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Jackson did not believe in the lone gunman theory.

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On January 30, 1835, President Andrew Jackson walked out of the Capitol Building into the cold, wet Washington air. He was just leaving a funeral for a South Carolina representative, a heavily-attended event with all the big political names of the time like John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, John Tyler, and Davy Crockett in attendance.

Perpetually near death himself, Jackson was in the midst of one of his sick confined-to-bed periods, but he came to show his respects, physically supported by both a cane and Secretary of the Treasury Levi Woodbury.

As Jackson emerged from the Rotunda, he was ambushed by a man who suddenly appeared from behind a pillar just eight to ten feet away. The man whipped out a brass-handled pistol and shot at Jackson. Everyone heard the shot. Jackson’s friends nearby immediately checked to make sure he was all right, and he did not appear to be shot.

Then, the man whipped out another gun and shot at the President again. Somehow, Jackson was unhit, again. Everyone seemed surprised by this, including the shooter.

It was at this point that Jackson went at the man with his cane. 

It has been widely written that Andrew Jackson beat the man with his cane, but it seems he only tried to beat him with his cane, but was stopped because Navy Captain Thomas Gedney and Davy Crockett quickly subdued the man. One report said the crowd was yelling, “kill him, kill the assassin!” but Gedney hauled him off instead.

Amazing, both guns were fired at very close range right at Jackson’s chest, but no one was hit.  Reports said they were examined and found to be in perfect working order, had been loaded correctly, and fired just fine when they were tested.

It seemed the percussion cap went off, which is what is supposed to ignite the spark that lights the gunpowder and sends the bullet on its way, and that is why the shots rang out loudly as expected. But somehow, the gunpowder did not ignite. Some people took this as evidence of divine intervention or a miracle, but it could have been due to the rainy weather and being kept under the nervous sweaty coat of the would-be assassin, a man named Richard Lawrence

Richard Lawrence was a nobody by Washington standards. He was 35 years old, born in London but a resident of the United States since he was 12. He was trained as a house painter, but he had been unable to hold a job for long recently and he preferred to paint landscapes.

Since he had a lot of time on his hands, he had come to several sessions of Congress to watch the debates, with all their fiery heated rhetoric. Jackson had no idea who he was—they had never met. In Jackson’s mind, this man was a hired gun—a pawn in an enemy plot to take him out. As soon as Jackson’s already-weak and now-rattled body was led into a carriage back to the White House, the conspiracy theories began. Jackson proclaimed he knew who was really responsible.

The Conspiracies

A pro-Jackson newspaper The Globe had its own idea about who was to blame. John C. Calhoun, that walking hairy-necked nightmare. 

Calhoun had been Jackson’s vice president in his first term, but he was in the Senate now and a bitter political enemy of Jackson’s. Their enmity had become personal. Calhoun had been leading the charge to investigate Jackson and patronage – giving jobs in the government to your political supporters. Calhoun was exposing that the post office was full of this kind of corruption, and calling out the irony of Jackson running against corruption as though Jackson had pledged to drain the swamp but was instead filling it with his friends.

Calhoun may have gone a little too far in his language though, saying that Jackson was acting like a Julius Caesar in need of a Brutus. That was enough for one newspaper to say that Calhoun’s violent rhetoric had inspired this deranged man to try to kill Andrew Jackson.

Calhoun flew into a rage in the Senate where he read the newspaper aloud and said that idea was outrageous. The newspaper, he said, “asserts that he who denounces abuses and corruption, be they ever so great, instigates assassination!” Calhoun did not seem to draw a line between pointing out corruption and insinuating that someone needed to be killed.

But as much as Jackson hated Calhoun, he blamed someone else for the assassination attempt. Jackson was sure the person behind this plot was a man named George Poindexter. (I wondered if maybe this is where the nerdy term Poindexter comes from, but no—that’s a newer word based on a character from the 1950s Felix the Cat cartoons.)

George Poindexter was a senator from Mississippi who had a lot in common with Jackson, mostly a temper and the fact they had both killed men in duels. Poindexter had once been a supporter of Jackson’s and may have expected some sort of diplomatic appointment that never happened. Whatever the case, the two drifted apart. Far apart. Poindexter had become an extremely vocal opponent of Jackson’s policies and the hatred and insults went both ways. According to one account, Poindexter once had a friend go to the White House on his behalf to challenge the president to a duel, and Jackson’s response was that Poindexter was not enough of a gentleman to be worthy to duel with him because, Jackson said, “he was in the daily habit of horse-whipping his wife.”

Poindexter took great offense to that horsewhipping accusation and publicly denied this charge, accusing Jackson of slander. Poindexter even had his wife publicly back him up to refute the story, which is probably the same thing he would do if he were horsewhipping her daily.

