Tag: andrew jackson

Andrew Jackson once declared: “I was born for the storm; calm does not suit me.”

Throughout his life, Jackson was no stranger to close calls. The scrappy president from Tennessee had been a boy when the Revolutionary War broke out, and he cut his teeth fighting against the British. When he was captured in 1781, a British soldier slashed him for refusing to shine his boots, giving Jackson scars on his hand and face. As an adult, Jackson survived a duel that left him with a bullet in his chest, and he was once shot so badly during a Nashville street brawl that he almost lost one of his arms.

Nothing quite compared, however, to the moment that Jackson survived an assassination attempt in Washington, D.C. on January 30, 1835.

At that point, no U.S. president had ever been the target of an assassination attempt before. But Andrew Jackson was unlike any other president in American history. Though he’d become a hero during the War of 1812, Jackson was a deeply polarizing figure from the start.

In the election of 1824, the politically inexperienced and uneducated Jackson cut a different figure than his competitors, including John Quincy Adams — the Secretary of State and the son of a former president, John Adams. Despite this, Jackson ran a surprisingly popular campaign and only lost the race to Adams when it was thrown to the House of Representatives after none of the candidates garnered a majority of the electoral vote. Jackson accused Adams of striking a “corrupt bargain” and ran again in 1828.

This time he won — to the abject horror of many in the political establishment.

As president, Jackson pursued a number of divisive policies, from removing high-ranking government officials who he claimed were corrupt (and replacing them with his supporters) to his opposition to rechartering the Second Bank of the United States.

Many of Jackson’s policies were so controversial, in fact, that his detractors (led by Kentucky Senator Henry Clay) formed a new political party. They called themselves the “Whigs,” which prompted a direct comparison to the English anti-monarchy party of the same name. It also prompted a comparison between King George III of Britain, the hated British monarch who’d ruled during the Revolutionary War, and Andrew Jackson, who was dubbed “King Andrew” by his opponents.

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On January 30, 1835, politicians gathered in the Capitol Building for the funeral of South Carolina Representative Warren Davis. It was a dreary, misty day and onlookers observed that it was one of the rare occasions that could bring the fiercest of political rivals side by side on peaceable terms. But the peace wasn’t meant to last.

President Andrew Jackson was among their number that day. At 67, Jackson had survived more than his fair share of maladies and mishaps—some of them self-provoked, such as the bullet lodged in his chest from a duel 30 years earlier. “General Jackson is extremely tall and thin, with a slight stoop, betokening more weakness than naturally belongs to his years,” wrote Harriet Martineau, a British social theorist, in her contemporaneous travelogue Retrospect of Western Travel.  

Six years into his presidency, Jackson had used bluster and fiery speeches to garner support for his emergent Democratic coalition. He used his veto power far more often than previous presidents, obstructing Congressional action and making political enemies in the process. Jackson’s apparent infirmity at the funeral belied his famous spitfire personality, which would shortly become apparent.

As Jackson exited the East Portico at the end of the funeral, Richard Lawrence, an unemployed painter, accosted him. Lawrence pulled a Derringer pistol from his jacket, aimed at Jackson, and fired. Although the cap fired, the bullet failed to be discharged.

As Lawrence withdrew a second pistol, Jackson charged his would-be assassin. “Let me alone! Let me alone!” he shouted. “I know where this came from.” He then attempted to batter the attacker with his cane. Lawrence fired his second gun—but this one, too, misfired.

Within moments, Navy Lieutenant Thomas Gedney and Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett had subdued Lawrence and hurried the president off to a carriage so he could be transported to the White House. When Lawrence’s two pistols were later examined, both were found to be properly loaded and well functioning. They “fired afterwards without fail, carrying their bullets true and driving them through inch boards at thirty feet,” said U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton. An arms expert later calculated that the likelihood of both pistols misfiring was 125,000 to 1.

It was the first attempt to assassinate a sitting president, and in the aftermath, attention was focused less on how to keep the President safe and more on the flinging of wild accusations. Jackson himself was convinced the attack was politically motivated, and charged rival politician George Poindexter with hiring Lawrence. No evidence was ever found of this, and Poindexter was cleared of all wrongdoing.

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