Andrew Jackson Was A Real-Life Horror Movie Monster


The Indians called him "Sharp Knife" for a reason.

I’ve read a lot of Stephen King novels, but I was never afraid of a character jumping out from the pages of a book and punching me in the face until I read a biography of Andrew Jackson.

Jackson’s life is a long series of larger than life incidents of being an unrelenting murder machine. And I’m not even talking about the institutionalized horror of his genocidal Indian Removal Act, which wiped out thousands of Native Americans. I’m talking about personal in-your-face horror on a level his colleagues considered supernatural.

First of all, you couldn’t design a better origin story for a paranormal killer than Andrew Jackson’s troubled youth. The boy was literally forged in war. At only thirteen, he was a messenger in the Revolutionary War when he was captured by British forces and held prisoner.

In his biography The Life of Andrew Jackson, Robert Remini writes that a British commander asked young Andrew to clean his boots and Andrew replied, “Sir, I am a prisoner of war, and claim to be treated as such.” The furious officer thrust his sword at the boy’s head, and Andrew instinctively reached out and grabbed the blade with his left hand.

That ninja move left him with lifelong scars on his head and fingers, and it marked the beginning of two things: his lifelong command of respect, and his total defiance of death. The war cost Andrew two of his brothers and his mother, and the rest of his life was basically one long revenge story against Britain and anyone else who got in his way.

Young Andrew Jackson defying a British officer and a chair.
After the war, Jackson fell in with a wild crowd, drinking, gambling, cockfighting, and leading a gang of hooligans. According to Remini, “one of his favorite tricks was moving outhouses to far-off places.” Who does that? A monster, that's who.

Jackson's mischievous nature soon turned to violent machismo. His first biographer, James Parton, called Jackson:
“a thorough-going human fighting-cock – very kind to the hens of his own farm-yard, giving them many a nice kernel of corn, but bristling up at the faintest crow of chanticleer on the other side of the road.”
So now we know why the chicken crossed the road – to get the hell away from Andrew Jackson.

Jackson brought that fighting-cock fearlessness to the courtroom. As a judge in Tennessee, he once presided over the trial of a violent child mutilator named Russell Bean. One day in a fit of rage, Bean stormed out of the courtroom. The sheriff and his posse were unable to apprehend the armed madman, so Jackson adjourned the court for ten minutes and sauntered outside himself, a pistol in each hand.

Jackson ordered Bean to surrender, and he meekly obliged. Later when asked why he gave himself up to Judge Jackson and no one else, Bean said, “When he came up, I looked him in the eye, and I saw shoot, and there wasn’t shoot in nary other eye in the crowd.”
Russell Bean, the incredible sulk, surrendering to Judge Andrew Jackson.
That’s the best description of Andrew Jackson I’ve ever seen – he had shoot in his eyes. That captures the truth that Jackson was an unpredictable mix of bark and bite. He was Cujo and Beethoven (but mostly Cujo.) He was famous for his temper, but according to Remini he “more often than not feigned anger for the paralyzing effect he knew it had upon his victims.” The fact that he was in perfect control of his spontaneous rage makes him even more terrifying.

The only thing scarier than the loudness of Jackson's bark was the eerie quietness of his bite. Once when a debtor he was pursuing defiantly stepped on Jackson's foot, Jackson didn’t flinch. He simply “picked up a piece of wood and calmly knocked the man out cold," according to Remini. "Respect for the law, Jackson-style, had arrived in Tennessee.” Like a backwoods version of Maniac Cop and Judge Dredd, Jackson’s version of right and wrong usually involved obliterating his opponents.

Jackson applied that same violent morality to his personal life. This might have ended badly, but lucky for him, he was an unkillable beast. 

In 1806, Jackson got into a duel over a horseracing bet with Charles Dickinson. Dickinson called Jackson “a worthless scoundrel” and “a poltroon and a coward” in the Nashville Review, and Jackson decided Dickinson needed to die. After the command to fire was yelled, Dickinson shot Jackson square in the chest. Instead of falling, Jackson kept standing, unfazed, like you might expect from Jason Voorhees or Michael Meyers but not from a real human. 

By duel rules, Dickinson then had to get back on his mark and give the wounded Jackson a chance to shoot at him. Teeth clenched, Jackson raised his right arm and fired one shot. That single shot blew a hole straight through Dickinson's abdomen and he promptly bled to death. Andrew the human fighting-cock didn’t just have shoot in his eyes – his very soul was made of shoot.

Guns were a popular weapon for Jackson, but like most horror movie monsters, they proved useless against him. After a funeral during his presidency, a crazed man confronted Jackson and shot a pistol straight at his heart. The shot rang out, but no bullet was discharged. Jackson went into full Jackson mode and started beating the would-be assassin with his cane when somehow he managed to pull out a second gun and shoot at the president from point blank range. That gun also failed to discharge. John Tyler, who witnessed the event, said it was “almost a miracle they did not go off.” 

