This is a survey of the 90 women and one man who have been married at any time to those who were elected or otherwise became President or Vice-President of the United States (an update from my previous post on this topic in 2007). I'm aware that this is a heteronormative approach; it is determined really by the available records (which are themselves patchy in places). Many of those concerned will have had relationships with people to whom they were not married; in most cases, history does not record their biographical details.
I would have very much liked to include Julia Chinn, a slave belonging to future Vice-President Richard Mentor Johnson, whio is not otherwise known to have been married; they lived together openly in 1820's and 1830's Kentucky, and she bore him two children who took his surname and inherited his property. However her year of birth, and the year in which their relationship started, are unknown, as is the precise date of her death in 1833, three years before he was elected Vice-President (uniquely, by the Senate, as the Virginia electors would not vote for a man who had lived with a black woman). Reluctantly, I have to strike her from my list.
I also considered including James Buchanan and William Rufus King, who served respectively as President from 1857 to 1861 and as Vice-President briefly in 1853. Both were bachelors; they lived together in Washington for fifteen years, and Washington gossip of the time appears to have assumed that they were in a sexual relationship. However, if I have excluded Julia Chinn I guess I have to exclude other partners who were not officially married.
I was able to find years, but not precise dates, of birth for two women married to vice-presidents of the middle period: Evelyn Colfax, born in 1823, whose husband Schuyler served under Ulysses S. Grant from 1869 to 1873; and Mary Wheeler, born in 1828, whose husband William served under Rutherford Hayes from 1877 to 1881. When I first wrote this in 2007 I was also missing exact birthdates for Cornelia Fairbanks in 1852 and Dorothy Barkley in 1882, but both have now turned up.
Anyway, that leaves me with a list of 90 women and one man who were married at some time or other to the 75 men and one woman who have served or been elected as President, Vice-President or both. Twelve of the latter were married twice, and one three times: ten of them – Aaron Burr, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Hannibal Hamlin, Schuyler Colfax, Benjamin Harrison, Levi P. Morton, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Alben Barkley and President-elect Joe Biden – were widowed and remarried; Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller both divorced their first wives, and Donald Trump has divorced twice; but I have included all of their spouses.
I was surprised that multiple marriages turned out to be slightly more common among the women, with seventeen of them (plus Doug Emhoff) known to have married more than once (and there may be more who I have missed). Jane Wyman married and divorced the same man twice after her marriage to Ronald Reagan, who was already her third husband. Martha Washington and Martha Jefferson were already widows when they married George and Thomas respectively; both of Aaron Burr's wives were widows when he married them, his second wife possibly twice over; likewise Mary Harrison, Edith Wilson and Jane Hadley BarkleyRachel Jackson, Florence Harding, Jane Wyman, Happy Rockefeller, Karen Pence (the outgoing Second Lady), Jill Biden (the incoming First Lady) and Doug Emhoff (Kamala Harris's husband) all divorced their previous spouses, as did Jane Wyman as previously noted; and Caroline Fillmore, Frances Cleveland, Muriel Humphrey and Jacqueline Kennedy all married again after their first husbands' deaths.
Longevity: 13 of the 91 are still living. (The same number as in 2007.) They are, in order of birthdate, Rosalynn Carter (93), Lynne Cheney (79), Laura Bush (74), Hillary Clinton (73), Tipper Gore (72), Ivana Trump (71), Marilyn Quayle (71), Jill Biden (69), Karen Pence (turns 64 next month), Marla Maples (57), Michelle Obama (turns 57 next month), Doug Emhoff (56) and Melania Trump (50; she shares my birthday but is three years younger).
Leaving them aside, the average lifespan is 71.1 years, and the median 74.5 (the middle point between Floride Calhoun, 74.4 and Ellen Colfax, 74.6). Apart from Rosalynn Carter, thirteen made it past their 90th birthdays: Eliza Bowen Jumel (Aaron Burr's second wife; more on her in a moment), Judy Agnew, Caro Dawes (whose husband Charles was VP under Coolidge), Tod Rockefeller (Nelson's first wife), Jennie Hobart (whose husband Garret was McKinley's first Vice-President), Barbara Bush, Ilo Wallace (whose husband Henry was FDR's second vice-president), Betty Ford, Jane Wyman, Lady Bird Johnson, Nancy Reagan, Ann Gerry (whose husband was Madison's second vice-president, and gave his name to the gerrymander) and Bess Truman. The nonagenarians include seven of the most recent nine to have passed away (Joan Mondale and Happy Rockefeller were in their 80s).
