The Horseshoe Colonel

Colonel John Williams was everything Andrew Jackson was not: tall, handsome, and articulate in the courtroom or with his quill pen. Jackson defeated him three times but he never gave up and died on the way back to D.C. trying to prevent the Trail of Tears. Without him there would have been no Jackson.

Six generations of the Williams family now break their silence and tell their side of the story.

Cautioned by Jackson supporters on the Senate floor to fear the General he replied, “You tell the General that if he challenges me I shall pick rifles at twenty paces and shoot him between the eyes where he cannot pad with paper.”

Dolly Madison called him the Chesterfield of the Senate and Simone Bolivar nicknamed him “the elegant gentleman.” Did he and his family cause Jackson to lose the Presidency in 1824? He said “there was no ‘Corrupt Bargain’”and he wrote a book that was “suppressed by the Party.”

He was written out of history.



I send you here a little book,

For you to look upon,

Where you may see a Hero’s face

when he is past and gone.

-John Williams in The Political Mirror