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Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, was born in the Waxhaws area near the border between North and South Carolina on March 15, 1767. Jackson's parents lived in North Carolina but historians debate on which side of the state line the birth took place.

Jackson was the third child and third son of Scots-Irish parents. His father, also named Andrew, died as the result of a logging accident just a few weeks before the future president was born. Jackson's mother, Elizabeth ("Betty") Hutchison Jackson, was by all accounts a strong, independent woman. After her husband's death she raised her three sons at the South Carolina home of one of her sisters.

Two hundred years ago today, on the morning of May 30, 1806, two men, each armed with a large-caliber pistol, glared at each other across a distance of eight paces. They awaited the word to fire. One was a young planter, Charles Dickinson, celebrated as the best shot in Tennessee. The other was a general in the militia and former U.S. Senator named Andrew Jackson.

The quarrel that had brought them to the field was trivial. Dickinson had made a slighting remark about Jackson’s wife, Rachel, whose murky divorce from an earlier husband had long made the rounds of the gossip mills. Later the two men had disputed a debt connected with a horserace. The disagreement escalated, and Dickinson sent a letter to a newspaper denouncing Jackson as “a worthless scoundrel, a poltroon and a coward.” Fighting words.

When Andrew Jackson ran for the Presidency in 1828, the Nashville Central Committee issued a statement to explain the strange, indeed mysterious, circumstances of his marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards. According to the committee’s report, Jackson escorted Rachel to Natchez in January 1791 to help her escape her husband, Lewis Robards of Kentucky. Then he returned home. Several months later Jackson heard that Robards had obtained a divorce from his wife. Without waiting for confirmation, Jackson returned to Natchez and, according to the committee’s statement, "married Mrs. Robards” sometime in the summer of 1791. Two years later the couple learned that Robards did not have a divorce. All he had was an enabling act permitting him to sue for his freedom in a court of law. Not until September 27, 1793, did a jury find Rachel guilty of living "in adultery with another man” and desertion, whereupon the court dissolved the marriage. Four months later Jackson and Rachel were legally married by the justice of the peace of Davidson County, Tennessee, Robert Hays, Rachel’s brother-in-law. In the presidential campaign of 1828 Jackson’s supporters insisted that he and Rachel were innocent of any wrong-doing at the time of their "first” marriage. But despite a recent and extensive search in this country and abroad, not a single document has been found that corroborates the story put out by the Central Committee. Indeed, several documents suggest a different interpretation. For example, the inventory of the estate of John Donelson, Rachel’s father, dated January 28, 1791, lists her as Rachel Jackson. Other documents dated July and October 1790 list her as Rachel Donelson. It would appear that Jackson and Rachel had "married” prior to their departure for Natchez, sometime between October 1790 and January 1791. It is also possible that they did not marry at all and simply lived together as husband and wife until the divorce was finally granted in 1793. During the presidential campaign Rachel was accused of bigamy and the couple of moral delinquency. Was there a marriage prior to 1793? William B. Lewis, Jackson’s close friend, insisted that there had to be. "I would ask,” he wrote in 1827, "how it is possible that any man [such as Jackson] could have been held in such high estimation by a whole community if he had acted as has been alleged? Could any man, so destitute of moral virtue … maintain so high a standing?”

Dueling, a custom in Europe since the Middle Ages, had arrived in the New World in 1621, when two servants fought with swords in Plymouth Colony a year after the landing of the Mayflower. European duels took a largely ritualistic form, rarely resulting in fatalities. American duelists were more serious. Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1831 that “in America one only fights to kill.”

Some states had passed statutes banning the practice, and religious leaders condemned it, but in the early 1800s a challenge was a commonplace reaction to an insult. Jackson and Dickinson faced each other only two years after the nation’s most momentous duel, in which Vice President Aaron Burr gunned down Alexander Hamilton in Weehawken, New Jersey. The 39-year-old Jackson was notoriously hot-tempered and had always been quick to find a quarrel. “His passions are terrible,” Thomas Jefferson once observed. The notion of settling matters of honor through violence, always stronger in the South than in the North, had migrated to the frontier. The dueling field provided an arena in which a man could show his mettle. That it took real courage to face an armed man 24 feet away was beyond doubt.

