Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Jackson-Dickinson Duel. On Bed river in Logan county, Kentucky, on the 30th day of May, 1806, was fought the famous and fatal duel between Major General Andrew Jackson, afterwards President of the United States and Charles Dickinson, attorney- at-law, of Nashville, Tennessee. The trouble which led up to the fatal meeting on
the field of honor
has been
variously
stated. Ill feeling had existed between them for several years. General Jackson was a very high tempered, over-bearing and determined man who had incurred the ill-will and hatred of several prominent people. His friends declared that there was a plot upon the part of his enemies to get Dickinson to kill him or drive him out of that section of the country. It was claimed that Dickinson was the best shot in the United States and the general idea was that a duel between them necessarily meant the death of General Jackson. It was generally understood that the duel was to be fought and many bets were made upon the result, the odds were always against Jackson. Dickinson himself had a bet of five hundred dollars that he would
get him
at his first fire. The ill feeling between the two men, which culminated so fatally, originated from statements made or reported to have been made by Dickinson in reference to General Jackson’s wife, a subject upon which he was at all times exceedingly sensitive. About the year 1790 General Jackson was boarding with the widow of John Donelson; her daughter Rachel had married a man by the name of Lewis Roberts who was later known as Lewis Robards. In that year Robards petitioned the Legislature of Virginia to divorce him from his wife, Rachel, and in his petition he filed an affidavit setting out the fact that his wife had deserted him and that she wasliving in adultery with…