← Back to the front page

Tough Teddy and Old Hickory: America’s Most Badass Presidents

Khalid Elhassan December 4, 2024 14 min

Tough - An 1828 woodcut of the Andrew Jackson vs Charles Dickinson duel — An 1828 woodcut of the Andrew Jackson vs Charles Dickinson duel. Wikimedia

15. The Maniac Who Tried to Assassinate Old Hickory

Tough - Andrew Jackson in 1824 — Andrew Jackson in 1824. Wikimedia

By the time he became president, Andrew Jackson’s dangerous reputation had been so well established, that only a madman would try to assault him. However, America never had a shortage of madmen. One of them became the first to attempt a presidential assassination when he took a shot at Jackson. Richard Lawrence, a house painter, often angrily muttered about Andrew Jackson. On January 30^th, 1835, he was seen sitting in his shop, cackling to himself, before he suddenly got up and exited, with the exclamation: “I’ll be damned if I don’t do it!” The “it” was killing Jackson, which Lawrence tried to do by ambushing the president outside the Capitol building.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.