Category: History

On July 2, 1863, the lines of the Battle of Gettysburg, now in its second day, were drawn in two sweeping parallel arcs. The Confederate and Union armies faced each other a mile apart. The Union forces extending along Cemetery Ridge to Culp’s Hill, formed the shape of a fish-hook, and the Confederate forces were spread along Seminary Ridge.

[Map from PBS]

General Robert E. Lee ordered General James Longstreet to attack the Union’s southern flank, aiming for the hills at the southernmost end of Cemetery Ridge. These hills, known as the Little Round Top and Big Round Top had been left unoccupied, and would have afforded the Confederates a good vantage point from which to ravage the Union line.

General Longstreet, disagreeing with Lee’s orders, and hoping that the cavalry under the command of General J.E.B. Stuart would soon come up with the army to participate in the attack, was slow to advance on the hills.

Although Longstreet’s soldiers broke through to the base of the Little Round Top, Union General G. K. Warren perceived the Confederate plan in time to rouse his men to take the strategic hill, fending off the Confederate attack.

General Lee had also commanded General R.S. Ewell to attack the northernmost flank of the Union Army. On one occasion Ewell’s troops took possession of a slope of Culp’s Hill, but the Union remained entrenched both there and on Cemetery Ridge, where General Meade was headquartered.

Library of Congress

The largest and arguably most significant military engagement in North American history began in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on this date in 1863.

In a daring venture, Confederate general Robert E. Lee moved his Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania in June, hoping for a decisive victory on Union soil. Trying to catch up, the Union Army of the Potomac, under new commander George Meade, moved north and west toward the Confederates, who were widely dispersed. Learning the Union Army was on the move, Lee began to consolidate his forces.

On June 30, Union cavalry led by John Buford skirmished with a small Confederate contingent just west of Gettysburg. Buford, realizing that the field provided good defensive ground, determined to hold the Confederates until the main body of the army came up.

On July 1, a larger Confederate force moved east toward Gettysburg and met resistance from Buford’s dismounted cavalry, soon joined by the First Corps. The battle ebbed and flowed during the day as troops from both sides moved to the action. Ultimately, Confederate forces arriving from the north were able to flank the Union troops and force them through the town. The Confederates failed to keep the initiative, however, and the Union was able to dig in on the ridge south and east — Cemetery Ridge.

Fifteen thousand Americans were casualties that day.

was fought on this date in 1876. Dee Brown wrote the following for The Reader’s Companion to American History:

In 1876, under command of Gen. Alfred Terry, Custer led the Seventh Cavalry as one force in a three-pronged campaign against Sitting Bull’s alliance of Sioux and Cheyenne camps in Montana. During the morning of June 25, Custer’s scouts reported spotting smoke from cooking fires and other signs of Indians in the valley of the Little Bighorn. Disregarding Terry’s orders, Custer decided to attack before infantry and other support arrived. Although scouts warned that he was facing superior numbers (perhaps 2,500 warriors), Custer divided his regiment of 647 men, ordering Capt. Frederick Benteen’s battalion to scout along a ridge to the left and sending Maj. Marcus Reno’s battalion up the valley of the Little Bighorn to attack the Indian encampment. With the remainder of the regiment, Custer continued along high ground on the right side of the valley. In the resulting battle, he and about 250 of his men, outnumbered by the warriors of Crazy Horse and Gall, were surrounded and annihilated. Reno and Benteen suffered heavy casualties but managed to escape to a defensive position. Since that day, “Custer’s Last Stand” has become an American legend. The battle site attracts thousands of visitors yearly.

Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star is generally regarded as the finest book on the battle; indeed, one of the finest on western American history. James Welch’s Killing Custer tells the story more from the Indian perspective.

ratified the Constitution on this date in 1788, thereby becoming the tenth state.

Virginia has 7.5 million people (including four Sweeties).

Virginia has 42,769 square miles, making it the 35th largest state.

The highest point in Virginia is Mount Rogers at 5,729 feet above sea level. The lowest point is sea level.

Eight presidents were born in Virginia.

The other day NewMexiKen explained how historians believe that Betsy Ross, contrary to folklore, had no actual involvement in the making of the first American flag. Emily and Jill, official daughters of NewMexiKen, commented that there was some documentation that Ross made the case for the five-pointed star by showing how it could easily be cut from fabric.

Whatever, none of that matters. I have now learned what Betsy Ross’ real contribution to the American War of Independence might have been.

According to David Hackett Fischer in his outstanding book Washington’s Crossing, after some skirmishes with American militia near Mount Holly, New Jersey, the British commander Hessian Colonel Carl Emilius Ulrich von Donop “had found in his quarters the exceedingly beautiful young widow of a doctor.” (Quotation from a German officer who was present.) As Fischer reports, “The colonel spent the night of December 23 in the widow’s house. He decided to stay on Christmas Eve, and then on Christmas as well.” Bottom line, von Donop and his troops were 18 miles from Trenton, instead of the six they were supposed to be in case of a major American attack.

