The Assassination Attempt on President Andrew Jackson – January 30, 1835: Pure Grit, No Quarter Asked or Given.
by Beau Yotty
This is the story of Old Hickory in his element, 67 years old, body frail from years of war wounds, duels, and frontier life, but still the toughest son of a gun to ever sit in the White House. It happened right after he’d been to the funeral of a congressman in the U.S. Capitol. Jackson was shuffling out the East Portico, leaning on his cane because his health was shot, bad lungs, chronic pain from old bullets, the works. A deranged British-born house painter named Richard Lawrence stepped out from behind a pillar, raised a derringer point-blank at Jackson’s heart, and pulled the trigger.
Click. Nothing. Misfire. Damp powder from the rainy day, or divine intervention, take your pick.
Lawrence didn’t quit. He yanked out a second loaded pistol and aimed again.
Jackson didn’t flinch, didn’t duck, didn’t call for guards. The old man charged, cane raised like a tomahawk, roaring like the frontier brawler he’d always been. He closed the distance and started beating Lawrence over the head and shoulders with everything he had. Lawrence got off the second shot, another misfire. By then, the crowd (including Davy Crockett) piled on the assassin and dragged him down while Jackson kept swinging.
Newspapers at the time quoted Jackson barking at the men trying to pull him back: “Let me go, gentlemen, I am not afraid! They can’t kill me, I can protect myself!” He walked away without a scratch. Lawrence was hauled off, later ruled insane, but the point was made: you come at the President of the United States, you’d better not miss… because Andrew Jackson sure as hell wasn’t going to.
This wasn’t some Secret Service takedown or modern security theater. This was the President of the Republic, the same man who’d crushed the British at New Orleans with a ragtag army of militiamen, pirates, and freedmen, personally beating down an armed killer with a walking stick. He was already carrying lead from duels and wars that would have killed lesser men. He’d buried his wife right before taking office. He’d fought the banks, the nullifiers, the elites, everything that tried to break the American spirit.
That moment crystallized everything Jackson stood for: unapologetic toughness, iron will, and the raw American refusal to bow to any threat, foreign or domestic. No victim card, no weakness, no retreat. Just a frontiersman who became President and proved that the man in the big chair could still fight like the country he led, hard, direct, and victorious. Old Hickory didn’t just survive; he counter-attacked. That’s grit and toughness personified, the kind that built this nation.