The first presidential assassination attempt in U.S. history ended with both pistols misfiring and the 67-year-old president beating his attacker nearly to death with a cane.
On January 30, 1835, Andrew Jackson — 67 years old, already battered by decades of duels, frontier violence, and the slow death of a musket ball that had been lodged near his heart since 1806 — was leaving a congressman's funeral at the U.S. Capitol when a man stepped out from behind a pillar and pointed a pistol at his back. The pistol misfired. The man drew a second pistol and fired again. That one misfired too. Jackson, rather than running, charged.
The would-be assassin was Richard Lawrence, a British-born house painter who had become convinced that he was King Richard III of England, that the U.S. government owed him a fortune, and that Andrew Jackson was personally preventing him from collecting it. In the weeks before the attempt, neighbors had watched him sitting in his paint shop, laughing and muttering to himself. On the morning of the attack, he stood up, announced 'I'll be damned if I don't do it,' and walked to the Capitol.
After both pistols failed, Jackson came at Lawrence with his walking cane. By most accounts, Jackson had to be physically restrained by bystanders — one of whom was Davy Crockett, the Tennessee frontiersman and congressman — before he beat the man to death. Lawrence was taken into custody. Investigators later determined that the damp, humid weather that day had made the percussion caps on both pistols almost certainly unable to fire. The odds of both misfiring were later calculated at roughly 1 in 125,000.
At trial, Lawrence was found not guilty by reason of insanity after just five minutes of deliberation. He spent the rest of his life in institutions, dying in 1861 at what is now St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington. Jackson, characteristically, did not accept the insanity explanation. He was convinced the attempt had been orchestrated by his political enemies — specifically former Vice President John C. Calhoun and Senator George Poindexter — though no evidence ever supported this. His enemies, meanwhile, suspected Jackson had staged the whole thing to gain sympathy.
The assassination attempt was the first against a sitting U.S. president. Jackson survived it the same way he had survived most things in his life — through sheer aggression and what seemed to be unreasonable luck. He had already survived two duels, several street fights, a near-fatal illness during the Creek War, and the musket ball he'd carried in his chest for decades. He served two more years as president after the Capitol attack. A doctor finally removed the old bullet from his chest in 1832, years before the assassination attempt. When asked if it hurt, Jackson reportedly said: 'I've had it in me long enough.'