Bess Truman was the longest-lived of all, born 13 February 1885, died 18 October 1982, a total of 97 years, 8 months and 5 days. At the other end of the scale is the tragic figure of Alice Roosevelt, who died on 14 February 1884 of kidney problems just after giving birth to Theodore's first daughter; she was born on 29 July 1861, so was only 22 years and six months old. The second youngest was President-elect Biden's first wife Neilia, killed in a car accident four months and twenty days after her 30th birthday. At least four others died in their thirties – Martha Jefferson, Lucy Morton (whose husband was later to serve as Benjamin Harrison's vice-president), Hannah Van Buren, Sarah Hamlin and possibly Evelyn Colfax, who was born some time in 1823 and died on 10 July 1863.
This piece is mainly about the spouses, but briefly on the principals: 11 are still living, Jimmy Carter (96), Dick Cheney (turns 80 next month), Joe Biden (78), Donald Trump, George W Bush and Bill Clinton (all three are 74), Dan Quayle (73), Al Gore (72), Mike Pence (61), Barack Obama (59) and Kamala Harris (56). Leaving them aside, the average lifespan is 71.6 years, and the median 70.5 (between Elbridge Gerry and Nelson Rockefeller). The longest lived was John Nance Garner, who died in 1967 eleven weeks before his hundredth birthday; the shortest-lived was John F. Kennedy, who was 46 (he called Garner on the morning of 22 November 1963 to wish him a happy 95th birthday, and was dead a few hours later). The shortest-lived Vice-President was Daniel Tompkins. The longest-lived President is Jimmy Carter, and long may he remain so.
Age at marriage: Taking all 91 spouses here, but considering only their marriages to Presidents or Vice-Presidents, the average age at that marriage was 25.5 and the median 24. (The 46th of the 91 is Hannah Van Buren, who married Martin, her first cousin once removed, two weeks before her 24th birthday.) 22 of the women were married before they turned twenty, fourteen of those marriages to future Presidents or Vice-Presidents. Harriet Wilson, whose husband Henry was Ulysses S Grant's second VP, appears to have been the youngest – just past her sixteenth birthday when they were married in 1840. (She died in 1870, a couple of years before he became vice-president; he in turn died in office in 1875.)
The other teenage brides were Hannah Tompkins (whose husband Daniel was VP under Monroe), Eliza Johnson (wife of Andrew Johnson), Mary Wheeler (married to Hayes' VP), Mary Breckenridge (whose husband was VP under Buchanan), Elizabeth Monroe, Sophia Dallas (whose husband was Pierce's VP), Sarah Hamlin, Rosalynn Carter, Floride Calhoun (whose husband was VP to both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson), Alice Roosevelt (TR's first wife, as noted above), Barbara Bush, Mamie Eisenhower and Abigail Adams (John Adams' wife). In addition, Eliza Jumel, Rachel Jackson, Theodosia Burr, Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, Caroline Fillmore, Florence Harding, Jane Hadley Barkley and Happy Rockefeller all married their first husbands before they were 20.
The oldest bride by quite some way is perhaps the most exotic story of the lot. Eliza Bowen Jumel is a difficult but fascinating figure to pin down. She was born in 1775, and married her first husband Stephen Jumel in 1804. Her murky background meant that they had difficulty being received in New York society, so they emigrated to France where she became a friend of Napoleon's, offering him safe passage to America after Waterloo. They moved back to New York in 1828; Stephen Jumel died in 1832, and the following year Eliza, now reputedly the richest woman in America, married Aaron Burr, who had served as vice-president under Thomas Jefferson thirty years earlier. He was 77, she was 58. It didn't work out; they separated after only a few months, and their divorce was finalised on the day of Burr's death, 14 September 1836. I am not making this bit up: her divorce lawyer was Alexander Hamilton junior, whose father Burr had shot dead more than thirty years before. She lived on until 16 July 1865, dying at the age of 90.
The oldest woman at first marriage in the list is also the most recently married, incoming Vice-President Kamala Harris, who wed Doug Emhoff two months before her 50th birthday in 2014. He is 7 days older than her, but had been married before. The oldest person at first marriage to a President or Vice-President is incumbent First Lady Melania Trump, who married Donald nine months after her 34th birthday. Bess Truman was also 34 when she married Harry.
