Armistead Thomson Mason
Armistead Mason served as senator of Virginia from January 1816 until March 1817 after winning an election for the recently vacated seat of William B. Giles, who resigned to publish analog blogs for a while before becoming governor of Virginia. As hinted by his short time in office, Mason was not a particularly prominent politician. His only real distinction was that he was the second-youngest person ever to serve as a senator, taking office when he was a full year-and-a-half younger than the required age of 30. (The youngest has an infamous legacy of his own.) Once everyone found out about Mason’s age, he agreed to resign after his term ended.
Mason then tried to run for Congress, though per the Congress’s Biographical Directory, his “campaign of much bitterness” led to several duels. In 1819, Mason and his second cousin/next-door neighbor John Mason McCarty took the field after a yearslong dispute in local papers that featured Mason calling McCarty a “perjured scoundrel” and “an ass in lion’s clothing,” with McCarty writing that his second cousin had “paucity of talent which rendered him so conspicuously dumb in the Senate of the United States.” Owned. Andrew Jackson, back in the Army between spells in office, reportedly told Mason to settle it with a duel, in which Mason wounded McCarty, while McCarty shot Mason through the heart. Both of these dummies were descendants of George Mason.
George Augustus Waggaman
Again, that goddamn menace Andrew Jackson plays a role in another dead senator’s tale. George Waggaman, like Mason, fought in the War of 1812, serving under then-General Jackson at the decisive American victory in the Battle of New Orleans. He stuck around in Louisiana after the war, married into a family of sugarcane plantation owners, and worked as a lawyer. After he practiced law for two decades, Waggaman was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1831 following the resignation of Edward Livingston, Alexander Hamilton’s old pal and the brother of Robert R. Livingston, who negotiated the Louisiana Purchase.
Waggaman’s victory was a bit of a surprise, since he ran as an anti-Jackson candidate and defeated Livingston’s cousin, a much more pro-Jackson politician. He served for four years, then went back to the gulf, where he got into a dispute with fellow Battle of New Orleans vet and former New Orleans Mayor Denis Prieur. The two men had serious political differences, and historical records say they fell out over what the papers called “some family affair, of long standing” or “domestic affairs.” A report on the duel claims that Waggaman “received the ball of his antagonist in the fleshy part of his right thigh, through which it passed and buried itself in the left.” The recap also states that Prieur was unharmed, and that Waggaman “is not considered to be in danger.”
Wrong. Waggaman died two weeks later.