Chapter 2

The Bank War & The Presidents Who Fought Back

Four American presidents took on the banking establishment. Three were assassinated. One survived an assassination attempt that should have killed him.

Veritas Worldwide · March 2026 · 1832–1901

On the morning of January 30, 1835, President Andrew Jackson was leaving the funeral of a South Carolina congressman at the United States Capitol when a man named Richard Lawrence stepped forward and pointed a pistol at him from a distance of about eight feet. The pistol misfired. Lawrence drew a second pistol. It also misfired. Jackson, then 67 years old, lunged at his attacker with his cane. The probability of both pistols misfiring in sequence, given the weather conditions that day, was later calculated by the Army to be approximately 1 in 125,000.

Andrew Jackson hated banks. This was not a political position adopted for electoral advantage. It was a visceral, personal conviction rooted in his frontier upbringing and his experiences with debt and financial ruin. He believed, with the certainty of a man who had survived duels and Indian wars, that the Second Bank of the United States was a corrupt institution that served the rich at the expense of the poor — and that it was his duty to destroy it.