Which is precisely what the Americans did after crossing the Delaware River Christmas night. They attacked Trenton the morning of December 26, 1776, and had a decisive victory.

At least one German officer thought von Donop’s dalliance cost Britain the colonies: “partly to the fault of Colonel Donop, who was led to Mount Holly by the nose…and detained there by love….”

And who was the beautiful widow? “Could she have been an American agent?” Fischer asks. Attempts to identify her as someone from the community have been without success.

However, Fischer tells us:

In December 1776, there was a young and very beautiful young widow, a “Free Quaker” strongly sympathetic to the American cause, who lived in Philadelphia, had family connections in Gloucester County, New Jersey, was married there, and often went back and forth. She was acquainted with Margaret Morris, and also with George Washington. Her name was Betsy Ross. One historian, Joseph Tustin, has raised the possibility she may have been the mysterious widow of Mount Holly. Her husband, John Ross, who had died in 1776, came from Gloucester County and may have been related to Doctor Alexander Ross, who was a physician practicing at Mount Holly in 1776.

There is no evidence; just speculation. But hey, there was no evidence she sewed the first flag either and this is a more intriguing story.

[NewMexiKen is completing Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing after a couple of unexplainable false starts. It is a delightful, informative historical narrative. Truly deserved of all its awards and your attention.]

Anne Applebaum thinks they should Give This ‘Attic’ A Story To Tell. NewMexiKen recommends you go read the whole column, but here’s an excerpt:

Just about the only thing that the Museum of American History does not do, in fact, is teach anyone American history. That is, it doesn’t tell the whole American story, or even chunks of the American story, in chronological order, from Washington to Adams to Jefferson, or from Roosevelt to Truman to Eisenhower. When the museum was built in 1964, this sort of thing probably wasn’t necessary. But judging from a group of teenagers whom I recently heard lapse into silence when asked if they could identify Lewis and Clark, I suspect it’s now very necessary indeed.

Opinion polls bear out my suspicions. According to one poll, more U.S. teenagers can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government. Even fewer can state the first three words of the Constitution. A San Francisco reporter once did an informal survey of teenagers watching Fourth of July fireworks in a park and found that only half could name the country from which the United States had won its independence. (“Japan or something, China,” said one seventh-grader. “Somewhere out there on the other side of the world.”) We’re not talking about ignorance of semi-obscure facts here: We’re talking about ignorance of basic information.

Given this yawning knowledge gap, the Museum of American History could perform a real service to its 3 million annual visitors just by telling them, in at least one or two permanent exhibitions, something about what actually happened. After all, museum visitors can see Mickey Mouse and his ilk any time. But many visitors, after their once-in-a-lifetime trip to Washington, won’t go to another history museum again. Ever.

It was on this day in 1893 that the verdict was announced in the trial of Lizzie Borden. She was accused of murdering her father and her stepmother with an ax. It was one of the first murder trials in America that got covered by the national press because of the sensational nature of it.

Her father was the president of a bank. He was one of the richest and stingiest men in the town of Fall River, Massachusetts. He’d come home on a hot August morning, 1892, taken a nap on his couch, and about an hour later Lizzie started calling out to the neighbors that her father had been killed. The police found the stepmother upstairs was also dead. They determined the murder weapon had been some kind of hatchet.

The case against Lizzie Borden was entirely circumstantial. Nobody had seen the murders. No weapon was found. There was no physical evidence linking Lizzie to the crime. All the police could prove was that she had been in the house at the time of the murders. She had a lot of money to gain from it, and she’d recently tried to buy poison at the local pharmacy.

The trial lasted two weeks. Lizzie was found innocent. No one else was ever tried for the murder. After the trial, she bought herself a three-story mansion where she lived for the rest of her life.

The Writer’s Almanac

Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. [on this date in 1972] in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here.

Three of the men were native-born Cubans and another was said to have trained Cuban exiles for guerrilla activity after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

They were surprised at gunpoint by three plain-clothes officers of the metropolitan police department in a sixth floor office at the plush Watergate, 2600 Virginia Ave., NW, where the Democratic National Committee occupies the entire floor.

There was no immediate explanation as to why the five suspects would want to bug the Democratic National Committee offices or whether or not they were working for any other individuals or organizations.

The Washington Post

In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.

Franklin D. Roosevelt in his statement on signing the National Industrial Recovery Act 72 years ago today.

Roosevelt began his statement describing the Act:

The law I have just signed was passed to put people back to work, to let them buy more of the products of farms and factories and start our business at a living rate again. This task is in two stages; first, to get many hundreds of thousands of the unemployed back on the payroll by snowfall and, second, to plan for a better future for the longer pull. While we shall not neglect the second, the first stage is an emergency job. It has the right of way.

