Free A Treasury of Great American Scandals by Michael Farquhar Page A

and yelled, “Now, you damned rascal, I am going to punish you. Defend yourself !” With that, Benton reached into his pocket as if going for his gun. Jackson then drew out his own gun and forced his adversary back inside the inn. As this was happening, Jesse Benton slipped away and took another position inside. As his brother was being forced in, Jesse fired at Jackson, shattering the general’s arm and shoulder. Jackson fired at Thomas as he fell, but his shot missed.
    Racing in from the street, John Coffee immediately saw his friend lying prostrate in a pool of blood and fired at Thomas Benton. Missing, he then tried to club him with his pistol, but Benton retreated, falling out of the building backward down a flight of stairs. Another of Jackson’s companions, his nephew Stockley Hays, tried to run Jesse Benton through with his sword cane, but the weapon hit a button and broke. As the two men wrestled on the ground, Hays resorted to stabbing Jesse Benton repeatedly in the arms with a dirk. The crowd pulled them apart before Benton was in a position to shoot Hays.
    As the melee came to end, Jackson was carried away to the Nashville Inn. He was bleeding profusely, saturating two mattresses. A physician in attendance suggested amputating the shattered limb, but Jackson wouldn’t hear of it. “I’ll keep my arm,” he ordered before drifting into unconsciousness. The bullet remained with him for the next twenty years, along with the one lodged near his heart. The Bentons, meanwhile, were loudly denouncing Jackson as a failed assassin. Coming across a small sword the general had dropped in the encounter, Thomas Hart Benton snapped it in two while shouting insults about Jackson. He then paraded the pieces across the public square. Yet despite his bravado, Benton was well aware of the true danger he now faced from Jackson and his outraged associates: “I am literally in hell here,” he wrote; “the meanest wretches under heaven to contend with—are at work on me. . . . I am in the middle of hell, and see no alternative but to kill or be killed; for I will not crouch to Jackson; and the fact that I and my brother defeated him and his tribe, and broke his small sword in the public square, will for ever rankle in his bosom and make him thirst for vengeance. My life is in danger . . . for it is a settled plan to turn out puppy after puppy to bully me, and when I have got into a scrape, to have me killed somehow in the scuffle.”
    Benton’s fears turned out to be baseless. He was spared the wrath of Old Hickory. In fact, the two later became political allies when they were both elected to the U.S. Senate. Jesse Benton, on the other hand, cursed Jackson to his grave.
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    Andrew Jackson proved himself a violent foe when it came to defending his own honor but went nearly insane with rage if anyone dared besmirch the good name of his wife, Rachael. He had fallen in love with the pipe-smoking frontier woman while she was separated from her first husband, Lewis Robards. That marriage had been a disaster, and Rachael moved away to Natchez in Spanish Florida. Jackson accompanied her there, ostensibly to protect her on the dangerous journey south. Rachael was eventually divorced from Robards, although the legality of the divorce was later called into question, making Rachael a possible bigamist when she married Jackson in 1791. Such marital limbo made her a target for many of Jackson’s political enemies, including the first governor of Tennessee, John Sevier.
    After a series of political clashes, Sevier verbally accosted Jackson, then a judge on the Tennessee Superior Court, outside the Knoxville courthouse in 1803. “I know of no great services you have rendered to the country except taking a trip to Natchez with another man’s wife!” Sevier taunted. With that crack Jackson went berserk. “Great God!” he bellowed. “Do you mention her sacred