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Dramatic Assassination Plots from History and Their Outcomes

Khalid Elhassan October 29, 2020 34 min

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand - Austria-Hungary — The arrest of Gavrilo Princip after his shooting of Franz Ferdinand and his wife. BBC

12. The Crank Behind the First Assassination Attempt on a US President

By the time he made it to the White House, Andrew Jackson’s reputation as a very dangerous man to rile had been well established. So well established, in fact, that only a nutjob would try to assault him. However, America never had a shortage of nutjobs, and one of them became the first to attempt a presidential assassination by taking a shot at Jackson.

Richard Lawrence, a house painter, was in the habit of angrily muttering to himself about Andrew Jackson. On January 30^th, 1835, he was seen sitting in his shop, cackling to himself, before suddenly getting up and exiting, with the exclamation: “I’ll be damned if I don’t do it!” “It” was killing Jackson, which Lawrence tried to do by ambushing the president outside the Capitol building.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.