Free Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom

concluded Jackson—his orders were not to march his force to the fighting fronts along the Canadian border, but instead to go to New Orleans and reinforce the despised Wilkinson, who had not yet left for his unsatisfactory performance in the north, and who was supposed to march on Spanish West Florida, where the Spanish and British were stirring up the Indians against the United States. Accordingly, Jackson moved his men eight hundred miles by river rafts down to Natchez, just above New Orleans, where he received a further communiqué from the War Department canceling the whole mission and telling him to disband his army and go home. Jackson did no such thing, at least not the part about disbanding his army. He believed that the new orders were nothing more than a smarmy ploy to get rid of him and to have his volunteers serve under Wilkinson. Instead, he vowed to march his men all the way back to Nashville himself, which he did, acquiring in the process the nickname “Old Hickory,” when somebody watching the general leading his men out of the wilderness remarked, “He’s tough as hickory,” after the toughest wood he knew. The name stuck, but it was also along this arduous march that serious trouble began to fester.
    The Benton brothers, both officers in Jackson’s army, were from a prominent and wealthy family in Franklin, just outside Nashville. The younger Benton had become friends with one Lieutenant Littleton Johnson, who had developed a grudge against Lieutenant Colonel William Carroll, the brigade inspector. Johnson sent Jesse Benton to Carroll with a challenge to a duel. Carroll refused on grounds that Johnson was not a gentleman;*  21 Benton then declared that if that be so, he himself was one, and promptly challenged Carroll personally to the duel.
    Carroll asked Jackson to be his second, but Jackson demurred and tried to patch things up. When this proved impossible, he reluctantly accompanied Carroll to the dueling grounds. Jesse Benton fired first and nicked Carroll on the thumb, then, “in a fit of panic,” he turned and bent over, exposing his rear end to Colonel Carroll, which was precisely where Jackson’s brigade inspector shot him.*  22
    Having his little brother humiliated in this way did not set well with now Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Hart Benton, who had once been Jackson’s friend and envoy to Washington, and he stated to Jackson that it was a “very poor business for a man of [Jackson’s] age and standing” to be involved in a duel between two of his young officers. There things might have rested but for Nashville gossips and troublemakers who kept hinting to each of the ruffled parties that one or the other was saying something impolite about him. Things finally got so bad that Jackson publicly stated he would “horsewhip” Thomas Benton the next time he encountered him.
    This occurred six weeks later, on September 4, 1813, when the Bentons rode into Nashville and checked into the City Hotel, across the courthouse square from the Nashville Inn, where Jackson and his associates customarily hung out. News of the Bentons’ arrival quickly got to Jackson, who retrieved his horsewhip and marched over to the hotel to fulfill his promise. There he accosted Thomas Benton in the doorway and, calling him a “damned rascal,” brandished the whip, at which point Benton reached into his pocket for what Jackson thought was a pistol. Jackson outdrew him with his own, backing Benton through the hotel doorway with his pistol leveled. But brother Jesse, hearing the encounter, had sneaked around to the side of the barroom, from which vantage point he fired two shots at Jackson, which smashed into his arm and shoulder. Jackson, toppling, fired at Thomas and missed; then Thomas drew and fired twice at Jackson’s prone figure in front of him, but he missed, too.
    Jesse had reloaded and was about to put an end to Andrew Jackson on the spot when two of the general’s friends came bursting into the room.