These are tough times for President Andrew Jackson’s legacy. Liberals succeeded in snatching him off the $20 dollar bill starting in 2020. Many Democratic groups are renaming their annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners because both men were slaveholders. Extremists are even trying to re-brand him as America’s Heinrich Himmler for his (admittedly horrible) Indian removal policy.
Then, out of the blue, President Trump gave some love to Jackson by telling the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito: “… had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw with regard to the Civil War, he said ‘There’s no reason for this.'”
The flap is nothing new. Because Jackson was, remains, and likely always will be, a lightning rod that draws controversy.
As traditionalists and revisionists bicker back and forth, let us pause to revisit an incident in Old Hickory’s story that’s now largely forgotten.
Jackson almost became America’s first assassinated president. And it was a very, very close call.
It happened on Jan. 30, 1835. Funeral services for a South Carolina congressman had just wrapped up inside the Capitol Building. Jackson was walking out of the East Portico.
Suddenly, an unemployed painter named Richard Lawrence approached. He pulled a Derringer pistol of out his pocket and fired at point blank range. But the percussion cap didn’t ignite, meaning the gun didn’t fire.
How did Jackson respond? By bellowing “Let me alone!” and lunging at his assailant. Lawrence produced a second Derringer and pulled the trigger. It also didn’t fire.
The 67-year-old Jackson delivered his own brand of justice by whacking the daylights out of Lawrence with his hardwood walking stick. Now the attacker was in danger of becoming the victim.
Lawrence was spared only because a naval officer and Congressman Davy Crockett (of Disney’s later “king of the wild frontier” fame) pulled him away. Jackson was hustled into his carriage and rushed to the White House.
He had just survived the first known assassination attempt on a sitting president. Jackson talked about it endlessly at a party that night, blaming his political rivals for trying to eliminate him. But no traces of a conspiracy ever turned up.
That’s because Lawrence was as indeed crazy as the proverbial bedbug. During his trial that April (where he was defended by Francis Scott Key, author of the Star Spangled Banner’s lyrics), he told jurors they had no right to pass judgment on him. Privately, he claimed Jackson had killed his father. He also said he was English King Richard III and was entitled to payments from his American colonies, which Jackson had somehow denied him.
No surprise then that Lawrence was found to be insane. He spent the next 26 years in a mental institution, dying there in 1861.
As for his Derringers, why they didn’t fire was never determined. Both guns were later tested. Each worked perfectly, their bullets hitting a board 30 feet away. Experts rated the odds of both pistols not firing at 1 in 125,000.
Andrew Jackson had, figuratively, ducked a bullet.
He completed the final two years of his presidency and returned to his plantation outside Nashville, Tenn. He died there 10 years later, in 1845, at the then-ripe old age of 78.
Jackson was, at the time of his death, exactly what he had been throughout his life and remains nearly 175 years later: a highly controversial and divisive figure. Proving yet again the truth in President Harry Truman’s observation, “The only new thing in life is the history you don’t know.”
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former broadcast journalist and government communicator. His weekly offbeat look at our forgotten past, “Holy Cow! History,” can be read at jmarkpowell.com.
If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.