The second part of the Act gives employment through a vast program of public works. Our studies show that we should be able to hire many men at once and to step up to about a million new jobs by October 1st, and a much greater number later. We must put at the head of our list those works which are fully ready to start now. Our first purpose is to create employment as fast as we can, but we should not pour money into unproved projects.

The first part of the National Industrial Recovery Act — the industry codes — was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935. The second part, which first became known as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and then the Public Works Administration (PWA) lasted until the 1940s. The PWA earned a near spotless reputation for good management.

Abraham Lincoln delivered his House Divided Speech at Springfield, Illinois, on this date in 1858.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new — North as well as South.

The speech was made at the Illinois Republican State convention that had nominated Lincoln for U.S. Senator. It was a precursor to the Lincoln-Douglas debates in the campaign that followed, which Lincoln lost. It seems to be about as succinct a statement of the core issue of the Civil War as one could find.

but lets talk about Betsy Ross.

According to James W. Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me, Professor Michael Frisch at SUNY Buffalo asks his first-year college students to list “the first ten names that you think of” in American History before the Civil War. (He excludes presidents, generals, etc.) Betsy Ross led the list seven years out of eight.

Here’s reality: Betsy Ross played no part in the actual creation of the first American flag. As Loewen puts it, “Ross came to prominence around 1876, when some of her descendants, seeking to create a tourist attraction in Phildadelphia, largely invented the myth of the first flag.”

Flag Day (June 14) commemorates the date in 1777 when the Continental Congress approved the design for a national flag.

was admitted to the Union as the 25th state on this date in 1836.

Arkansas is the 29th largest state (53,182 square miles); it ranks 32nd in population (2.75 million).

It has 75 counties.

The name “Arkansas” comes from French explorers’ (Marquette and others) pronounciation of the term that Indians of the Ohio Valley used to refer to the Quapaws, the Indians who lived in what is now northeastern Arkansas.

The state bird is the mockingbird.

The two individuals depicted in Statuary Hall in the National Capitol are James Paul Clarke and Uriah Milton Rose.

On June 4, 1754, twenty-two-year-old Colonel George Washington and his small military force were busy constructing Fort Necessity, east of what is known today as Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Washington’s men built the fort to protect themselves from French troops intent on ousting the British from the territory northwest of the Ohio River. Washington’s troops were surrounded at Fort Necessity, and forced to surrender to the French on July 3, 1754.

Washington’s military activity in the area marked the beginning of the French and Indian War, the American phase of a worldwide war between Great Britain and France. Fighting began over issues of local settlement and trade rights in the upper Ohio River Valley. At the core of the conflict was the larger issue of which nation would dominate the heartland of North America.

Library of Congress

The Chinese army crackdown on the protests in and around Tiananmen Square was 16 years ago today. According to estimates by the Chinese Red Cross (accepted at the time by the U.S. State Department) some 2,600 protesters and military were killed and another 7,000 wounded.

This declassified State Department cable (June 22, 1989) provides the account of a witness to the violence on the night of June 3-4. The students believed that the military would be firing rubber bullets. The witness tells that “he had a sickening feeling when he noticed the bullets striking sparks off the pavement near his feet.”

This second declassified cable provides an hour-by-hour chronology of the events of the night of June 3-4, 1989.

While difficult to read, these documents tell the story as American diplomats reported it.

NewMexiKen took this photo in Tiananmen Square just three years after the historic events there. The building in the background is the Great Hall of the People. At left is the Monument of the People’s Heroes.

(Originally posted June 4, 2004)

The 175-mile road trip between Gettysburg and Monticello is a sometimes traffic-clogged passage past flag-waving outlet malls and fast-emerging suburban outposts built to serve the Washington region’s booming population.

But a journey through the lands near Route 15 also takes in six presidential homes, including James Madison’s Montpelier, a concentration of Civil War battlefields from Antietam to Manassas, a million acres on the national historic register and the rolling Piedmont scenery that inspired the Founding Fathers.

Yesterday, Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, put the vast tri-state area on his group’s annual list of the nation’s most endangered historic places. Also among the 11 sites are a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Los Angeles, historic Catholic churches in Boston and decaying buildings in downtown Detroit.

The Washington Post

The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 11 Most Endangered Places 2005.

Jeanne d’Arc was burned at the stake on this date in 1431. She was 19 years-old.

Rhode Island ratified the Constitution on this date in 1790, thereby becoming the 13th state.

Wisconsin entered the Union as the 30th state on this date in 1848.

John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, was born on this date 88 years ago (1917).

Annette Benning is 47. Melissa Etheridge is 44.

… the first passenger railroad in the U.S. began service between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland, in 1830. That’s 13 miles.

… the first telegraph message was transmitted by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1844. Sent from Washington to Baltimore it said, “What hath God wrought!”

… the first Major League Baseball night game was played in Cincinnati in 1935. The Reds beat the Phillies 2-1. The Reds played seven night games that year (one against each National League opponent).