old hickory gets shot--1/17/25

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Today's selection -- from A Brutal Reckoning by Peter Cozzens. In 1813, Andrew Jackson, the future hero of the Battle of New Orleans as well as the future president of the United States, was shot in an altercation in a Nashville hotel:

“Andrew Jackson passed a gratifying spring at the Hermitage. He welcomed the public adulation, basked in the affection of his wife, and radiated the joy that came with fatherhood. He and Rachel had longed for children but had been unable to conceive. In 1809 her sister-in-law had twins. Being of delicate health and already saddled with several children, she gave one of the twins to the Jacksons to raise as their own. They named the boy Andrew Jr.

“His militiamen knew Old Hickory as tough, but he treated the toddler with a profound paternal tenderness unfathomable to those familiar only with his volatile public persona. Calling on the Jacksons one evening, Thomas Hart Benton found Andrew Jackson seated in a chair, a lamb and his namesake child on his lap. Handing the animal to a servant, Jackson stammered that Andrew Jr., weeping because the lamb was alone outside, had begged him to bring it indoors. The gesture moved Benton. ‘The ferocious man does not do that,’ he averred. ‘Though Jackson had his passions and his violence, they were for men and enemies—those who stood up against him—and not for women and children, or the weak and helpless; for all of whom his feelings were those of protection and support.’

“Unless they were slaves. By 1813, a row of rickety huts on the Hermitage was home to at least twenty, on whom Jackson meted out punishment with whip and chains. When Rachel complained to him that her maid Betty had ‘put on some airs and been guilty of a great deal of impudence,’ Old Hickory publicly flogged her. Should she again misbehave—Berry apparently had washed the clothes of white neighbors without ‘the express permission of her mistress’—Jackson would give her fifty lashes, a brutal penalty that might well prove fatal. To runaway slaves, Jackson showed no mercy. Recovering four of his own, he felt ‘compelled to place two of them in irons for safekeeping until an opportunity offers to sell or exchange them.’

“Although they were slaveholders with large acreage, the Jacksons lived modestly, as dictated by their fluctuating finances, which might collapse should Colonel Benton fail to persuade the War Department to pay Old Hickory's Natchez-expedition debt. Their home was a square two-story, single-chimney, three-room log cabin—one room on the ground floor and two upstairs. A second and smaller cabin stood twenty feet from the main house. A covered walkway connected the two structures. Such was the Hermitage in 1813.

General Andrew Jackson, an 1819 portrait by John Wesley Jarvis

“Jackson's domestic tranquility ended abruptly. In June, William Carroll, a talented young militia captain who had impressed Jackson on the Natchez campaign but alienated other junior officers by his arrogance and ‘dandyism,’ asked his former commander to serve as his second in a duel with Jesse Benton, the hot-tempered brother of the very man in whose hands Jackson's fortunes then rested. A startled Jackson tried to decline because his age and station rendered acceptance ‘extremely injudicious.’ Carroll persisted, however, and after a futile attempt to persuade Benton to drop his challenge, Jackson assented. The June 14 duel was as ludicrous as the grounds for it were trivial. Both participants took bullets, Carroll in the thumb and Ben­ton a grazing shot across the buttocks.

“Thomas Hart Benton returned from Washington to find his younger brother the butt of jokes for the mortifying spot in which he had been hit. Thomas Hart Benton blamed Jackson for the affair, his outrage the greater because he had persuaded the War Department to assume Jackson's military debts. When Jackson learned that the elder Benton had publicly disparaged him as a dishonorable rogue, he ‘swore by the Eternal’ that he would horsewhip him the first chance he got. All Nashville braced for a clash that most thought absurd.

“The showdown occurred on the morning of September 4, 1813, five days after Fort Mims fell. Had the antagonists known that a courier was then pounding the road to Nashville with news of the massacre, they would likely have forgotten their petty grievances. As it was, Jackson went out of his way to provoke a needless confrontation. Learning that the Bentons were staying at the City Hotel in Nashville, he rode into town with his nephew Stockley Hays and his friend and fellow planter John Coffee on the pretext of picking up mail. The three took rooms at the nearby Nashville Inn. Sauntering along the sidewalk from the post office to their lodging, they approached the City Hotel, where Thomas Hart Benton lingered in the doorway, staring daggers at them. Jesse Benton hid inside. Both carried pistols.

“‘Do you see that fellow?’ whispered Coffee.

“‘Oh yes,’ replied Jackson, ‘I have my eye on him.’

“As they came abreast of Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson whirled to face him, brandishing a whip. ‘Now, you damned rascal, I am going to punish you. Defend yourself.’

“Benton reached in his breast pocket. Jackson drew a pistol and backed him into the hallway. Emerging from the barroom, Jesse Ben­ton raised his pistol, loaded with three balls, and fired. One ball shat­tered Jackson's left shoulder, severing the artery; another pierced Old Hickory's left upper arm and buried itself near the bone; the third barely missed him. Pitching forward, Jackson fell hard on the floor, blood spurting from his shoulder and oozing down his arm. Coffee and Hays joined the fray. Pistols were fired and daggers wielded, but when bystanders finally pulled the belligerents apart, only Jackson had been hurt badly. Carried to a room in the Nashville Inn, Jackson soaked two mattresses in blood before doctors stanched the bleeding. A young physician recommended amputation. ‘I'll keep my arm,’ countered Old Hickory. No one dared contradict him. Neither did the doctors attempt to extract the ball. They slapped a poultice of slippery elm on the wounds. For the next three weeks, Jackson lay prostrated from loss of blood. Hounded by Jackson adherents, the Bentons left town.”

author:	Peter Cozzens
title:	A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South
publisher:	Vintage
pages:	166-168