Category: History

Brief narratives about people and events in the American past.

Gettysburg

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.

Wow!

Archaeologists pulled aside a curtain on Wednesday to reveal what can only be called a secret garden: the pristinely preserved ruins of an ancient civilization that was long ago lost to the mists of time in the remote cliffs of eastern Utah, then resolutely protected over the last 50 years by a stubborn local rancher who kept mum about what he knew.

The ruins, called Range Creek, are spread over thousands of acres, much of it in inaccessible back country and reachable only through a single-track dirt road once owned by the rancher and recently bought by the State of Utah. Preliminary research dates the settlement from about A.D. 900 to 1100, during the period of the Fremont Indian culture.

Read more from The New York Times.

The Treaty of Vesailles…

at the end of World War I was signed on this date in 1919, five years to the day after the assassination that sparked the war.

The United States Senate never ratified the Treaty, as much for political as diplomatic reasons.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand…

was assassinated in Sarajevo on this date in 1914, igniting what we know as World War I.

Franz Ferdinand was the nephew of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. After the Emperor’s son had committed suicide and Ferdinand’s own father had died, Ferdinand was first in succession to the Emperor. He was considered likely to be a reformer, which upset Balkan nationalists.

In all, there were seven assassins along the route of the Archduke’s car, all Bosnian Serbs. The third of the seven, Nedelko Cabrinovic,

threw a bomb, but failed to see the car in time to aim well: he missed the heir’s car and hit the next one, injuring several people. Cabrinovic swallowed poison and jumped into a canal, but he was saved from suicide and arrested. He died of tuberculosis in prison in 1916.

The seventh was Gavrilo Princip.

Princip heard Cabrinovic’s bomb go off and assumed that the Archduke was dead. By the time he heard what had really happened, the cars had driven by. By bad luck, a little later the returning procession missed a turn and stopped to back up at a corner just as Princip happened to walk by. Princip fired two shots: one killed the archduke, the other his wife. Princip was arrested before he could swallow his poison capsule or shoot himself. Princip too was a minor under Austrian law, so he could not be executed. Instead he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and died of tuberculosis in 1916.

It was the Archduke and Sophie’s fourteenth wedding anniversary. The Archduke’s last words were, “Sophie dear, Sophie dear, don’t die! Stay alive for our children.”

In the aftermath of the assassination, diplomatic efforts failed, perhaps because both Austria and Serbia feared loss of national prestige. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany sided with Austria; Russia supported Serbia as required by treaty. France was obligated to support Russia in any war with Germany or Austria-Hungary. Britain was obligated to support France in an any war with Germany.

Source for quotes and some background: The Balkan Causes of World War One

James Smithson…

died on this date in 1829.

Smithson’s will left the bulk of his estate to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford. But should his nephew die without children—legitimate or illegitimate—a contingency clause stated that the estate would go to “the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge…”

Source: The Smithsonian Institution

The nephew did indeed die without children and in 1838 approximately $500,000 in gold was brought to the United States. After a decade of indecision and debate about how best to carry out the bequest, the Smithsonian Institution was created by Act of Congress (1846).

An aside: According to the Smithsonian:

Senator John C. Calhoun opposed acceptance of the Smithson bequest, largely on the grounds that to do so on behalf of the entire nation would abridge states’ rights. He maintained that Congress had no authority to accept the gift. He also asserted that it would be “beneath [U.S.] dignity to accept presents from anyone.”

President Kennedy…

uttered his famous words “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner) on this date in 1963. As The New York Times put it at the time:

President Kennedy, inspired by a tumultuous welcome from more than a million of the inhabitants of this isolated and divided city, declared today he was proud to be “a Berliner.”

He said his claim to being a Berliner was based on the fact that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.”

More Little Bighorn

From Killing Custer:

Nor does this picture change. Whether Custer is portrayed as a hero, as Errol Flynn did it in the World War II-era They Died with Their Boots On, or as a genocidal nut, as in the Vietnam-era Little Big Man, he is still the center of attention. The recent miniseries Son of the Morning Star depicted Custer as a naughty, hot-blooded, fratboy type-but he is still the character that the cameras follow, the man whose death has always been the point of telling the story. No matter that in fact his famous hairline was beginning to recede, that his remaining hair was cut short, and that it was too hot to wear buckskin that summer day. Or that the Lakotas and the Cheyennes had no idea who had attacked them or which particular army commander they were fighting. More than a century after his death, Custer has the kind of name recognition that would make any aspirant for national political office jealous.

