Warren Ransom Davis served for eight years as a congressman from South Carolina before dying in office at 41. Funeral services were held for him in the House chamber on Jan. 30, 1835, attended by an assortment of his colleagues — and by President Andrew Jackson himself. Afterward, Jackson was strolling through the Capitol Rotunda when an unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence positioned himself less than 10 feet in front of the president, pointed a pistol and fired. It was the first assassination attempt on a president in American history.
It was not, however the first attempt on Jackson’s life. Old Hickory was either lucky or preternaturally adept when it came to surviving attacks. In 1806, for example, a Tennessee plantation owner named Charles Dickinson, known as an expert marksman, called him a “worthless scoundrel” in print and accused his wife of bigamy. Jackson challenged him to a duel and shot him dead.
Violence followed the nation’s first frontier president to Washington, too. In May 1833, an aggrieved former naval officer named Robert Randolph had lunged toward Jackson on a steamboat heading to Fredericksburg, Va. Jackson emerged with a bloodied face but suffered no serious harm. According to Jackson’s nephew Andrew Donelson, a witness, “the ruffian was unnerved by the countenance of Uncle and he could do no more than display his intention.” Afterward, Jackson made clear that he didn’t want to be surrounded by military protection, which meant those around him must be prepared to “shoot down or otherwise destroy those dastardly assassins whenever they approach us.”
Less than two years later, he got his chance to make good on those pugnacious words when Richard Lawrence fired his pistol at Jackson. Again, Jackson escaped unharmed. Lawrence’s powder failed to light, and the cap exploded harmlessly. Lawrence dropped the first gun when it misfired and revealed a second, but the backup pistol too failed to fire. “The explosion of the cap was so loud that many persons thought the pistol had fired,” Missouri Sen. Thomas Hart Benton would later write.
Both weapons later were tested and found to be functional. At least one newspaper chalked this up to a miracle — but the humidity of the gloomy day most likely played as big a role as providence.
As soon as Jackson heard the first pistol explode, he started toward Lawrence, brandishing his famous hickory cane, “with which I knew I could give such a stroke as to break his pistol arm,” he said in one account. As the 67-year-old president charged forward, a Navy lieutenant knocked Lawrence down, with Jackson right behind him making sure his assailant was fully subdued. Legendary woodsman and Tennessee Rep. Davy Crockett was among the crowd helping to keep the peace. “I wanted to see the damnedest villain in the world,” Crockett would later say, “and now I have seen him.”
With Lawrence in custody and Jackson safe, Washington became consumed with doling out blame. Shortly afterward, Jackson would insist that Lawrence was part of a larger plot instigated by his enemies. He repeatedly claimed that Lawrence was a “hired assassin” employed by Mississippi Sen. George Poindexter, who had opposed many of his financial policies. (Poindexter called for a Senate investigation into the charges, which absolved him of any wrongdoing.) The Washington Globe suggested that “orators who have depicted the President as a Caesar who ought to have a Brutus” might have influenced the attack. But the truth is that Lawrence was simply insane.
The house painter’s first three decades of life were relatively stable despite a family history of serious mental illness. But in the years leading up to the attack, things were beginning to unravel. Twice Lawrence announced he was departing for England via Philadelphia, only to return home after a few weeks and blame various obstacles for his aborted voyages. The weather in Europe was too cold, he first claimed; when he returned home a second time, he reported that the government had placed attacks on his character in Philadelphia newspapers.
He quit working and announced that he would soon receive enough money to hire his own ship and crew. How? He was King Richard III, he explained, and had submitted a claim to Congress for the rights to several estates. When he didn’t receive his riches, he blamed the president for his woes. On the morning of the attack, a witness said, he saw Lawrence sitting in his old paint shop, laughing maniacally and talking to himself.
After the attack at the Capitol, Lawrence told the authorities that Jackson had prevented his succession to the British throne, caused him to lose work, and killed his father. His trial began in April, with “The Star-Spangled Banner” writer Francis Scott Key serving as prosecuting attorney. Lawrence arrived dressed as an English dandy, and shouted frequent interruptions. “I desire to know if I, who claim the Crown of the United States, likewise the Crown of Great Britain, and who am superior to the court, am to be treated thus?” he asked as the judge arrived.
After deliberating for just five minutes, the jury found Lawrence not guilty because he was “under the influence of insanity.” He spent the rest of his life in Government Hospital, a newly opened insane asylum in Washington. Meanwhile, the White House installed a “watch box,” manned by a lone sentry, in reaction to the attempt. It was abandoned after Jackson left office.
It would be 30 years before John Wilkes Booth committed the first of America’s four successful presidential assassinations, killing Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in 1865. But attempted assassinations, often by men as delusional as Lawrence — consider John Flammang Schrank, the crazed former saloon keeper who shot Theodore Roosevelt in Milwaukee in 1912, or Ronald Reagan’s would-be killer, John Hinckley — occur more frequently. And our own era is not immune. In November, federal authorities filed assassination charges against mentally ill Oscar Ramiro Ortega Hernandez, accused of firing an assault rifle at the White House while President Obama was on his way to Hawaii. The 21-year-old from Idaho had recently made a video proclaiming himself “the modern-day Jesus Christ,” and had told friends that Obama was the Antichrist. Times change, but paranoia remains the same.
Ruth Graham is a writer living in New Hampshire.