After a four-year absence, Andrew Jackson is back in the Oval Office.
Not the actual Jackson, of course. After all, the iconic office didn’t exist when he lived in the White House. Instead, his likeness has returned.
President Trump makes no secret of his admiration of Old Hickory. Jackson’s portrait hung there during Trump’s first presidency (a loaner from the U.S. Naval Academy). President Joe Biden replaced it with a painting of Ben Franklin when he moved in. Jackson was restored along with Trump 2.0 in January, though it’s a different image.
Something else is different from 2017 as well. Because President No. 45 and No. 47 now shares something in common with President No. 7 that he didn’t during his first term.
Would-be assassins marked both men for death.
The bullet that grazed Trump’s ear while he was speaking in Pennsylvania last July came dangerously close to robbing him of his political comeback. And his life. Few people remember that Andrew Jackson almost became America’s first assassinated president. And it was a very close call.
It happened on January 30, 1835. A funeral for a South Carolina congressman had just wrapped up inside the U.S. Capitol, and Jackson was walking out of the East Portico.
Suddenly, an unemployed painter named Richard Lawrence approached. He pulled a derringer pistol out of his pocket and fired at point-blank range. 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. Suddenly, the attacker was in danger of becoming the victim.
Lawrence was spared when a naval officer, joined by Congressman Davy Crockett (of Disney’s later “King of the Wild Frontier” fame), intervened. 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 crazy as the proverbial bedbug. During his trial that April (where he was defended by Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner”), 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.
And what about the derringers? Why didn’t they fire? Nobody knows. Both guns were later tested and worked perfectly, their bullets hitting a target 30 feet away. Experts rated the odds of both pistols not firing at 1 in 125,000.
Andrew Jackson had, figuratively, dodged two bullets.
He completed the final two years of his presidency and returned to his plantation outside Nashville, Tennessee. He died there eight years later at the then-ripe old age of 78.
At the time of his death, Jackson was precisely what he had been throughout his life and remains 180 years later: a highly controversial and divisive figure. And very nearly the first in the tragically long line of presidents gunned down, too. Proving yet again the truth in Harry Truman’s observation, “The only new thing in life is the history you don’t know.”
