On May 30, 1806, future President Andrew Jackson kills a man who accused him of cheating on a horse race bet and then insulted his wife, Rachel.
Contemporaries described Jackson, who had already served in Tennessee’s Senate and was practicing law at the time of the duel, as argumentative, physically violent and fond of dueling to solve conflicts. Estimates of the number of duels in which Jackson participated ranged from five to 100.
Jackson and Dickinson were rival horse breeders and southern plantation owners with a long-standing hatred of each other. Dickinson accused Jackson of reneging on a horse bet, calling Jackson a coward and an equivocator. Dickinson also called Rachel Jackson a bigamist. (Rachel had married Jackson not knowing her first husband had failed to finalize their divorce.) After the insult to Rachel and a statement published in the National Review in which Dickinson called Jackson a worthless scoundrel and, again, a coward, Jackson challenged Dickinson to a duel.
On May 30, 1806, Jackson and Dickinson met at Harrison’s Mills on the Red River in Logan, Kentucky. At the first signal from their seconds, Dickinson fired. Jackson received Dickinson’s first bullet in the chest next to his heart. Jackson put his hand over the wound to staunch the flow of blood and stayed standing long enough to fire his gun. Dickinson’s seconds claimed Jackson’s first shot misfired, which would have meant the duel was over, but, in a breach of etiquette, Jackson re-cocked the gun and shot again, this time killing his opponent. Although Jackson recovered, he suffered chronic pain from the wound for the remainder of his life.
Jackson was not prosecuted for murder, and the duel had very little effect on his successful campaign for the presidency in 1829. Many American men in the early 1800s, particularly in the South, viewed dueling as a time-honored tradition. In 1804, Thomas Jefferson’s vice president Aaron Burr had also avoided murder charges after killing former Treasury secretary and founding father Alexander Hamilton in a duel. In fact, Rachel’s divorce raised more of a scandal in the press and in parlors than the killing of Dickinson.
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Andrew Jackson.
Violent, and full of shit, and the first of many assassination hoaxes?
https://tinyurl.com/yas9f5e6
A return to dueling could be beneficial.
I think so. You wouldn’t have these liberal morons spouting lies on TV without being challenged.
Then again, that supposes someone on the right would have the courage to call them out, and there’s probably not a single politician in all of DC today, left or right, who would put their life on the line to defend their own honor let alone the honor of the nation.
Just one inch to the left would have saved so many Indians.
Nah, someone else would’ve taken care of that job.
Probably not. Jackson was the prime culprit. Congress was evenly split, but Jackson managed to jam through the atrocities. If he had died, the Trail of Tears most likely would not have occurred.
Jackson and Junaluska. The latter having saved the former’s life, of course, at Horseshoe Bend. I really do revere both men but Jackson makes it difficult on me from time to time. To understand the man’s childhood at the hands of Natives and Brits is not to excuse the history, but to use reason.
I have Blacktwigs and Junaluskas planted next to each other. It’s necessary to heal. I wonder what Mom will say about that in September.
Thank God those Indians never did thing to each other before the White Man . White men musta’ taught them how to wage war, enslave each other and steal land .
I love listening to the Lakota when I’m in South Dakota saying how they want the Black Hills back; of course the Cheyenne tell me that the Lakota stole it from them first via war parties .
Even if Jackson had died in the duel the Westward expansion would have carried on and another politician would have propagated the conquering of the Indian tribes .
It is not so much the conquering that is the issue. It is the slaughtering of women, children and the old after the conquering that is the issue. That was Jackson’s forte.
I’d agree with that…the same goes for the folks in the South after Sherman’s march to the sea .
Harry Turtledove wrote a great alternative history book about a group of neo-Nazis who went back in time and effected a Southern victory. Their objective was to keep the blacks enslaved. Much to their disdain, when they went back to the present, the Southerners had ultimately freed the slaves.
Sometimes it’s easy for us to engage a hypothetical time machine and assume our version of history pans out.
Llpoh, there were so many atrocities on both sides. It was unimaginable. Ft. Mims had a profound effect on Jackson. Pregnant settlers had their unborn children cut from their wombs and dashed on the fort walls.
Please do not think I am excusing such horror. Just hopefully reaching out to you with some humble information.