On January 30 of 1835 one Richard Lawrence staggered into the history books by becoming the first person to try to assassinate a sitting United States president. I trust it is clear that I do not think anyone should ever assassinate a U.S. president current or former, so I will not be misunderstood when I say that his choice of Andrew Jackson as his target was, from a narrowly practical point of view, extremely ill chosen.

Lawrence, described by acquaintances as a quiet if diligent house painter, seems to have gone insane in the early 1830s. As his behaviour spiraled out of control he became obsessed with the president, and on January 30 attempted to shoot Jackson as the latter was leaving the U.S. Capitol funeral of Congressman Warren R. Davis, using two pistols notorious for unreliability in the sort of damp weather Washington was then experiencing both of which misfired.

In response Jackson leaped at the would-be assassin and beat him severely with his cane before various Congressmen including Davey Crockett wrestled Lawrence into submission, after which he was put on trial with the prosecutor being Francis Scott Key, the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner". The jury found him "not guilty by reason of insanity" after a five-minute deliberation and he was confined to mental hospitals until his death in 1861.

Trying to murder Jackson at close range was certainly crazy in the colloquial as well as in this case the technical sense. The 7^th president of the United States and its first "border" or hillbilly chief executive was a man with a long history of physical courage, decisiveness and lack of regard for the niceties of social interaction. At 13 he became involved in the American Revolution as a courier, got captured, and when a British officer ordered him to clean his boots responded with a phrase so far from "Merry Christmas" that it earned him a permanent scar on his head and hand from a sabre. But Jackson did not clean the boots.

Later, as President, his closest Senate ally was Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who Jackson had both whipped and shot during a tavern brawl in 1813 in which Benton and his brother also shot and nearly killed Jackson. Jackson himself had earlier killed a man in a duel for insulting his wife Rachel, whom Jackson stole from her cruel husband including, allegedly, once chasing him into the tall grass with a knife.

Jackson was an odd character with a strange mix of impressive virtues and scary vices, a populist and a slaveowner, a cunning calculator with a manic temper. But just about everyone who ever met him would testify that on account of both his virtues and his vices he was about the last man on earth at whom to fire a non-fatal shot at close range. Even Richard Lawrence, in his more lucid post-1835 moments, I imagine.

On this date in history in 1886 one Karl Benz became a hero of entrepreneurship and then, I suppose, a massive ecological villain when he patented a gasoline-powered car. People like me have long praised the automobile as a classic private solution to a pressing public problem, the increasingly intolerable fouling of cities and destruction of forests by… the horse.

I know, it sounds a bit silly. But major cities were being buried in horse poop, drowned in horse pee, and afflicted with tens of thousands of dead horses a year. And more and more forest land was being cleared for pastures to grow the hay all these creatures consumed.

If government had taken charge of the problem, there is no telling what disaster would have ensued. Instead entrepreneurs created a new form of transportation, less picturesque in ways that make me genuinely sad but enormously more efficient and effective. You could not have cottages for the middle class if we all had to take horse carts to them, nor supermarkets or indeed almost any facet of modern life. You could also not have carts that play what was once quaintly called "high fidelity" music, heat your seat and protect you from the elements while a gentle push of your foot accelerates you to 100 km/h. And now that we have seen modernity in all its horror, maybe future waves of technology can allow us to decentralize, slow down, and get back in touch with nature external and internal while retaining some of the gains like, say, laptops that can edit video. Just to pick an example at random.

Of course today the reaction is likely to be that by inventing the gas-powered car Benz (yes, of Mercedes-Benz) played a major role in dooming the planet and its inhabitants to climate change that will drown, fry or otherwise exterminate us all. But even if one grants that he’s about as much of a benefactor to humanity as, say, Sauron, surely we can at least draw the lesson that if we want alternatives to current technology including fossil-fuel-dependent vehicles and power plants, we are far likely to get dynamic, unpredictable, astoundingly effective solutions from the private sector than from central planning.

In turn they may raise new dilemmas over time to replace the ones they solve. But it sure beats government intervention, which reliably creates new messes without fixing the old ones.

"Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot." Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

While I’m on the subject of St. Leninsburg it is fitting to note that today marks the end of the brutal 872-day Nazi siege of what was then Leningrad between 8 September 1941 and January 27, 1944. Whatever one thinks of the regime and the name, it was an astonishing demonstration of tenacity under circumstances that literally defy belief.

It cost an estimated 580,000 German and three and a half million Soviet military casualties and a million civilians, over 600,000 during the siege and an astounding 400,000 in the evacuation (which gives you some idea of the efficiency and compassion of Bolshevism). The inhabitants were menaced, obviously, not only with death by bombardment or bombing but also and primarily by starvation.

Among the siege tales of horror were several thousand arrests for cannibalism, mostly of those already dead of natural causes although more than 10% involved deliberate killing of humans for food, and literally thousands of cases of murdering people for their ration cards. Not that there was much to be had even with a card; during the siege people ate their pets, often touchingly trading with a neighbour so as not to eat their own. There are even statues to two hero cats from the siege, Elisey and Vasilisa, though they turn out to be celebrated not for being food but for what they ate, being part of a shipment of cats delivered from Yaroslavl to help deal with the overwhelming plague of rats in the shattered city.