Old Hickory’s life was full of almost-miracles that make sense if you think of him as held together not by flesh and bone but by sheer vengeance. How else can you explain how he could survive without blood? After being shot twice in a brawl in 1813, Jackson's blood soaked through two mattresses before doctors could stop the hemorrhaging. Years later after a serious cold, Jackson said he lost upwards of 70 ounces of blood "by the lancet and otherwise." That’s half the blood in a human body and would be fatal. For a mere mortal.

I mean come on.
Andrew Jackson's monstrousness wasn’t confined to the silent brooding slasher movie villain or even the charming vampire – he also embodied bloodthirsty cannibals like Leatherface and Hannibal. At least, that’s what his political opponents claimed in their 1828 anti-Jackson pamphlets known as the Coffin Handbills.

A supposed “eye-witness” to Jackson’s execution of six deserters during the War of 1812 wrote:
Would you believe it, gentle reader, this monster, this more than cannibal, Gen. Andrew Jackson, eat the whole Six Militia-men at one meal!!! Yes, my shuddering countrymen, he swallowed them whole, coffins and all, without the slightest attempt at mastication!!!... can you, my deluded countrymen, even think of making this horrible anthropophagian monster President of the United States?
The same handbill also alleges that after a battle, Jackson had the bodies of a dozen Indians prepared for his breakfast and he ate them in their entirety. “If you place him at the head of the government,” the pamphleteer asks, “what pledge can you have, that if he should at any time he displeased with his cabinet, that he will not have all four of his secretaries roasted, and eat them for his dinner!!!!”

Clearly these allegations are false, as not even George Washington could eat that many Indians for breakfast. Sadly the Coffin Handbills were not satire; they were just old-school fake news.

This grisly picture from an 1828 Coffin Handbill claims that while a man named Samuel Jackson was trying to defend himself against Andew Jackson, Andrew “drew the sword from his cane and run it thro’ Sam’l Jackson’s body, the sword entering his back and coming out of his breast….it is for you to say, whether this man, who carries a sword cane, and is willing to run it thro’ the body of any one who may presume to stand in his way, is a fit person to be our President.”

The truth about Jackson's savagery was just as disturbing as the fake news. After a particularly bloody battle in 1814, Andrew Jackson’s men counted the dead Indians by cutting off their noses. They collected 557 noses. This is why it’s easier to compare him to fictional monsters like Freddy or Jason than to think about how the same person who complained to British soldiers that a POW shouldn't have to clean boots could somehow go on to desecrate the bodies of his enemies.

The Indians called him Sharp Knife, but the populist president killed more of them with a pen than he ever did with a knife or gun. To his Native American enemies and slaves (especially runaway slaves) he wasn’t supernatural – he was just a high-ranking white devil.

Andrew Jackson in 1844 or 1845, within a year of his death.
At 78 years old, mortality finally caught up with the old General. After years of poor health, his doctor pronounced him dead in his armchair one morning, and his family prayed over him one last time. They moved his body back to his bed, and he sprang back to life. Just like a killer in the final act.

Dead or not, Jackson was going to say his goodbyes. His last words to his family and slaves were, “Do not cry – be good children and we will all meet in heaven.” Those words might sound sweet coming from anyone else, but I can’t help but think they sound like a threat coming from Jackson. Forget “See you in hell!” – Jackson will see you in heaven, and not even God can protect you if you’re on his bad side. Old Hickory will bust through the pearly gates, punch the halo off your head, and strangle you with your own harp strings.

And who's to say he would stop there? If any president could haunt the earth, it would be Andrew Jackson. Don't believe me? Go into a bathroom, turn out the lights, and say his name in the mirror five times. No? I thought so.

Like Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II, who was described as a "powerful magician and a genius in many ways, as well as a tyrant, an autocrat, a lunatic and a genocidal madman," Andrew Jackson's energy probably emanates from his portrait, influencing those around it to do his bidding.
Recently Donald Trump has been cozying up to Andrew Jackson. To mark his 250th birthday, he even laid a wreath on Jackson's grave – something no president has done in 35 years.

He might not want to get too close.



Sources:
The Life of Andrew Jackson by Robert Remini
Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World by Jack Weatherford
Taliaferro, John. [Supplemental account of some of the bloody deeds of General Jackson, being a supplement to the "Coffin handbill." Cuts of 6 coffins ... John Taliaferro. Member of Congress from Northern Neck, Va. 1828]. Northern Neck, 1828. Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.18601400/. (Accessed March 15, 2017.)

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