Andrew Jackson’s Brush with Death: The First U.S. Presidential Assassination Attempt and Press War, 1835

The attempted assassination of Andrew Jackson, lithograph by Endicott & Co.,1835

On January 30, 1835, as President Andrew Jackson was leaving the U.S. Capitol building through the East Portico following his attendance to a funeral for a congressman, a man appeared, raised a pistol at him, and pulled the trigger. When the would-be assassin realized it misfired, he pulled out another pistol he had readied, pulled the trigger, and the second gun miraculously misfired. Richard Lawrence, a commercial painter and English immigrant to the United States, had just become the first person to attempt to kill a sitting U.S. president. After the second trigger was pulled, the sixty-seven-year-old war veteran rushed Lawrence and raised his cane in an attempt to beat him – as stunned onlookers such as Davy Crockett intervened by restraining Lawrence until the police arrived. News of the attempt spread quickly. The Richmond Enquirer pronounced…

…we have to record an event today, which is unprecedented in our annals. During forty-six years, we have had several Presidents, and no attempt has been made upon the life of any of them, until Friday last, when a man, in the midst of an immense crowd… daringly attempted to assassinate A. Jackson!¹         

Press War 

Although some believed Lawrence was part of a larger conspiracy, it was quickly determined he was deranged and was immediately institutionalized in a local insane asylum. However, the Richmond Enquirer, along with a multitude of other newspapers throughout the country supportive of Jackson, blamed the opposition Whig party press for creating a political environment conducive to the deed. In their view, the assassination attempt was a result of the constant vitriol directed at Jackson himself. “It is sign of the times,” the New York Evening Post commented, that the opposition press would use the “occasion for a renewal of the wretched slang of demagogues, and for uttering jibes and imputations of the most atrocious kind against men whose characters have never yet been impugned…” The Evening Post was referring to the fact that some of Jackson’s detractors had compared the president to historical tyrants such as the ancient Greek ruler Pisistratus. The Enquirer castigated the Richmond Whig’s nonchalant dismissal of the unprecedented event, and quoted their claim that “‘such devices have not been unfamiliar to kings, potentates, tyrants, and their slaves and minions…’”² The editor at the Evening Post pointed his finger at the Whigs:

One would have supposed that this patricidal attempt to cut off the chief magistrate of the nation… would fill all hearts with horror… Nay more – one would have supposed that such an event would at last open men’s eyes to the atrocity of the course which political opposition has been pursuing; would convince them of the incendiary character of the means which have been used to overthrow the popularity of Andrew Jackson; and would show them what horrid scenes of anarchy and blood must naturally follow from the revolutionary and seditious sentiment which have been openly and loudly proclaimed in the highest places in the nation.³  

A week later, the Whig publication National Gazette of Philadelphia responded to accusations from the Washington Globe on the “nefarious object of rendering the Whigs in the Senate responsible for Lawrence’s attempt.” To make their point, the National Gazette cited the American Revolution:   

There is nothing… more ridiculous in one aspect, and more favorable to the abuse of power in another, then this new theory of the responsibility of public orators and writers for the delusions and enterprises of lunatics… Our Declaration of Independence paints George III as one of the worst of tyrants; and in regard to the same monarch, Patrick Henry exclaimed in the colonial legislature of Virginia that Caesar had his Brutus. But if some Englishman or American, of distempered brain, had soon after attempted the life of George, the American Congress and the great orator and patriot would, under the theory just mentioned, have been chargeable as instigator!⁴ 

Just below the Gazette’s denial of Whig wrongdoing regarding the incitement was the widely disseminated report by the Globe of the examination and interview of Lawrence by two physicians. Lawrence believed Jackson had caused him to lose his job and that his brother-in-law and the president were “‘in league’” against him. The report noted that when Lawrence was asked by the doctors: “‘if he was friendly to General Jackson he replied, No. Why not? He answered, because he is a tyrant. Who told you he was a tyrant? He answered, it was common talk with the people, and that he had read it in all the papers.’”⁵ 

1. “The attempted Assassination of the President!!!” Richmond Enquirer, February 3, 1835. ↩︎
2. Evening Post, New York, February 4, 1835; Richmond Enquirer, February 3, 1835, quoting the Richmond Whig. ↩︎
3. Evening Post, New York, February 4, 1835 ↩︎
4. The National Gazette, Philadelphia, February 9, 1835. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎

About the author

Based in South Korea since 2008, Benjamin J. Swenson is a professor at Hoseo University in Asan. He holds a PhD from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, where his dissertation addressed 19^th-century Euro-American military history. His work has appeared in the Journal of Military History, and his most recent, The Dawn of Guerrilla Warfare (2023), was published by Pen & Sword. Its follow up, Wars of the Mexican Gulf, will be published in 2024. His hobbies include Viking sagas and chess.