The first presidential assassination attempt in U.S. history ended with both pistols misfiring and the 67-year-old president charging his attacker with a cane.
On January 30, 1835, Andrew Jackson — 67 years old, already battered by decades of duels and frontier violence, and still carrying a bullet 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 charged Lawrence with his walking cane raised and began beating him with it. The crowd, which included Tennessee congressman and frontiersman Davy Crockett, wrestled Lawrence into submission, and he was taken into custody. The pistols were known to be vulnerable to moisture, and the day was damp. Smithsonian Magazine later put the odds of both misfiring 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 lived through a deadly 1806 duel with Charles Dickinson and a 1813 Nashville shootout with the Benton brothers that nearly killed him, and he still carried a bullet from each. The 1806 bullet stayed near his heart for the rest of his life; the 1813 bullet, lodged in his arm, was cut out by a surgeon in 1832. He served two more years as president after the Capitol attack.