Lewis Robards

For his grandson, the Lexington slave trader, see Lewis C. Robards.

Pension record for Lewis Robards' widow Hannah Winn Robards

Lewis Robards (December 5, 1758 – April 15, 1814) was an American Revolutionary War veteran and Kentucky pioneer who is best remembered as the first husband of Rachel Jackson, who was later married to Andrew Jackson, elected U.S. president in 1828.

Biography

The seventh of his father's 13 children, Robards was born in Goochland County, Virginia. His family were slave-holding landowners. His mother was descended from First Families of Virginia types, his father had been a "militia lieutenant during the French and Indian War and...a member of Goochland County's Committee of Safety in 1775". The American Revolution began when Robards was a young man and he enlisted in May 1778 and by 1791 he had been promoted from second lieutenant to first lieutenant and up to captain; thus he is sometimes designated in histories as Captain Lewis Robards to distinguish him from relatives with similar names. He saw combat at Richmond and the James River and was present at the siege of Yorktown.

After the father died in Virginia in 1783, Lewis, several of his siblings, and his mother moved to Cane Run, Kentucky, where they owned several hundred acres that had been partially cleared.

A 1913 history of Tennessee written by Will T. Hale and Dixon L. Merritt, quoting from a possibly-never-published manuscript history of the Green River area written by Lucius P. Little, provides some additional detail on the Robards family:

For reasons best known to the historians, they have apparently tried to commit Captain Robards to oblivion. The student searches the books in vain for satisfying data. The Robards family was a distinguished one. Judge Little says: Lewis Robards, a native of Goochland county, Virginia, had followed his older brother George into the Virginia army at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. They continued in service until peace was declared, and meantime each had won the title of captain. In the vicinity of Harrodsburg (Ky.) they located a large tract of rich land and became settlers on Cane Run. Here they remained two or three years clearing and improving their lands and also doing their part in resisting Indian attacks and driving the savage out of the country. Their father having died, they returned to Virginia, and after settling his estate came back to Kentucky, bringing with them their widowed mother and her family of children, and located in a log house on their lands. Embraced in the father's estate was a large number of slaves who were also brought west. In a few years, and as the Robards girls reached womanhood, the mother decided on a more capacious dwelling, and so a stone house was erected near a famous spring, better suited to the family's needs and tastes. The pioneers were greatly given to marrying and giving in marriage at a period when the affections were young and fresh. Captain George Robards went to Virginia and brought back as a bride Elizabeth Sampson, a lovely grand-daughter of the old Huguenot family, Dutois. From her descended the distinguished Thompson family of Kentucky. The widow Robards' oldest daughter married Hon. Thomas Davis, one of the earliest congressmen of the state. Another daughter married Capt. John Jouett, a Revolutionary soldier, who received from the Virginia legislature a sword for gallantry in battle and who was one of the state's first citizens. The sons of Captain Jouett were also men of note, the famous portrait painter, Matt Jouett, being one. The circumstances leading to the marriage of Captain Lewis Robards were briefly these: It was after the family had moved to the stone house that on a wintry day, Mrs. Donelson, a widow, was overtaken by a storm in the Cane Run neighborhood and besought Mrs. Robards for permission to occupy the deserted log dwelling. In hospitable Kentucky she had but to ask such a favor and it was granted. Rachel, a daughter of the mover, was handsome , bright-eyed and attractive, but lacking in culture and refinement. She did not long escape the observation of Lewis Robards, or fail to realize that she was being favorably observed. Lewis was a bachelor of thirty, not much of a gallant, with a penchant for horses and hounds, a good shot, an expert hunter, and a valuable man in an Indian raid. But he had very little to do with the gentler sex on his own account. So before he was aware of what might come to pass, he was hopelessly enamored. A short courtship followed and marriage transferred Rachel from the log cabin to the stone house as a member of the Robards family. She was a sprightly talker, a graceful dancer, of a cheery dis position, and these qualities coupled with her fair face won the hearts of the entire household.

Another account has it that Rachel's mother, Mrs. Rachel (Stockley) Donelson, and her children rented a cabin for a time at the Robards settlement at Cane Run. According to one account published in 1884, "During a corn famine Gen. Donelson, with his family, went to Kentucky," and that's where Lewis and Rachel met. The couple married on March 1, 1785, at Harrodsburg, in what was considered an advantageous match between two prominent and wealthy frontier families. The marriage allowed 17-year-old Rachel to stay in Kentucky even though her father was moving back to Tennessee.

Historians generally use euphemistic language to convey that both parties to the marriage were rich and young, drank (possibly too much), and had affairs, and generally demonstrated poor emotional regulation. Lewis Robards allegedly "frequented the slave quarters at night"—and as a recent Smithsonian article points out, these sexual encounters were enslaved women "almost certainly without their consent." Rachel Donelson Robards may have had some kind of passionate entanglement with Peyton Short before Andrew Jackson came into the picture. Robards may have been a "son-of-a-bitch," and he may have been a slave trader. Another account describes him as "a rather suspicious-minded and jealous individual, who constantly quarreled with his wife and accused her of all manner of improprieties, some of which he himself was guilty. Robards also quarreled with Jackson and at one point Jackson threatened 'to cut the ears out of [Robards's] head.' At length Robards swore he would never live with Rachel again and left Nashville and returned to Kentucky." Still another account has it that Robards contacted Rachel's mother and told her to come get her daughter because he wanted her out of their house. The Robards–Donelson–Jackson relationship controversy was an ongoing scandal that became an issue during the 1828 U.S. presidential election.

After his first marriage was a closed book, Lewis Robards married Hannah Winn. They had ten children together, including five sons, before Robards died in 1814. In the account of Little, "A year or so after the granting of his divorce Captain Robards married a lovely refined woman, whom he took to his Mercer county home. Happily mated, he realized his brightest dreams of domestic life. His children grew up around him, and fulfilled all reasonable parental hopes. A home on a farm of broad acres in the Blue Grass region of Kentucky in the first half of the nineteenth century was quite enough to realize all the aspirations of the home-loving heart."

One of the sons, George Lewis Robards, served in the Battle of New Orleans (where Andrew Jackson came to national fame). Two of George Lewis Robards' sons, Lewis C. Robards and Alfred O. Robards, were slave traders in the Lexington, Kentucky area; they were implicated in multiple kidnapping into slavery cases. Lewis C. Robards was also notorious as a dealer in "fancy girls".

See also

• Andrew Jackson and the slave trade in the United States
• Springfield Plantation (Fayette, Mississippi)

References

Sources

• Toplovich, Ann (2005). "Marriage, Mayhem, and Presidential Politics: The Robards–Jackson Backcountry Scandal" (PDF). Ohio Valley History. 5 (4): 3–22. ISSN 2377-0600. Project MUSE 572973.