Though the duel was an outlaw activity, meticulous rules covered the nature of offenses and the details of combat. The aggrieved parties and their seconds would supplement these customs with particulars of how a given contest was to proceed. Courtesy and sang-froid were the order of the day.

Swordplay had largely died out in America by the 1800s; dueling pistols were the preferred weapon (though Abraham Lincoln once avoided a duel partly by choosing sabers as the weapon; his opponent, aware of his long-armed reach, declined the battle). The pistols were one-shot, muzzle-loading flintlocks. Their accuracy was limited, accounting for the short distance between the duelists. In some circles, careful aiming was scorned as ungentlemanly. But the dueling code specifically condemned deliberate misses. If a man was not serious he should not have given or accepted the challenge.

Journeying to the dueling ground, a Kentucky riverbank a day’s ride from Nashville, Jackson and his second settled on a strategy. Because Dickinson, 26, was a sure shot, he would probably try to fire first. Jackson would hesitate, risk being shot, then fire his own gun more deliberately.

The seconds loaded the pistols, and the men took their places with the muzzles pointed downward. Both affirmed that they were ready. Jackson’s second immediately shouted “Fire!” As expected, Dickinson raised his gun quickly. A loud explosion startled the birds in nearby trees. A puff of dust rose from the breast of Jackson’s coat and he raised his left arm to cover his chest.

“Great God, have I missed him?” Dickinson cried. He stepped back in astonishment, but was ordered to return to the mark. Jackson aimed and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. His pistol had stopped at half-cock. He calmly pulled the hammer back again and fired. His ball tore through Dickinson’s abdomen.

Only when he was leaving the field did one of Jackson’s friends notice that the general’s shoe was full of blood. Dickinson’s shot had broken two of his ribs and lodged not far from his heart. “I should have hit him,” Jackson asserted later, “if he had shot me through the brain.”

Jackson recovered—though the wound he received would pain him for the rest of his life. Dickinson died in agony the next day. Twenty-two years later the victorious duelist was elected the seventh President of the United States. His propensity for gunfighting was only one of the criticisms leveled against the man many believed to be a crude backwoods ruffian. His opponent, John Quincy Adams, called him “a barbarian and savage who could scarcely spell his own name.” The voting public disagreed. They saw Jackson’s iron will, bravery, and demonstrated devotion to his own honor as positive attributes. It was a lesson that would be repeated in American history—the people showing a preference for a man of action over one of intellect.

As the first President with no connection to the aristocratic elite of the East, Jackson brought to the White House and the country a new perspective on democracy and helped establish what he called “the republican rule that the people are the sovereign power.” We can only wonder how the nation’s political character might have been altered had the lawyer’s bullet struck an inch closer to its mark that May morning.

Jackson's health was never good and there were times during his presidency when it seemed he would not live to complete his term. But complete it he did and in 1837 retired to his home near Nashville which he and Rachel had named The Hermitage. When the Hermitage was first built it was little more than a small cabin, but by Jackson's retirement it had been expanded, remodeled, and rebuilt into a spacious plantation house.

Jackson remained a force in politics in his latter years. For example it was very much Jackson's behind the scenes maneuvering which secured the presidency for his successor Martin Van Buren and in 1840 he actively campaigned for Van Buren in Van Buren's unsuccessful candidacy for re-election. Jackson also worked for the annexation of Texas and remained loyal to future President James K. Polk (another North Carolina native). Polk had been one of Jackson's strongest supporters in Congress as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

In his last few years Jackson's health deteriorated badly and he died at the Hermitage on June 8, 1845. Andrew and Rachel Jackson did not have any children of their own, but adopted one of Rachel's nephews and gave him the name of Andrew Jackson, Jr. Jackson willed the Hermitage to Andrew Jr., but young Jackson's debts forced the sale of the property to the State of Tennessee in 1886.

As for dueling, the custom faded quickly following the much less decorous violence of the Civil War. What Benjamin Franklin had called a “murderous practice” ultimately succumbed not to laws but to public opinion. The majority of Americans came to concur with the novelist Hugh Henry Brackenridge that the custom was ludicrous rather than noble. A character in his 1792 satire Modern Chivalry answers a challenge from a British officer this way: “If you want to try your pistols, take some object, a tree or a barn door about my dimensions. If you hit that, send me word, and I shall acknowledge that if I had been in the same place, you might also have hit me.”

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