John Henry Eaton (June 18, 1790 – November 17, 1856) was an American politician and diplomat from Tennessee who served as U.S. Senator and as Secretary of War in the administration of Andrew Jackson. He has the distinction of serving as the youngest U.S. Senator in history, having been 28 years old at he time of his swearing-in.
He was born near Scotland Neck, Halifax County, North Carolina. His first wife was Myra Lewis. After Myra's death, He married his second wife, Peggy O'Neill.
He was a Democratic lawyer. He served in the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. He was a member of Tennessee House of Representatives from 1815 to 1816 and a U.S. Senator from Tennessee from 1818 to 1821 and again from 1821 to 1829. His apparent age of 28 at the time of his inauguration is notable; it contradicted the US Constitution's requirement that all Senators be over the age of 30. At the time, many people did not know their actual birth records; although it is not certain what occurred in this case. In any event, if challenged, he could have referred to previous under-aged Senators Armistead Mason or Henry Clay.
He was a close personal friend of Andrew Jackson. After Jackson became President he, along with Postmaster General, Amos Kendall, were the only members of the official Cabinet who were also a member of Jackson's informal circle of advisors often satirically called by Jackson detractors the "Kitchen Cabinet". (Apparently this group did, in fact, frequently meet in the White House kitchen.) He resigned his Senate seat in 1829 in order to take up appointment as Jackson's Secretary of War, a post in which he served from 1829 to 1831, when he resigned from the Cabinet over a scandal concerning his second wife, Peggy, that was known as the Petticoat Affair. He was later Governor of Florida Territory from 1834 to 1836 and ambassador to Spain from 1836 to 1840.
Eaton, a Freemason, died in Washington, D.C. on November 17, 1856. He was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, D.C.
Eaton County, Michigan is named in his honor.
John Eaton (1829-1906) was a US Commissioner of Education and a brevet brigadier general during the American Civil War.
He was born at Thetford, Vermont. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1854, studied at Andover Theological Seminary, and was ordained in 1862 to the Presbyterian ministry.
He served in the US Army during the American Civil War. In November of 1863, Ulysses S. Grant appointed him as the Superintendent of Negro Affairs for the Department of Tennessee; there he supervised the establishment of 74 schools. In 1863, he was made colonel of the Sixty-third Regiment of Colored Infantry, and, in 1865, he was advanced to brevet brigadier general.
He edited the Memphis Post in 1866-1867. He was appointed United States Commissioner of Education in 1870 and served with great efficiency in the Bureau of Education. Commissioner Eaton also reorganized the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.
In 1886-1891, he was president of Marietta College, and, in 1895, he was appointed president of Sheldon Jackson College in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 1898, he became inspector of education in Puerto Rico and played a role in the centralization of its educational system. His educational writings dealt largely with the education of freedmen. He wrote a history of Thetford Academy.
John Eaton, (born 30 March 1935 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania) is an American composer. He is a prominent composer of microtonal music, and worked with Robert Moog in developing several types of synthesizers. He innovated a compositional genre called pocket opera, operas scored for a small cast of vocalists and a chamber group.
His most famous opera is the Cry of Clytaemnestra (1980), a re-telling of some of the events surrounding the Trojan War from the perspective of Agamemnon's wife Clytaemnestra, which has been hailed as the first feminist opera.
Eaton's opera, The Tempest was premièred at the Santa Fe Opera in 1985, and subsequently performed in the autumn of 1986 at the Indiana University School of Music.
John Eaton is a musician, historian, educator and interpreter of jazz and American popular music. Named to the Steinway Concert Artist roster in 1988, Eaton has performed as headliner in the East Room of the White House, and both as soloist and with artists as Zoot Sims, Benny Carter, Clark Terry, and Wild Bill Davison. He has been a featured player at the Kool Jazz Festival and the Smithsonian Institution Performing Arts Jazz series, broadcast nationally on National Public Radio and Radio Smithsonian. [blank">http://siarchives.si.edu/findingaids/FA92-069.htm] [http://www.wolftrap.org/performances/show032908.html] He graduated from _Yale University in 1956.
Characterized by Nat Hentoff as "the complete pianist... the master of just about the whole spectrum of jazz music", John Eaton is profiled in Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler's Encyclopedia of Jazz, and has been reviewed by prominent music critics. [blank">http://www.theatre-washington-va.com/Schedule.cfm?TheScheduleID=14]
Eaton is known for a CD series project "John Eaton Presents the American Popular Song" in cooperation with the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, the operational partner of the _Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, comprising thirteen separate, recorded broadcast programs in concert and conversation with jazz bassist Jay Leonhart. Each program focuses on major artists, composers or collaborators in American music, including Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Julie Styne, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill and Vernon Duke, and Hoagy Carmichael and Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen, Frank Loesser, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.
See also