So when someone showed up to shoot the President following all this drama, Jackson was sure it was Poindexter. Jackson somehow got two sworn affidavits from people saying that they saw the shooter, Richard Lawrence, at Poindexter’s home multiple times. The affidavit writers, Mordecai Foy and David Stewart, swore that Lawrence and Poindexter were up to something. It leaked to a newspaper that Jackson was holding onto these affidavits—it is not clear what his master plan was for exposing Poindexter, but Poindexter demanded an investigation to clear his name. 

There was a Senate investigation and Mordecai Foy and David Stewart were questioned—and their story fell apart. One did not even know where Poindexter lived, and the other had no idea what Lawrence looked like. Poindexter’s name was essentially cleared. 

When that happened, a lot of the public opinion and outrage that had been directed at Poindexter was then redirected back at Jackson for baselessly accusing someone of a murder plot. Jackson managed to squander the good will of surviving a point blank assassination attempt by raging at his enemies. 

But the backlash against Jackson did not do any lasting political damage. He was leaving the presidency in a year anyway. Poindexter on the other hand, could not turn the good will of being falsely accused into future success. He lost his reelection bid to the Senate and spent the rest of his days in Mississippi. 

The Trial

The greatest factor in clearing Poindexter’s name was the trial of Richard Lawrence.

First, there was the question of bail – what should the bail be set at? Because at the time, the crime of attempted murder was a bailable one. The only way you could be held without bail was if you were accused of a capital crime, like murder. Not, apparently, trying and failing to commit murder. It seems that if you were finished with your crime, they could keep you locked up. But, if you weren’t quite done, you could pay for a chance to try again. 

They settled on setting the bail at $1500, but no one was willing to post bail for him so he awaited trial in jail.

Because the event happened in front of hundreds of people, there was no denying what Lawrence did so there was never a question of guilt. It became a question of insanity. If the defense could prove he was the right kind of insane, he could be found not guilty and go to an asylum instead of prison. (Insanity definitions at the time were complicated and included things like monomania and astromania, partial insanity and total insanity—and partial insanity meant there were moments of lucidness so you had to prove the crime didn’t happen during one of those lucid moments.)

The prosecutor trying the case was Francis Scott Key, who had written The Star Spangled Banner a decade earlier, and the trial was full of drama. At one point during the trial Richard Lawrence stood up and said the reason he tried to kill Jackson was because The Bank of the United States owed him money and Jackson was trying to close that bank. A marshal told him to pipe down and Lawrence said it’s not your job to tell me what to do—I tell you all what to do. 

The defense knew it was less than ideal for a defendant to assert authority over the courtroom and declare why they did the thing they were accused of, so the defense attorney asked the court to let Lawrence be dismissed from attendance because defending him would be much easier if he weren’t actually there. That motion was denied because it was so unusual. 

At the trial it came out that Richard Lawrence believed he was Richard III, the king of England, who had died in 1485. He also believed that the one thing standing in his way of being crowned as the King of England and America was President Andrew Jackson.

Two of his brothers-in-law testified about the recent change in Lawrence – within the last 18 months really, he went from being relatively normal to being paranoid about all kinds of things – not just that he was being kept from his rightful place in the monarchy but also that his tailors were conspiring to ruin his clothes.

There was also a recent history of violence – Lawrence, who sometimes fired pistols out his window at night, beat his sister and once tried to attack her with a 4-pound paperweight. He had to move from one place to another because of his behavior, for example threatening to kill his landlord and wife. 

A cousin testified that Lawrence’s father and an aunt were also deranged and confined in England, and seven doctors testified that Lawrence was insane. One said there was a particular expression in the eye of the accused “which a medical man can at once perceive, although he may not be able well to describe it.” Another doctor said a symptom of Lawrence’s “monomania” was his insensibility to external cold, which was observed by his prison keeper: “He would let his fire go out on the coldest day, and sit in his shirt sleeves.”

Aside from the apparently admissible diagnoses of crazy eyes and running hot, there was testimony that painted a real picture of a man with mental illness—paranoid delusions, talking to himself, staring off, manic incoherent rants, marked depression. All the doctors agreed that even though Lawrence could seem normal for brief periods of time, in their examinations he always quickly drifted toward talking about his delusions and they were all convinced he wasn’t faking it.

One of the doctors said that the violently-charged political arguments at the time in Congress and in the newspapers could have influenced Lawrence. 

Richard Lawrence’s defense didn’t bother with a closing argument, instead leaving them to decide based on the testimony they had heard.

The jury returned in about 5 minutes with the verdict of not guilty, due to his “having been under the influence of insanity at the time he committed the act.” 

The report of the trial said, “The court then ordered that Lawrence should be remanded, and be made as comfortable, and treated as well as his situation would permit, until some further provision could be made to prevent him from doing further mischief.” 

He was kept in insane asylums until his death 26 years later, in 1861.

The accusations of a conspiracy, from both sides, eventually went away and it was accepted that it was a lone gunman who came very close to changing history that cold day in 1835.

 

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Listen to the podcast episode where we dig into this story ahead of an interview with David S. Brown about his book The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson.