Five Bears, a Barn Owl,
and the White House Dickhead
--
A loose history of presidential pets, duels, and women of ill repute.
Someone should have shot President Andrew Jackson cold dead.
I don’t mean that as a matter of opinion, either. On January 30, 1835, as President Andrew Jackson left a congressman’s memorial service, a bat-shit crazy house painter named Richard Lawrence pulled the trigger on him at point blank range. The gun misfired. Lawrence drew a second pistol, aimed at President Jackson, and misfired again.
His odds of surviving two subsequent misfires from perfectly operable pistols were 125,000 to 1 — which is to say, someone should have shot President Andrew Jackson cold dead.
You’ll be hard pressed to find a historian who doesn’t agree. Old Hickory, also known as “jackass” by his opponents, was not only our seventh President, but also a notorious gambler, a former prisoner of war, a slave and plantation owner, a murderer of Indians and thief of their lands.
He also founded the Democratic Party, adopted two Native American orphans, and lost his first bid for presidency to John Quincy Adams in 1824. Subsequently, Adams did what every newly elected president yearns for most: he moved an alligator into the East Room of the White House.
Just a few terms later, President Martin Van Buren one-upped the alligator stunt and procured himself two tigers from the Sultan of Oman. In what can only be described as a dark time of PETA’s pre-existence, the clamor for the most unusual presidential pet was now in full swing.
In late 1860’s, for example, President Johnson lost his marbles and began feeding (and possibly socializing with) a family of white mice that lived in his bedroom. The public eventually caught on that he had was bat-shit crazy and impeached him. But just twenty years later, President Harrison picked up where Johnson left off: he plucked two choice opossums from the greater District of Columbia streets, and promptly named them Mr. Reciprocity and Mr. Protection.
For the next decade, it was mostly just billy goats and dogs and cats and roosters until someone let Teddy Roosevelt and his badger named Josiah into the White House, along with a lion, two kangaroo rats, a flying squirrel, a hyena, five bears, a barn owl, a zebra, and a guinea pig named Father O’Grady, among other pets.
Taft liked cows, and was the last president to keep them at the White House. Wilson’s ram chewed tobacco. And then Calvin Coolidge and his wallaby showed up in 1923, built an actual zoo on the White House grounds, and filled it with a pygmy hippo named Billy, a bobcat, a black bear, a few more lions, Ebenezer the donkey, and a shit ton of dogs with names like Boston Beans.
In 1929, to commemorate nearly 100 years passing since an alligator had graced the Presidential residence, Herbert Hoover let two alligators frolic freely along the White House lawn.
But that has little to do with Andrew Jackson, which is where we started. If you’ll remember, Jackson was not the sixth President of the United States, losing out in 1824 to John Quincy Adams. He came back with a vengeance in 1828, though, defeating Adams in a brutal campaign and then promptly teaching his own pet, Poll the Presidential Parrot, how to swear.
Which is in many ways the least remarkable detail in the life and Presidency of Andrew Jackson. His wife Rachel may be the most remarkable, on the other hand. A Presbyterian and devout reader of the Bible, Rachel shacked up with Jackson in 1788, then married him in Mississippi soon after, unbeknownst to her other husband, Lewis Robards, whom she had left back in Tennessee. Jackson wasn’t a man to let a technicality like a bit of bigamy get in the way of his intentions, though. Rachel later divorced Robards, and then married Jackson for a second time, this time legally, in 1794.
But here’s where things get weird. According to Wikipedia, the home of truth by crowdsourcing, Rachel was hot. Like really hot. She had big-ass black eyes and sexy, shimmery brown hair and succulent red lips. Her skin was radiant and it probably smelled faintly like peaches and peppermint, or Lovely by Sarah Jessica Parker. But her dimples put her over the edge, like Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson in the first Spider Man movie, in that scene where she’s wearing the pink clingy tank top in the rain and Spidey is hanging upside down in front of her.
I have to stop right here and say I love my wife. I think she’s smart, funny, beautiful, and an amazing mother and friend and companion. I’d be lost without her. We’ve been married for 14 (consecutive) years, and have known each other for well over twenty. But I have never once in my life challenged another man to a duel over her. I’ve not taken a single bullet or expended one for her, or raised a sword, or even thrown a punch.
Andrew Jackson, on the other hand, was involved in somewhere between 5 and 100 duels — one hundred — most of them attributed to defending the honor of his wife, Rachel. Like the man Jackson killed for accusing him of reneging on a horse bet, then insulting Rachel.
It probably went something like this. “You, sir, are a cockamamie, unwholesome equivocator. And your wife is a shrew.” At which point Andrew Jackson turned as red in the face as the mop atop his head, drew his revolver, and shot the man dead.
One time while my wife Kelly and I were still dating and I was away at The University of Arkansas, she called me to tell me that an old boyfriend had tried to kiss her, and that made me real mad — mad enough to tell her very sternly that I was mad, and that she should tell him very sternly that I was mad, and that if that didn’t solve the matter, I could dispatch one of my friends who was in closer geographic proximity to the offender than I was to handle my dirty business for me, by remote proxy. Like throwing mail order punches. But that’s not a duel, that’s cowardice. Or contract killing.
