On 30 Jan. 1835, an unemployed house painter, Richard Lawrence, approached 67-year old POTUS Andrew Jackson as he was leaving a congressional funeral at the Capitol building (such as it was then) with his aides, produced a pistol, and tried to shoot him. The furious POTUS Jackson clubbed him repeatedly with his cane/walking stick, while Lawrence produced a second pistol, which also misfired. Jackson's aides wrestled Lawrence away from the POTUS. Jackson was convinced that it was part of a wider Whig conspiracy...
On 14 April 1865, a conspiracy targeting POTUS Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of State William Seward, and other members of the U.S. government for murder was hatched. John Wilkes Booth shot and killed Abraham Lincoln. Ex-Confederate soldier Lewis Powell invaded Seward's home, stabbed and clubbed five people, including Seward's son. Seward was bed-ridden after being thrown from a carriage, and suffered many injuries, including a broken jaw that had been fitted with a metal brace. It is thought that the metal brace saved his life, since he was stabbed in the face, throat and chest but survived. The secession crisis had led the Fire-eaters in gaining more power and popular support than they had had previously. The twin shocks of first, John Brown and the secret six's role in his attack, and second, the sectional election where Lincoln had won the plurality of electoral college votes and became POTUS even though he'd been entirely omitted from the ballot of Southern States was second. After the defeat of the CSA and the surrender of the ANV at Appomattox, Booth and the conspirators were faced with the failure of slavery and the Union remaining indivisible, followed by the failure of collective violence to preserve a utopian republic of slaveholders, and seemingly the utter demise of the earlier political order within the South... So the plot was hatched as something of a desperate and vengeful as well as symbolic action of political violence to prevent Abraham Lincoln becoming a Napoleon-type dictator. In Booth's farewell letter of November 1864, he decried Lincoln's illegitimacy, and lamented his own failings: "and begun to deem myself a coward and to despise my own existence." He had to "do what I can for a poor oppressed downtrodden people" and further, he was deeply disturbed by the "hard war" policy and the Atlanta campaign, likening the red stripes of the flag to "bloody gashes." In late 1864 Booth met with Confederate agents in Montreal, including George Nicholas Sanders, formerly of the Franklin Pierce administration who had conspired against French dictator Napoleon III. Booth apparently listened to remarks delivered by Lincoln on 11 April in which the POTUS equivocated on full citizenship and voting rights for blacks, but acknowledged that anyone who'd fought for the Union would certainly have the right to vote, as well as some of the more "intelligent" among the freedmen... At this, Booth became enraged at the idea of black citizenship rights, and his prewar background as a Know Nothing in Maryland, opposed to Catholics and other non-Protestant immigrants and so on, viewing them as providing the illegitimate "Bonaparte" [Lincoln] with a block of voters, convinced him to act and to kill the president.