For many white southern men, and not just slave traders, the existence of “fancy girls” put a piratical middle finger in propriety’s face, which mattered not only because it irritated meddling abolitionists but because it irritated white southern women. Calls for sexual morality implied that women were the arbiters of domestic moral authority. This struggle over who would rule was the real meaning of the “Petticoat War” in Jackson’s Cabinet, and in it the president leveraged male resentment of female claims to power. Who were politicians’ wives to say whether or not John Eaton was a moral man
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