Diverting to the principals again, the youngest of the Presidents and Vice-Presidents at marriage – and the only teenager – was Andrew Johnson, 18 and 4 months when he married 16-year-old Eliza McCardle in 1827. The oldest President to marry for the first time was Grover Cleveland, aged 49 when he married 21-year-old Frances Folsom in the White House in 1886, the year after he first became President. John Tyler, Nelson Rockefeller, Millard Fillmore, Woodrow Wilson, Benjamin Harrison, Alben Barkley, Aaron Burr and Donald Trump all remarried when they were over 50, Burr being the oldest at 77 (as described above). Apart from Cleveland, Presidents Tyler and Wilson married in office (both having lost their first wives since becoming president) and Alben Barkley married while Vice-President.
Age gaps: Taking the 91 marriages of the Presidents and Vice-Presidents, the average age on the wedding day is 32.1 and the median 28.0 (William McKinley, married four days before his birthday in 1871), making the average age gap 6.5 and the median 3.8 (between Peggy and Zachary Taylor). Counting first marriages for the Presidents and Vice-Presidents only, the average age is 28.0 and the median 26.4 (Aaron Burr, when he married Theodosia); the average age gap is 4.1 and the median 2.8 (between Theodore Roosevelt and the ill-fated Alice).
The 33-year gap between Vice-President Barkley, born on 24 November 1877, and his second wife Jane Hadley, born 23 September 1911, is the largest for any of the couples here; they were married the week before his 72nd birthday, when she was 38 (a second marriage for both). The biggest gap for a President is that between John Tyler (born 29 March 1790) and his second wife Julia (born 4 May 1820); they were married on 26 June 1844. The biggest gap for a first marriage on both sides is the 27 years between Grover and Frances Cleveland.
Thirteen or fourteen of the spouses in my sample were older than the President or Vice-President who they married. The biggest such gap was between Aaron Burr (again!) and his first wife Theodosia, who was nine years older than him. Florence Harding was five years older than Warren, Karen Pence is two years older than the incumbent Vice-President, Abigail Fillmore was almost two years older than Millard, and Tod Rockefeller just over a year older than Nelson. There was less than a year in it for Caroline Harrison (Benjamin Harrison's first wife, who died the week before he lost his bid for re-election), Pat Nixon, Martha Washington, Ilo Wallace, Lou Hoover, Cornelia Fairbanks, President-elect Biden's first wife Neilia and possibly Evelyn Colfax, though it's likely that she was younger than her husband (we don't know when she was born in 1823; Schuyler was born in March that year). The closest gap is a week, as noted above, between VP-elect Harris and Doug Emhoff.
In office: The youngest woman married to a President was Frances Cleveland, as noted above, followed in order by Julia Tyler, aged 21 and 24 respectively when they married the President of the day. The youngest woman whose husband became President was Jacqueline Kennedy, aged 31 in 1961. The oldest First Lady was Bess Truman, almost 68 when her husband's term ended in 1953 (though Jane Wyman was 75 at the end of her ex-husband's term in 1989, and Ivana Trump's ex-husband's term ends a month before her 72nd birthday). Ellen Hamlin was only 25 when her husband Hannibal became Vice-President in 1861. At the other end, Etty Garner was 71 at the end of her husband's second term as Vice-President in 1941.
Endings: The average length of the marriages here considered is 33.7 years, the median being 32.1 (Warren and Florence Harding). The longest married couple in the sample are still alive, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, who tied the knot on 7 July 1946 and are still going almost three-quarters of a century later. They just recently overtook George and Barbara Bush (73.3 years). Three other couples made it to their diamond anniversaries: Joan and Walter Mondale, married for 64.9 years, Caro and Charles G Dawes, married for 62.2 years, and Abigail and John Adams, married for 61.7 years. Eleven Ten other couples made it past fifty years of marriage: Betty and Gerald Ford, Lynne and Dick Cheney (still with us), Judy and Spiro Agnew, Bess and Harry Truman, Pat and Richard Nixon, Mamie and Ike Eisenhower, Etty and John Nance Garner, Nancy and Ronald Reagan, Ilo and Henry Wallace, Louisa and John Quincy Adams, and most recently Tipper and Al Gore (also still with us). Edited to add: Apparently the Gores separated in 2010, though it is not clear if they have formally divorced.
At the other end of the scale, the briefest union was the three years and two months of Aaron Burr's marriage to Eliza Jumel, ending simultaneously with their divorce and his death; followed by the three years and three months of Theodore Roosevelt's first marriage to the unfortunate Alice. Six other couples did not make it to their tenth anniversaries: Benjamin Harrison, Alben Barkley and Woodrow Wilson all died within a decade of their second marriage, Ronald Reagan divorced Joan Wyman and Donald Trump divorced Marla Maples after less than a decade, and Neilia Biden died six years after marrying Joe.
