CHAPTER 28
ON THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 1835, there was a dinner in Washington to celebrate both the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans and the payment of the national debt—a long-sought, and now achieved, goal of Jackson’s. “The national debt is paid!” said Thomas Hart Benton in a toast. “This month of January, 1835, in the 58th year of the republic, Andrew Jackson being President, the national debt is paid! … Gentlemen, my heart is in this double celebration; and I offer you a sentiment, which, coming direct from my own bosom, will find its response in yours: PRESIDENT JACKSON: May the evening of his days be as tranquil and happy for himself as their meridian has been resplendent, glorious, and beneficent for his country.”
Twenty-two days later, Jackson was walking out of the House chamber after a funeral service for Representative Warren R. Davis of South Carolina. Emerging from the Rotunda to the porch whose steps led down the East Portico, Jackson was with Levi Woodbury, the secretary of the Treasury, and Mahlon Dickerson, the secretary of the navy, when the president’s eyes met those of a “handsome … well-dressed” young man, an unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence.
Armed with two pistols, standing less than ten feet in front of Jackson, Lawrence raised the first gun and fired. The cap exploded but the powder did not light. Realizing the danger, Jackson charged his assailant, brandishing his walking stick. “The explosion of the cap was so loud that many persons thought the pistol had fired,” said Benton. “I heard it at the foot of the steps, far from the place, and a great crowd in between.” Lawrence dropped the gun and produced a second pistol, but it too failed to fire. (In both cases the cap exploded but did not light the powder necessary to discharge the bullet.)
Until that moment, Jackson had thought the assassin “firm and resolved”; now Lawrence “seemed to shrink” as the president pursued the assailant with his cane and a nearby navy lieutenant knocked Lawrence to the ground. (Jackson took no chances. “The President pressed after him until he saw he was secured,” the Globe reported.)
The agitated Jackson was put into a carriage back to the White House. His life may have been saved, in a way, by George Washington and by the weather. In those days there was an empty tomb in the midst of the Rotunda, dug from the floor down to the damp basement, which had been readied for Washington’s remains. The first president’s heirs, however, resisted moving Washington from Mount Vernon to the Capitol, and so the large hole was unfilled, and it moistened the air in the Rotunda. That, added to the mistiness of the day, probably combined to dampen the powder in both guns. “The pistols were examined, and found to be well loaded; and fired afterwards without fail, carrying their bullets true, and driving them through inch boards at thirty feet,” Benton said. The odds of two guns failing to fire during the attack, it was later determined, were 125,000 to one.
JACKSON SEEMED TO calm down during the ride to the White House. Later that day Van Buren found him holding one of Emily and Andrew’s children on his lap and talking with Winfield Scott as though nothing exceptional had happened that morning.
Quietly, however, he was seeing enemies everywhere. Though Lawrence appeared to be insane (occasionally claiming to be the king of England, he had tried to kill his sister and had threatened others), Jackson believed Lawrence was an agent of his political foes. When Harriet Martineau visited the White House shortly after the incident, she mentioned the “insane attempt” to the president, who rebuked her. “He protested, in the presence of many strangers, that there was no insanity in the case,” Martineau said. “I was silent, of course. He protested that there was a plot, and that the man was a tool.… It was painful to hear a chief ruler publicly trying to persuade a foreigner that any of his constituents hated him to the death; and I took the liberty of changing the subject as soon as I could.”
Jackson’s men blamed the president’s opponents for the attack. Lawrence—“taciturn and unwilling to talk,” observers recalled—was reported to have haunted the Capitol in recent years. “Whether Lawrence has caught, in his visits to the Capitol, the mania which has prevailed during the last two sessions in the Senate—whether he has become infatuated with the chimeras which have troubled the brains of the disappointed and ambitious orators who have depicted the President as a Caesar who ought to have a Brutus … we know not,” the Globe said. But it was possible, the paper added, that “the infatuated man fancied he had reasons to become his country’s avenger.”
Jackson was even blunter and more conspiratorial. “Someone told me that you [said] on your way home that it must have been the work of a hired assassin,” a friend remarked to Jackson that afternoon at the White House.
“Yes, sir,” Jackson replied. “You know I always say what I think. I did say I thought it was the act of a hired assassin, and I still think so—employed by Mr. Poindexter—he would have attempted it himself long ago if he had had the courage.” Others had reportedly heard Jackson say the same thing at the Capitol itself: “This man has been hired by that damned rascal Poindexter to assassinate me.”
That Jackson’s suspicions instantly settled on Mississippi senator George Poindexter illustrates how deeply the president felt about the things closest to him. Poindexter had supported nullification, backed the Bank, attacked the removal of the deposits, and become a rival of Van Buren’s. Even in Jackson’s Washington, though, for a president to accuse a senator of trying to have him murdered was remarkable. Nathaniel Niles, a diplomat who was at the White House with Jackson after the attack, thought it disturbing for the president “to name any person, especially one holding a high and honorable post in the government, as the author of this base attempt against his life.… The President may have private enemies like any other man but it must not be believed that mere party hostility can lead to such results—if it be so it is all over with us—our system cannot be preserved, nor, indeed, is it worth preserving.”
PROFESSING INNOCENCE, SENATOR Poindexter demanded an investigation. Three weeks after the incident, Senators John Tyler and Silas Wright, Jr., two members of a five-man select committee, called on Jackson at the White House. There the president shared two affidavits alleging that Lawrence had been seen visiting Poindexter’s house in Washington. One was from a blacksmith who did work for the White House, the other from a man who had loaned money to Poindexter. Their stories did not survive scrutiny. The blacksmith appeared to have some hopes of being given work on the new Treasury Department fence, and, the committee found, “has become of late years idle and intemperate, and when under the influence of liquor, which is almost continual, he is talkative and noisy, and … unable to discriminate objects with accuracy.” The Senate dismissed the allegations against Poindexter.
Questioned afterward by two physicians seeking to determine whether he was insane, Lawrence said that he had often attended the tempestuous congressional debates of 1833–34 but denied that the vitriolic exchanges had driven him to the attack. In the end, Lawrence was found to be mad. “Hallucination of mind was evident; and the wretched victim of a dreadful delusion was afterwards treated as insane, and never brought to trial,” Benton recalled. “But the circumstance made a deep impression upon the public feeling, and irresistibly carried many minds to the belief in a superintending Providence, manifested in the extraordinary case of two pistols in succession—so well loaded, so coolly handled, and which afterwards fired with such readiness, force, and precision—missing fire, each in its turn, when leveled eight feet at the President’s heart.”
Deprived of solid evidence of a broader plot against the president, Blair and the Globe settled for blaming anti-Jackson Senate speeches for the attack. Because of the assaults of men like Calhoun, the Globe asserted, Lawrence, a “sullen and deep-brooding fanatic” who was “violent in his expressions of hostility to the Administration of the President,” took up arms. “Is it … a strained inference that this malignant partisan might have been fired to commit the deed by the violent denunciations fulminated against the President?” It was no strain for Jackson, or for his men.