My quest to find the most ridiculous occurrence in the Capitol has been ongoing for over ten years now, but I may have found a new pinnacle: The day a President was egged.
The year was 1854, the day August 5, the final day of the first session of the 33rd Congress. Accordingly, President Franklin Pierce (that’s him on the left) had been in his office in the Capitol, signing bills as they were passed by Congress. He then left the building via the north wing, still under construction as part of the major additions were made starting in 1851.
When he arrived on the eastern plaza, he was accosted by three men who had apparently been taking advantage of the Capitol’s watering holes. One of the trio asked the President to “take a drink with me.” Pierce declined with the words, “I don’t do anything of that kind.” Given that Pierce eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver, this presumably meant “drinking with three randos” rather than “drinking.”
The man who had made the request turned back to the Capitol, while Pierce went to talk to a couple in a carriage parked out on the plaza. At that moment, a hard-boiled egg appeared and knocked Pierce’s hat off. Pierce picked up his hat and turned to Isaac Wales of the Capitol Police, asking him “Have you no power to make arrests here?”
While Wales had not seen who had thrown the egg, the obvious candidates were the three men who had accosted the President, so he duly arrested them and took them to the office of the Capitol Police Chief, Charles W. C. Dunnington, who interrogated them.
The main accusation was made against James M. Jeffards of Charleston, South Carolina. The Washington Sentinel of the following day printed verbatim the interrogation of Jeffards and others. It became clear that nobody really knew what had happened. One witness, John Moses, claimed that he saw the egg thrown by Jeffards while another claimed that he had been hit by Jeffards’s arm as he threw – but that would have meant that Jeffards was left-handed, a claim he stoutly denied.
In spite of – or maybe because of – this uncertainty, Jeffards was remanded to custody in lieu of 500 dollar bail. Jeffards was not pleased with this turn of events, and, according to the Sentinel “took out a small pen-knife, and inflicted a wound just above his knee, protesting that he was determined to bleed to death.”
Eventually, a friend of Jeffards’s arrived and soon thereafter word came from Attorney General Caleb Cushing that the President did not want to press charges. Thus, Jeffards was set free.
The following day, the New York Herald headlined their piece “Dastardly Attack on the President of the United States,” and their account was picked up by newspapers throughout the country. The Chicago Tribune published a poem entitled “A Very Doleful Ballad” by the possibly pseudonymous Shanghai Cockadooleorum that recounted the events in the form of a cumulative tale. News of the attack was even reprinted in foreign papers, including Le Moniteur Belge, Belgium’s official paper.
What happened to Jeffards after his brief moment of fame is unclear. While all sources agree that he was from South Carolina, nobody by that name exists in the records of the time. While it is almost certain that this is due to a misspelling that made its way through the newspapers of the time, there is no way of knowing what the correct spelling was. And while there were further references to the incident throughout the year, including one article explaining that it had been a duck egg that had been thrown, soon it had fallen down the memory hole. Along with, to be honest, most of the rest of Pierce’s presidency.