On average, the women of my sample outlived their husbands by 6.2 years, the median being 5.1. (This excludes the living.) Mary Harrison, Benjamin Harrison's second wife, outlived him by 46 years. She remarried; Sarah Polk, who outlived her husband by 42 years, did not. Of vice-presidents' wives, the longest widowhood was that of Jennie Hobart, who outlived her husband Garret by 41 years (after 30 years of marriage). At the other end, Levi P. Morton lived to his 96th birthday, almost 49 years after the death of his first wife, Lucy, but had remarried. Neilia Biden died 48 years ago next week. Martin Van Buren and Thomas Jefferson both lived as widowers for over 43 years without remarrying. (Aaron Burr survived his first wife by 41 years.) In the middle, both Letitia Stevenson (whose husband Adlai was Cleveland's second VP) and Eliza Johnson (married to Andrew) died within six months of their husbands, and Barbara Bush, Elizabeth Monroe and Pat Nixon within a year.
There are currently no living widows of Presidents or Vice Presidents, and have not been since Nancy Reagan's death in 2016; it is more than two hundred years since the last time this was the case, before Elbridge Gerry died in 1814, less than two years into his Vice-Presidential term. In late 1901 and most of 1902 there were nine living widows – Mary Breckenridge, Lucretia Garfield, Ellen Colfax, Julia Grant, Eliza Hendricks, Ellen Hamlin, Jennie Hobart, Mary Harrison and Ida McKinley, a period bracketed by William McKinley's assassination and Julia Grant's death. On the other hand two living former Vice-Presidents are widowers, Walter Mondale and Joe Biden (who of course has remarried).
Change over time: To a certain extent we are comparing, if not apples and oranges, at least Seville oranges and clementines here. Things have changed for women's life expectancy quite a lot over the centuries since the future Martha Washington was born in 1731. It is striking, for instance, that of the sixteen couples whose marriages lasted more than fifty years, fourteen lived in the twentieth century (and the other two were Adamses). Here is a graph mapping ten point moving averages of age at marriage (to the husbands considered here), difference in age with husband, and age at death as against year of birth. (I'm very grateful to Del Cotter for help formatting this.)
The big variation is of course in lifespan. As already mentioned, of the nine women on the list who have most recently died, seven lived to be over 90 (ie, half the total number of nonagenarians on the list) and the other two were in their 80s. The low point appears to be the early nineteenth century; of the the sixteen women born between 1815 and 1840, six died before the age of 50 (Mary Wheeler, 47, 1828-1876; Harriet Wilson, 45, 1824-1870; Evelyn Colfax, ~40, 1823-1863; Sarah Hamlin, 39, 1815-1855; and Lucy Morton, 34, 1836-1871) and none reached their 90th birthday. The dip at the end of the table is because most of the women born in the most recent period are still alive, and poor Neilia Biden skews the statistics.
The average marriage age seems to start at just over 25 and ends at 30, but with a dip precisely at the same point as the shortest lifespans. Five of the sixteen women born between 1815 and 1840 married as teenagers (Harriet Wilson and Eliza Johnson at 16, Mary Breckinridge and Mary Wheeler at 17, and Sarah Hamlin at 18); three of them are also on the list of those who died early in this cohort. 31% of these sixteen married as teenagers, compared to nine of the other 75, 12% of the rest of the sample.
I plotted the average age gap as well just to see if I got anything interesting out of it, but I'm not sure that I did. There's a distinct dip for women born in the first three quarters of the twentieth century, and a peak in the earlier period, bracketed perhaps by Julia Tyler and Frances Cleveland.
Conclusion: This has to an extent been a fun bit of historical number-crunching. But only to an extent. One keeps on running up against stories like that of Neilia Biden or Alice Roosevelt; of Andrew and Rachel Jackson, taunted about their early bigamous marriage (her first husband having lied about getting the divorce) to the point that she died between the election and her husband's inauguration; Franklin and Jane Pierce, who saw their only child smashed to bits in front of them in a railway accident just before his inauguration in 1853; Abigail Fillmore, repeating the experience of William Henry Harrison and catching pneumonia during Pierce's inauguration, so that she died a few weeks later; and all the others who married expecting to have decades with their partner of choice, but found that fate decreed otherwise. Here's a touching video of the Biden family celebrating his 30th birthday just after he was first elected to the Senate in November 1972, little knowing that Neilia and their daughter (too young to be in the TV clip) would not see Christmas.
If you have read this, and you have someone special in your life, go and give them a hug, and tell them I said so (if you like).
The Doctor and Sarah successfully thwart the Kraals. Hooray!
