree, and endeavoring to make a spring into the air, was very remarkable, and far more edifying a spectacle than any European ballet could possibly have furnished." But Jackson was only less proud of his accomplishments as a dancer than as a fighter, and it was the part of discretion for a man of Nolte's critical turn to keep a straight face on this occasion.