The considerable difference between Jackson and Thomas G. Watkins began when Watkins signed a petition honoring Charles Henry Dickinson after Jackson killed him in a duel in May 1806. Watkins then physically assaulted Jackson’s friend Thomas Augustine Claiborne that July over the same controversy. John Sommerville wrote to Jackson on 4 Feb. 1822 from Nashville, informing him that Watkins was still being criticized for his alleged misconduct in 1807 relating to his patient Polly H. Davis’s will and urging Jackson to help Watkins regain public favor “by giving him the hand of friendship and of reconciliation” through a letter to TJ and another, not found, to James Madison (Jackson, Papers description begins Sam B. Smith, Harold D. Moser, Daniel Feller, and others, eds., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 1980– , 11 vols. description ends , 2:101–9, 5:141–3, quote on p. 143).