Andrew Jackson, one hell of a gun

MEven for fans of American history, the date of January 30, 1835 does not mean much, far from that of November 22, 1963, which entered collective memory with the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas. And yet that day, for the first time, an attempt was made to take the life of a sitting president in the United States. This date has been forgotten for a first simple reason: Richard Lawrence, the aggressor of Andrew Jackson, president since 1829, misses his target, after an incredible combination of circumstances. Armed with two pistols, he manages to shoot Jackson, who comes out of Representative Davis’ funeral on Capitol Hill, aiming at the heart. But one then the other of Lawrence’s weapons jams. Once the shooter is belted, his personality does little for the impact of the case. Having plunged for several months into a delusional psychosis that could not be diagnosed beforehand by the medicine of the time, this unemployed house painter had convinced himself to be King Richard III of England (died four centuries previously), to whom the United States owed a considerable sum of money that would make him rich forever. His judgment was therefore dispatched, Richard Lawrence being found not guilty of mental irresponsibility and locked up for the rest of his life, ending his life in 1861 in the first federal public institution opened for the insane in 1855, the government hospital in Washington, DC.

Yet, on closer inspection, this first assassination attempt says a lot of American history.

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