A character for the stage

 I wish a playwright would take a shot at Andrew Jackson as a dramatic character.

Marquis James began his “Andrew Jackson’s Famous Duel” with this:

 

On Thursday, May 29, 1806, Andrew Jackson rose at five o’clock, and after breakfast told Rachel that he would be gone for a couple of days and meanwhile he might have some trouble with Mr. Dickinson. Rachel probably knew what the trouble would be and she did not ask.

 

Jackson had married Rachel before her divorce was final. Charles Dickinson, a Nashville lawyer and a crack shot, had accused Jackson of cheating on a horse race. When the conversation got spirited, Dickinson had said some unkind things about Rachel.

Tennessee had a law against dueling, so the men met over the state line in Kentucky. Dickinson was faster and more accurate with a pistol than anyone. Jackson knew Dickinson would get off the first shot and that he would not miss. Jackson hoped he’d survive the wound long enough to kill Dickinson.

Jackson rode to Kentucky, regaling his friends with tirades about what a loser President Jefferson was. The men stopped at an inn on the night before the duel. Jackson’s friends reported he ate a hearty meal and was asleep within 10 minutes of getting in bed. Jackson slept soundly and had to be wakened in the morning.

The duel went as Jackson imagined. Dickinson fired first, and everyone saw the dust fly out of Jackson’s frock coat. Dickinson couldn’t believe Jackson didn’t fall and temporarily left his mark until he was ordered back by his seconds. Jackson took aim, but his pistol malfunctioned. He cocked it again and shot Dickinson.

While Dickinson’s seconds were tending to their mortally wounded friend, Jackson left the field, telling his friends to pay no attention to the wound in his chest. He didn’t want the Dickinson party to have the satisfaction of knowing he’d been badly hurt.

Jackson strikes me as having the right stuff for a dramatic character. He didn’t think about consequences. Wherever he went, the wake was mayhem.

The right stuff for a fictional character isn’t the right stuff for a president. As president, Jackson took no thought of the consequences of any of his actions. He was willful and thoughtless, the kind of man who defied court orders and did things that stained the country’s reputation forever.

But as a character on the stage, I see potential. Can you imagine what Aeschylus could have done with a character like that?

• Marquis James’s “Andrew Jackson’s Famous Duel” was in The Life of Andrew Jackson, published in 1933. It’s in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 477-80.