I even called my friend Taylor for a second opinion. Taylor is pretty enough that old drunk men forget they are old and leave their wives sitting alone at the table to stumble up to her and dust off a pickup line they haven’t used in fifty years. At work dinners, waiters and waitresses would tell me how beautiful she was, although I had no vested interest in the matter whatsoever. So I called her up and asked her if her husband Graham has ever had to challenge another man to a duel to protect his interests, conquer potential invaders, or defend her honor in any form or fashion.
“No,” she said. “Uh uh. Why the fuck are you calling me at 4:30 in the morning with such a weird question?” I hung up the phone, feeling validated. Even Taylor’s honor has never needed to be defended to the death, or even to the loss of limb, or digit, or even a paltry puncture wound.
My first thought was to wonder if Rachel Jackson was Puerto Rican or maybe Brazilian, but only because I have a few friends with Puerto Rican and Brazilian wives that get mouthy and find themselves in occasional trouble, at which point they push their husbands out in front of them to take the beat down. I’ve watched this go down a few times at odd hours of the morning, my friends leaving all black-eyed and cut up, their wives cackling and clapping with delight. But Rachel was from Tennessee, which is a ways from Puerto Rico, particularly by paddle wheeler or steamship or swimming donkey.
Taylor called me back later at a more reasonable hour from the West Coast to tell me that she had been thinking about it, and maybe Rachel Jackson was a hoe. At first, this made me feel guilty and I wondered if calling a former First Lady of the United States a fornicatress or a slammerkin was something that could get a black van parked in front my house. But then I realized that Rachel Jackson wasn’t actually a First Lady — she died of a heart attack shortly before Andrew won his Presidency, purportedly caused in no small part by the stress of being called a hobag by John Quincy Adams supporters throughout a particularly divisive election campaign. The theory could have merit. I told Taylor I would have to think on it a bit, that I’d call her back.
I got distracted, though, trying to figure out what a hobag would have been called in 1828 . I settled on trollop, strumpet, or woman of ill repute before I started feeing guilty again, making all of this dueling out to be Rachel’s fault. I called Taylor back.
“She’s not a strumpet, yo,” I said. It felt good, defending Rachel Jackson’s honor. I could see how Andrew got used to this.
“What’s a strumpet?”
“You know, a trollop,” I said. “A woman of ill repute.”
I gave Taylor the skinny on my newly hatched theory, formulated after minutes of tireless link clicking and a blueberry scone and a three-dollar Mexican Coke. “Andrew Jackson was a dickhead,” I tell her matter-of-factly, half expecting a great-great-great-great grandson of Jackson’s to aspirate from thin air and put a ball of lead in my heart, his trusty second proclaiming the matter squarely resolved and handing him his walking cane and top hat. Meanwhile, I die, Taylor still holding her iPhone 6 Plus to her ear.
I often wonder how the head of the dick, specifically, evolved into the grand insult it has become. Whereas the asshole can’t hide from its well-deserved reputation as an ill-perfumed, puckered old chap, the glans penis, literally meaning acorn of the penis in Latin, seems like a friendly little acorn to me.
In the mid-2000’s, my friend Christina and I both worked at a software company that offered us classes on a ton of exciting topics, like Using Microsoft Outlook Efficiently, and Critical Conversations for Managers and Team Leads. The basic goal of the curriculum was to beat us down and further entrench us in our positions as subservient wage gimps.
Christina’s course instructor arrived wearing pair of white pants made of a very fine, if not clingy fabric. He introduced himself, set the stage for the day of learning, and launched into the first chapter of material, which is when Christina first caught sight of his dickhead. That’s not a typo, either. As he taught tips for effective email management, the entire class gawked as the head of his dong occasionally made its thinly-veiled presence known in the lecture, perfectly accented by the high-sheen, highly translucent, and high dollar slacks that outlined his bell-end.
But back to Andrew Jackson. Today, his face adorns the front of the twenty-dollar bill, which is the minimum denomination I require my children to have saved before they can look at toys at Target. There’s simply nothing they want that can be bought for a Hamilton, a Lincoln, or a small wad of Washington’s. As I watch my children hand their twenties over to the cashier for their Minecraft Lego sets and their Hedgehog Hideaway pets, I can’t help but wonder what Mr. Jackson was like as an adolescent, a tween, a young man.
And then I find a few passages that tell me. He was the kind of guy that would move your outhouse in the night, so you couldn’t find your own toilet when you needed it the most. He invited prostitutes to the annual Christmas Ball to put off the “proper” attendees. And once, made the butt of the joke by his schoolmates, he yelled, “By God, if one of you laughs, I’ll kill him!”
That’s an asshole, right? Or at bare minimum, an acorn of the penis?
Sources and gratitudes:
Andrew Jackson by Carol H. Behrman
Secret lives of U.S. Presidents by Cormac O’Brien and Monika Suteski
PresidentialPetMuseum.com
Wikipedia: United States Presidential Pets
Wikipedia: Andrew Jackson
Biography.com: Andrew Jackson
