As soon as he was liberated, the irate judge summoned Jackson into court to show why he should not be held in contempt.  Beyond a blanket vindication of his acts, the General would not plead.  “I will not answer interrogatories,” he declared.  “I may have erred, but my motives cannot be misinterpreted.”  The judge thereupon imposed a fine of one thousand dollars, the only question being, he declared, “whether the Law should bend to the General or the General to the Law.”  Jackson accepted the sentence with equanimity, and to a group of admirers who drew him in a carriage from the court room to one of the leading coffeehouses, he expressed lofty sentiments on the obligation of citizens of every rank to obey the laws and uphold the courts.  Twenty-nine years afterwards Congress voted reimbursement to the full amount of the fine with interest.

For three weeks after the arrival of the treaty of peace Jackson lingered at New Orleans, haggling by day with the contractors and merchants whose cotton, blankets, and bacon were yet to be paid for, and enjoying in the evening the festivities planned in his honor by grateful citizens.  His pleasure in the gala affairs of the time was doubled by the presence of his wife, who one day arrived quite unexpectedly in the company of some Tennessee friends.  Mrs. Jackson was a typical frontier planter’s wife—­kind-hearted, sincere, benevolent, thrifty, pious, but unlettered and wholly innocent of polished manners.  In all her forty-eight years she had never seen a city more pretentious than Nashville.  She was, moreover, stout and florid, and it may be supposed that in her rustic garb she was a somewhat conspicuous figure among the fashionable ladies of New Orleans society.

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."[4] “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.”