In 1829, the entire United States government nearly ground to a halt over one woman, and the fight over her ended up deciding who would become president. Her name was Peggy O'Neale. She grew up in her father's tavern in Washington, a few blocks from the White House, where politicians drank, boarded, and argued late into the night. She was smart, outspoken, and by most accounts the kind of person every man in the room noticed. That alone was enough to get her talked about. She married a Navy purser named John Timberlake. While he was away at sea for long stretches, a Tennessee senator named John Eaton was a frequent presence around the O'Neale household. Washington noticed that too. In 1828, Timberlake died at sea. Rumors spread that he'd killed himself over his wife's affair with Eaton. Less than a year later, Peggy married Eaton. And a few months after that, Eaton's close friend Andrew Jackson took office and made him Secretary of War. The wives of Washington were not having it. Led by Floride Calhoun, the wife of Vice President John C. Calhoun, the cabinet wives refused to call on Peggy, refused to sit with her, and refused to attend events where she'd be present. It was a full social blockade. Even Jackson's own niece, Emily Donelson, who served as his White House hostess, wouldn't receive her. Jackson took it personally, and he had a reason to. His wife Rachel had died just weeks after the 1828 election, following a brutal campaign in which his opponents attacked her as an adulteress and a bigamist over the circumstances of their marriage. Jackson blamed those attacks for her death. To him, the women snubbing Peggy were doing the exact same thing. So the President of the United States launched an investigation into a woman's sex life. He collected affidavits. He tracked down hotel records and witnesses. In September 1829 he called a cabinet meeting, brought in the two ministers who'd been spreading the rumors, and laid out his case point by point. At the end he declared Peggy "as chaste as a virgin." Not everyone in the room was convinced. Jackson sent his niece back to Tennessee for a time when she wouldn't fall in line. The whole thing dragged on for two years, paralyzing the cabinet. Members aligned with Calhoun kept up the snub. Meanwhile Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, a widower with no wife to answer to, went out of his way to be kind to the Eatons. He invited them to dinners and treated Peggy with respect. Jackson never forgot it. By 1831 the situation was so poisoned that Van Buren came up with a way out. He and Eaton resigned, giving Jackson cover to ask most of the rest of the cabinet to resign too. It was the first time a president had wiped out nearly his entire cabinet at once. The fallout reshaped American politics. Calhoun, already clashing with Jackson over other issues, was finished as his heir. In 1832 Jackson dropped him and put Van Buren on the ticket as vice president. In 1836, Van Buren was elected president. A fight over who would sit next to whom at dinner helped put Martin Van Buren in the White House. As for Peggy, she outlived nearly all of them. Eaton went on to serve as governor of the Florida Territory and minister to Spain, where she was a hit at the royal court. After he died, Peggy, then about 59, married her granddaughter's 19-year-old Italian dance instructor. He eventually took most of her money and ran off with her granddaughter. She died in 1879, broke, having been at the center of more scandal than almost any woman in 19th century America. It's called the Petticoat Affair, and almost nobody learns about it.