But if you switch the focus, the story becomes infinitely richer. Late on a cold November night, with the wind howling outside his trailer on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Johnson Holy Rock began talking to us about Crazy Horse. Nearly eighty, Johnson is a former tribal chairman whose father was a young boy in Crazy Horse’s camp at the Little Bighorn. “Traditional history tells us that Crazy Horse could ride in front of a line of soldiers and they could all take a potshot at him and no bullet could touch him,” Johnson said, moving his arms back and forth for emphasis. “He’d make three passes, and after the third pass, then his followers were encouraged to make the charge. ‘See, I haven’t been wounded. I’m not shot.’ We would charge.”

I was intrigued, not by Crazy Horse’s ability to ward off bullets in the story, but by Holy Rock’s use of the term “traditional history.” Traditional history according to whom? Not the folks who wrote the history textbooks I read at Glen Rock Junior/Senior High School back in northern New Jersey. Amid George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and even George Custer, figures like Crazy Horse-and, in fact, centuries of Native Americans-rated barely a mention. Traditional history.

The Battle of Little Bighorn

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

Custer.jpgIn 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.

Jack Dempsey…

was born on this date in 1895 in Manassa, Colorado, which makes him about the most famous native-son of the San Luis Valley. As Red Smith wrote in Dempsey’s obituary for The New York Times in 1983 —

Jack Dempsey was one of the last of a dwindling company whose exploits distinguished the 1920’s as ”the golden age of sports.” His contemporaries were Babe Ruth in baseball, Red Grange and the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame in football, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen in golf, Bill Tilden, Helen Wills Moody and Suzanne Lenglen in tennis, Johnny Weissmuller and Gertrude Ederle in swimming, Paavo Nurmi in track, Man o’ War, the racehorse, and Earl Sande, the jockey. But none of the others enjoyed more lasting popularity than the man who ruled boxing between 1919 and 1926.

The obituary is worth reading.

Amazing

The most amazing thing in the item below is that President Eisenhower had press conferences two weeks apart!

A little historical perspective

NewMexiKen means no disrespect to the late Ronald Reagan by posting this item. I actually respect the office too much to “dis” any but an incumbent President I happen to disagree with. But I think it is interesting to put the recent national mourning into perspective. Frank Rich does it well.

A total of some 200,000 Americans passed by the [Reagan] coffin in California and Washington. The crowds watching the funeral procession in Washington numbered in the “tens of thousands,” reported The Washington Post. By comparison, three million Americans greeted the cross-country journey of Warren Harding’s funeral train from San Francisco to Washington when he died in office in the steamy August of 1923, according to Mark Sullivan’s history, “Our Times.” It took 3,500 soldiers to direct the crowd in his hometown of Marion, Ohio, alone. The grief for Harding was so pronounced in New York, a city that hardly knew him, that The Times reported how theaters canceled their shows to hold impromptu memorial gatherings for those citizens unable to jam into the packed services held in Trinity Church at Wall Street and Temple Emanu-El uptown and most houses of worship in between. Next to that, the Reagan outpouring, much of it carried out by bubbly TV-camera-seeking citizens in halter tops and shorts, was grief lite.

The entire Rich column is well-worth reading.

West Virginia…

joined the Union as the 35th state on this date in 1863.

According to the Library of Congress:

The land which formed the new state originally constituted part of Virginia. Historically, the two areas differed culturally, as pioneering individuals traditionally settled the western portion, while a slave holding aristocratic society developed in the eastern portion. Westerners made an unsuccessful attempt to formally separate from Virginia in 1769. When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, the residents of the western counties, few of whom owned slaves, decided to stay with the Union. “Mountaineers always freemen” is the state’s motto.

View President Lincoln’s handwritten corrections to Secretary of State Seward’s opinion on the admission of West Virginia.

Where will you meet your Waterloo?

Napoleon was defeated by Wellington at the Belgian village of Waterloo on this date in 1815.

The BBC has a concise history of the battle including this introduction:

The Battle of Waterloo was fought thirteen kilometres south of Brussels between the French, under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Allied armies commanded by the Duke of Wellington from Britain and General Blücher from Prussia. The French defeat at Waterloo drew to a close 23 years of war beginning with the French Revolutionary wars in 1792 and continuing with the Napoleonic Wars from 1803. There was a brief eleven-month respite when Napoleon was forced to abdicate, exiled to the island of Elba. However, the unpopularity of Louis XVIII and the economic and social instability of France motivated him to return to Paris in March 1815. The Allies soon declared war once again. Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo marked the end of the Emperor’s final bid for power, the so-called ‘100 Days’, and the final chapter in his remarkable career.

The Writer’s Almanac has a brief history as well. Hear Garrison Keillor tell it.