There are two stories I find uplifting about the resilience of the human spirit under such ghastly conditions. One is that the authorities had created an air raid system involving a metronome broadcast over the radio that speeded up if German bombers were approaching. After air raids became less frequent the radio station often broadcast music instead. But during breaks in the music the metronome resumed to assure listeners the city’s resistance had not collapsed, and apparently hungry, cold, lonely, frightened people would huddle by the radio and draw strength from the steady unquenchable tick tock tick tock. And the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad includes an underground museum whose only sounds are emergency broadcasts and the ticking of a metronome. (Horribly, an earlier Leningrad Defence Museum and many of its exhibits were destroyed in a fit of Stalin’s jealousy that saw the heroic siege declared a myth and many who had led the defence of the city purged by kangaroo courts and sent to Siberia or shot.)

The other is a soldier’s story. Kenneth Adelman, a top U.S. arms control negotiator under Ronald Reagan, tells of meeting Soviet Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev at the 1987 Reykjavik summit and learning that as a young man Akhromeyev had been tasked with defending a road outside Leningrad during the siege and that for 18 months including harsh Russian winters he never set foot inside a building. "'Never?' I asked. 'No. We were told to stay there. We stayed there.'" (Akhromeyev also told Adelman that only two of 32 boys in his high school class survived the war and that indeed eight of 10 males born in the Soviet Union in 1923, as he was, died during the conflict.)

Such heroism deserved a better cause than Stalinism, even in opposition to Naziism. But it is heroism all the same. And while I wish it had never been necessary, I do recognize and am inspired by their capacity to persevere through conditions unbelievable even to hear about, let alone endure.

My latest for The Rebel:  

On January 26 of 1924 the Soviet government renamed the former St. Petersburg "Leningrad." It was an ominous move though not as ominous as moving the capital to Moscow on March 12 1918, a dramatic symbol of its rejection of Russia’s always uneasy membership in Western civilization. But it also led to one of those great jokes Soviet oppression engendered.

By way of background, the tsars had already changed the somewhat Germanic-sounding "St. Petersburg” to Petrograd (Петроград) on the outbreak of World War I. So after World War II, the authorities are processing all sorts of displaced persons and the bureaucrats ask this somewhat baffled old guy "Where were you born?" "St. Petersburg." "Where did you live before the Revolution?" "Petrograd." "Where did you live before the Great Patriotic War?" "Leningrad." "Where do you want to live now?" "St. Petersburg."

Sadly, had he been younger and lived a long life he might have got his wish insofar as Leningrad was renamed St. Petersburg in 1991. But the spirit of openness and affiliation with the West that had never been sufficiently embraced before 1914, including by the towering Peter the Great himself, was neither understood nor accepted after the fall of Communism particularly by the Russian political elite. Under Putin in particular it’s still really Leningrad and the capital is still in the inward-looking Moscow not Russia’s window on Europe and the free world beyond.

It’s a great pity, for the Russian people and for us.

In my latest National Post column I argue that Justin Trudeau's recent refusal to answer an English question in English "since we're in Quebec" is neither an innocent mistake nor a harmless reflex.

To return to the topic of weddings that bring tears to your eyes, and again a royal one, would you cry if the king insisted on marrying you without telling anyone? Or might you just flee instead?

I have a feeling Anne Boleyn did neither on November 14, 1532 when she tied the knot surreptitiously with the dreadful Henry VIII. Anne was clearly in over her head, an ominous phrase in this context. But the young woman (we aren’t sure how young; she may have been born in 1501 or 1507) appears to have been a clever and confident schemer who wrongly thought she knew exactly what she was doing.

They were publicly married on January 25, 1533, leading to a ruckus of which you may have heard. The new Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, formerly the Boleyn family chaplain, declared the marriage null and void on May 23 of that year and, five days later, mysteriously changed his mind. Henry VIII could do that to you.

And to himself; when Anne proved unable to give him male heirs he had her convicted of high treason, as well as adultery and incest and perhaps witchcraft, by a jury that included her own uncle who lived to tell the tale largely, one suspects, because she did not (along with five men framed as her lovers). Cranmer then conveniently realized Anne’s marriage had been invalid after all. Gosh.

Henry had married Anne secretly because the Pope was still trying to figure out whether to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. (And when it became public excommunications flew.) So he wanted to have things both ways. And Anne ought to have realized that when Henry VIII thinks he’s using you and you think you’re using him, he’s right.

So I don’t have a lot of wedding advice to offer women other than don’t make the bridesmaids wear seafoam green. (They don’t have to look awful for you to look nice and nobody will ever wear that outfit again.) But I would urge you to reject any suitor who proposes that you marry him and move into his bed without mentioning it to anybody.

Especially, and I cannot stress this too strongly, if his surname is Tudor and his title is King.