The Day Both Pistols Misfired
On January 30, 1835, an unemployed house painter fired two pistols at President Andrew Jackson outside the U.S. Capitol — and both misfired in what experts called a 1-in-125,000 fluke.
On the afternoon of Friday, January 30, 1835, President Andrew Jackson walked out of the U.S. Capitol after attending a congressman's funeral and into one of the most astonishing moments in presidential history. As the 67-year-old president crossed the East Portico, a man stepped from behind a pillar, raised a pistol, aimed it at Jackson's back — and pulled the trigger. There was a click. Nothing more.
The gunman was Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter. Undeterred by the first failure, he drew a second pistol and fired as Jackson — no man to wait politely to be shot — charged straight at him with his walking cane raised high. The second pistol misfired too. Then the President of the United States set about beating his would-be assassin with the cane, and kept at it until the stunned crowd intervened. Among those who rushed in was Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett, the famous frontiersman, who helped wrestle Lawrence into submission.
Later calculations put the odds of both pistols misfiring the way they did at roughly 1 in 125,000. The weapons Lawrence had chosen were flintlocks known to be vulnerable to moisture, and the day was damp — but even so, the double failure was a fluke of historic proportions. Had either pistol fired, the seventh president would very likely have been killed on the Capitol steps.
Lawrence, it emerged, was a deeply unwell man. He had come to believe that he was Richard III of England, that the American government owed him a vast fortune, and that killing Jackson — whom he called “King Andrew” — would clear the way for a national bank and the payment of his imagined claims. He was tried on April 11, 1835, in a case prosecuted by none other than Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” After just five minutes of deliberation, the jury found Lawrence not guilty by reason of insanity. He spent the rest of his life in institutions, and died in 1861.
It was the first known attempt to assassinate a sitting president of the United States — and it remains one of the strangest. A president saved by damp powder and dumb luck; an attacker disarmed by his own delusions and then by a cane; a frontiersman playing peacemaker on the Capitol steps. History rarely offers a scene this improbable, and it has never quite repeated it.
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