The decisive Day is come

Or so Abigail Adams wrote to husband John the day after the Battle of Bunker Hill, which was fought on this date in 1775. The first major battle of the American Revolutionary War, it was fought more than a year before the Declaration of Independence.

After the action at Lexington and Concord in April (Paul Revere’s ride), the reinforced British were camped in Boston. The Massachusetts Committee of Safety decided to contain the British by occupying the heights of Charlestown north of Boston (and Dorchester south of it). The militiamen, however, did not have artillery to defend the heights once occupied.

By the morning of June 17, some 1,200 Americans were entrenched on Breed’s Hill in Charlestown — not Bunker Hill, which would have been a better choice. Reinforcements increased the number to 1,500 by afternoon. They were bombarded by British cannon shooting uphill and without much effect. Some 2,200 British troops attacked the fortified position around 3:30 — uphill, carrying 125 pound knapsacks. The first two assaults were thrown back, but the third succeeded as American gun powder ran out.

Though the British took the hill, they suffered more than 1,000 casualties — “The dead lay as thick as sheep in a fold.” American losses were less than 500.

The Battle of Bunker Hill encouraged the colonies. It proved that American forces could inflict heavy losses on the British.

An American officer, William Prescott, is said to have ordered during the battle, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”

The Massachusetts Historical Society has an excellent web site relating to the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Rating the Presidents

C-Span had a panel of historians and other observers rate the presidents in 1999. The 41 presidents were evaluated on Public Persuasion, Moral Authority, Relations With Congress, Crisis Leadership, International Relations, Vision/Setting Agenda, Economic Management, Administrative Skills, Pursued Equal Justice For All, and Performance Within Context of Times. Select from the results for each of the categories or view the overall results.

The same survey was also conducted among C-SPAN viewers.

Lincoln, Washington and the Roosevelts (FDR and Teddy) topped both surveys.

One Who Yawns

As NewMexiKen notes below, “Several sources give June 16, 1829, as Geronimo’s date of birth.” In her excellent 1976 biography of Geronimo, however, Angie Debo concludes:

Geronimo was born in the early 1820’s near the upper Gila in the mountains crossed by the present state boundary [Arizona-New Mexico], probably on the Arizona side near the present Clifton. …

He was given the name Goyahkla, with the generally accepted meaning “One Who Yawns,’ why or under what circumstances is not known.

As an adult in battle he was called Geronimo by Mexican soldiers, perhaps because they could not pronounce Goyahkla, or perhaps to invoke Saint Jerome (Geronimo is Spanish for Jerome). The name was adopted for him by his own people.

Even more Geronimo

Some have wondered what motivated Geronimo to fight so fiercely. Perhaps this from his autobiography (written with S.M. Barrett in 1905) explains a little:

Geronimo.jpgIn the summer of 1858, being at peace with the Mexican towns as well as with all the neighboring Indian tribes, we went south into Old Mexico to trade. Our whole tribe (Bedonkohe Apaches) went through Sonora toward Casa Grande, our destination, but just before reaching that place we stopped at another Mexican town called by the Indians Kas-ki-yeh. Here we stayed for several days, camping outside the city. Every day we would go into town to trade, leaving our camp under the protection of a small guard so that our arms, supplies, and women and children would not be disturbed during our absence.

Late one afternoon when returning from town we were met by a few women and children who told us that Mexican troops from some other town had attacked our camp, killed all the warriors of the guard, captured all our ponies, secured our arms, destroyed our supplies, and killed many of our women and children. Quickly we separated, concealing ourselves as best we could until nightfall, when we assembled at our appointed place of rendezvous–a thicket by the river. Silently we stole in one by one: sentinels were placed, and, when all were counted, I found that my aged mother, my young wife, and my three small children were among the slain. There were no lights in camp, so without being noticed I silently turned away and stood by the river. How long I stood there I do not know, but when I saw the warriors arranging for a council I took my place.

More Geronimo

In its obituary of Geronimo, The Times provided this quote:

Gen. Miles, in his memoirs, describes his first impression of Geronimo when he was brought into camp by Lawton, thus: “He was one of the brightest, most resolute, determined-looking men that I have ever encountered. He had the clearest, sharpest dark eye I think I have ever seen, unless it was that of Gen. Sherman.”

Geronimo

Several sources give June 16, 1829, as Geronimo’s date of birth. It’s not clear to NewMexiKen that the Apaches were using the Gregorian calendar at that time. And, indeed, one of those sources, The New York Times, stated in its obituary of Geronimo in February 1909 that he was nearly 90 — not 79 as this birth date would indicate. But, he had to be born some time. So why not June 16?

House divided speech

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 during that campaign, which Lincoln lost. It seems to be about as succinct a statement of the core issue of the Civil War as one could find.