The First Assassination Investigation
Before Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle, Francis Scott Key sat on hottest seat in Washington
The first attempted assassination of an American president happened nearly 200 years ago, 19th century gunfire with a 21st century resonance.
The investigation of the January 1835 attack on President Andrew Jackson foreshadows in many ways this week’s Capitol Hill testimony of Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. America’s personalities, manners, and technologies have changed dramatically in the 189 years since, but the country’s political dynamics have not.
Today’s red-blue division of American politics was already evident in 1835. President Andrew Jackson, who came to office in 1829, was the first U.S. president who did not hail from Massachusetts or Virginia. A war hero celebrated for victories over the British in New Orleans and the Seminole Indians in Florida, Jackson’s presidency antagonized America’s post-1776 elite with its disregard for Washington’s customs and his successful campaign to close the government’s accounts at the U.S. Bank, the country’s largest financial institution. In contemporary parlance, Jackson was America’s first “red” president.
Political rhetoric of the day had a familiar ring. Like the term “woke” today, “abolitionist” was a popular political epithet used to defame an upstart movement for racial justice. While a pro-slavery faction majority dominated the Congress in the “land of the free,” opposition to human bondage was spreading in the Northeastern and Midwestern states. As with campaigns for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) today, the movement for universal emancipation was viewed by many white Americans as a “mind virus” that endangered the country.
Then as now, gun violence was a reality, and conspiratorial thinking prevalent.
Then as now, a presidential appointee and a congressional committee independently investigated an attempted assassination.
The First Attack
On January 30, 1835, Jackson had just emerged from the funeral for a South Carolina congressman in the U.S. Capitol when Richard Lawrence, a manual laborer, stepped from behind a pillar and fired a pistol. The gun misfired. Lawrence produced another pistol — which also misfired. Enraged at the assault, Jackson charged the shooter — a display of bravado not unlike Trump’s defiant response to the gunfire that nearly took his life. The gunman was subdued and arrested.
While Jackson’s supporters (like Trump’s today) credited divine providence with sparing their hero’s life, his rivals voiced skepticism. Charles Francis Adams, son of Jackson’s predecessor, John Quincy Adams, suspected "jugglery" in the assassination story which seemed to only boost Jackson’s popularity. "We must judge the tree by its fruit,” he warned.
Like Trump’s latter-day acolytes, Jackson’s allies countered that excessive partisan rhetoric had inspired the gunman.
“If no secret conspiracy has prompted the perpetuation of the horrid deed,” editorialized the pro-Jackson Globe newspaper, “we think it not improbable that … hearing despotism and every horrible mischief threatened to the Republic and …. imputed to the necessary consequences of the President’s measures, it may be that the infatuated man fancied he had reasons to become his country’s avenger.”
The First Conspiracy Theorist
For his part, Jackson became America’s first conspiracy theorist.
The president was convinced that Lawrence had acted at the behest of Senator George Poindexter of Mississippi, a one-time ally turned bitter rival in the struggle over the U.S. Bank. Two witnesses came forward to say they had seen Lawrence in Poindexter’s company.
Harriet Martineau, a best-selling writer from England who visited the White House in 1835, found Jackson was obsessed. When Martineau mentioned the "insane attempt” on his life, Jackson rebuked her.
"He protested, in the presence of many strangers, that there was no insanity in the case," Martineau later wrote. "I was silent, of course. He protested that there was a plot, and that the man was a tool. ... It was painful to hear a chief ruler publicly trying to persuade a foreigner that any of his constituents hated him to the death."
While Trump has touted various conspiracy theories over the years, he has not offered one about the gunfire that nearly killed him, at least not so far.
The First Investigation
The job of investigating the shooting of Jackson fell to Francis Scott Key, the famous author of the Star Spangled Banner. Key was a pro-slavery ally of the president who served as the District Attorney for the City of Washington. Just as Republicans today question the independence of Cheatle, who was appointed by Biden, so Jackson’s opponents wondered if Key would merely follow his patron’s preferred conclusion.
According to a biographer, Key interrogated the would-be assassin in his closely guarded cell in the city jail in Washington’s Judiciary Square. Lawrence declared that neither Key nor any power in this country could punish him — because such action would be resisted by the powers of Europe. His family had wrongfully been deprived of the crown of England, Lawrence claimed. "I'll yet live to regain it," he said. "I consider the president of the United States nothing more than my clerk.”
Key was convinced that Lawrence was mad, not the tool of Poindexter or anyone else. He recommended that Lawrence be committed to an asylum for the insane — which only made Jackson more furious.
In February 1836, a Senate Committee appointed to investigate Jackson’s charges against Poindexter found the two witness reports were baseless. According to the local newspaper, the Alexandria Gazette, the panel reported unanimously "that NOT A SHADE of suspicion rested on Senator P. in relation to the charge.”
Nonetheless Jackson believed to his dying day that Lawrence had been hired to kill him. Lawrence was confined to a Washington asylum where he died 40 years later.
What Trump makes of Cheatle’s testimony about deceased gunman Thomas Crooks will be known shortly.
[For more on the formative red-blue politics of the 1830s, read my book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835.]
I especially loved how Nancy Mace tore into to her. 9 days and not a single document handed over. God the SS needs to go. Maybe then the ZIA can follow. Unaccountable agencies ever since WWII ended and ever our 5 star general warned against.
Jeff —- Absolutely fascinating.