No incident of this session so well illustrates the partisan bitterness and the venomous nature of the hates engendered by the struggles of the preceding years as the attempt on the life of Jackson at the Capitol on January 30, 1835.[788] Under normal conditions and in ordinary times the incident would have been dismissed, and, properly, ascribed to the insanity of the assailant. But it was the first time an attempt had been made upon the life of a President--and it was a President who had been intemperately denounced as a tyrant, despot, and wrecker of American institutions and liberties. Just as John Tyler had instantly thought of “political effect,”[789] the ardent friends of Jackson caught the same idea from the opposite angle. And two days later, Frank Blair in the “Globe” threw out the suggestion of a conspiracy. “Whether Lawrence [the assailant] has caught, in his visits to the Capitol, the mania which has prevailed the last two sessions of the Senate,” he wrote, “whether he has become infatuated with the chimeras which have troubled the brains of the disappointed and ambitious orators who have depicted the President as a Cæsar who ought to have a Brutus; as a Cromwell, a Nero, a Tiberius, we know not. If no secret conspiracy has prompted the perpetration of the horrid deed, we think it not improbable that some delusion of intellect has grown out of his visits to the Capitol, and that hearing despotism and every horrible mischief threatened to the Republic, and revolution and all its train of calamities imputed as the necessary consequence of the President’s measures, it may be that the infatuated man fancied that he had reason to become his country’s avenger. If he had heard and believed Mr. Calhoun’s speech of day before yesterday, he would have found in it ample justification for his attempt on one who was represented as the cause of the most dreadful calamities of the Nation; as one who made perfect rottenness and corruption to pervade the vitals of the Government, insomuch that it was scarcely worth preserving, if it were possible.”[790]