No mention of my dramatic entrance, the spectacular mis-fire of not one but two pistols, or the fact that I was the first person in the United States to ever try and kill a sitting president. It's as if the world has forgotten me.
I was born in 1800 in a modest farmhouse in a small town in England and after emigrating to America, i worked as a painter and decorator and got the reputation of being able to slap a fresh coat of whitewash onto any surface faster than a horse could change direction and my life took a sharp turn in 1824 when I was hired to paint the interior of the local tavern, The Singing Sawhorse.
The tavern’s owner insisted on serving his patrons the finest whiskey in the county and while I worked and one evening, after a particularly generous tasting days work, I knocked over a barrel of whiskey. It rolled, clattered, and, in a spectacular display of physics, crashed into a candle and the resulting blaze set the tavern’s thatched roof on fire. I spent the next three hours dousing the flames with buckets of water.
That night, as I lay in a straw-filled mattress, I dreamed of Andrew Jackson, the man who would later become president, standing in the middle of the burning tavern, clapping his hands and goading me and I awoke with my heart pounding, my mind buzzing and a lingering scent of brandy.
A few weeks later, while browsing a pamphlet, I read about how President Andrew Jackson was vowing to crush the Bank and thought he must be stopped before he destroys the very fabric of our society.
That was the moment I realized my true calling was not just to add colour to the world, but to remove the colour from the one man who threatened to paint it all grey. And so my mission was born.
I visited the local blacksmith, who also doubled as the town’s gunsmith and bought a pair of flintlock pistols that had been used by a local militia during the War of 1812 but the Blackmith assured me they were still fully functional
On the morning of January 30th, 1835, I boarded a stagecoach heading to Washington, D.C. and I arrived early, pushed my way through a crowd of curious onlookers and took my spot.
When President Jackson arrived he seemed unaware of my presence despite standing five feet away, doing my best impression of a non-suspicious gentleman.
I raised my left pistol, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Click. The flint mis-fired. I tried again, this time with my right pistol and got another click. The audience gasped, the guards stared, and I was left standing there staring at two dead weapons and Jackson beating me around the head with his cane.
The guards moved in, and I was swiftly escorted out, handcuffed, and escorted to the nearest police station. At that point, I realized that perhaps I’d missed something essential, a functioning gun, and the world’s first presidential assassination attempt was a spectacular dud.
The trial was a circus and the defense attempted to argue insanity and the judge found me guilty but not sane enough to be executed and that began my tenure at the U.S. Public Hospital for the Insane and the rest of my days doing oddly soothing activities.
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