Future President Kills in Cold Blood

A curator shows off Jackson and Dickinson’s duelling pistols at the Smithsonian Institution in 1926.

(Library of Congress)

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.

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.

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.”

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).