1789: The United States House of Representatives holds its first meeting. Two hundred-odd years later, it seems altogether tragicomically fitting that this meeting is held on April Fool's Day.
1865: On General Ulysses Grant's orders, General Philip Sheridan launches his corps against rebel positions at Five Forks, south of Petersburg, Virginia. The Union forces soundly defeat the rebels holding the position and seize the vital rail junction, forever closing off that supply route and severing Robert E. Lee from his meager reserves. With this and the Union victory at Fort Stedman, Grant senses the elusive victory at last within his reach. He orders a general assault for the following day.
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1792: Congress creates the United States Mint at Philadelphia. The United States begins standardized minting of decimal coinage.
1865: Union troops surge forward from all positions outside Petersburg. Lee's rebel army, hopelessly outnumbered, outgunned, demoralized, and unsupplied, cannot hold. Lee begins a long and painful retreat, trying to keep his army alive as he moves ever westward, seeking a base of supplies. As huge columns of Union infantry follow him, Union cavalry slices along parallel routes, progressively capturing and destroying his potential supply bases. Please see entry for 8 April 1865.
1917: President Wilson, addressing a joint session of Congress, recounts the systematic course of German misconduct toward the United States, which heretofore has been neutral in World War I. Outside the Capitol building, crowds of angry citizens await the government's considered response to the international threat. "There is one choice we cannot make, we will not make; we are incapable of choosing the path of submission," Wilson tells Congress. He asks Congress to declare war on Germany and the other members of the Central Powers. Please see entry for 6 April 1917.
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1956: The United States Supreme Court rules that states cannot prosecute persons for the crime of sedition. It does not do away with that crime (a slightly lesser variant of treason). Instead, it rules that federal statutes enacted in 1940 have superceded any state interest in the matter. Probably a correct ruling (if sedition is a crime against the United States, the United States and not its component states should prosecute the crime), the doctrine of pre-emption will grow until it is perhaps the single most powerful--and most intrusive--tool the federal government has to interfere in private and public life.
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1965: MiG fighters from North Vietnam shoot down several American planes, the first air-to-air losses in the Vietnam war. Although the air combat toll will mirror that of the Korean War--where the enemy lost approximately 15 aircraft to each American fighter lost in the air--the losses come as an unpleasant surprise. American air combat schools will quickly gear up to sharpen our flyers' air combat ("dogfighting") skills, as the rules of engagement in Vietnam will too often prohibit the effective use of long-ranged air-to-air missiles.
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1933: President Franklin Roosevelt issues an executive order requiring all citizens to surrender their holdings of gold to the Federal Reserve. In exchange, they are to receive coin or currency for the value of the precious metal they surrender. Please see entry for 6 March 1933.
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1862: At six o'clock in the morning, Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston hurls the 40,000 men of his Army of Tennessee against the Union encampments on the southern bank of the Tennessee River. General Ulysses S. Grant commands the Union force of approximately 33,000 men centered on Pittsburgh Landing. His forces are unprepared for the Rebel onslaught, many camps not having thrown up any entrenchments. The Rebel attack takes his troops by surprise and most of the Union army spends the day in headlong retreat, finally sheltering at the landing under the protection of the heavy guns mounted in the ironclads on the river. Three things prevent the day from being a total disaster: Johnston's poor tactical layout of his troops (he lined up his three corps one after the other instead of massing each to one side or the other of its neighbors, thus contributing to confusion as the Rebel troops advanced); time wasted by Rebels plundering the hastily abandoned Union camps; and the indomitable fighting spirit of Grant and several of his subordinates, especially William Sherman, John McClernand, and Stephen Hurlbut. Johnston will not live to see his army's success this day; he suffers what he thinks is a grazing wound to his leg while leading an attack, and a few minutes later is dead, having bled to death. The loss of his inspired leadership will bear heavily on the final outcome. Two places in particular bear incredibly heavy fighting: A densely wooded stretch of sunken road that Hurlbut will defend so tenaciously it will be called "The Hornet's Nest," and a small wooden church almost dead center in the battlefield. The church, as it happens, will contribute its name to this singularly bloody contest between Americans: The Battle of Shiloh. Please see entry for 7 April 1862.
1917: The Senate votes 82 to 6 in favor of President Wilson's request. The House of Representatives votes 373 to 50 to support him. Jeannette Rankin, a representative from Montana and the only woman representative at that time, votes against the resolution, fearing as she does so that she has committed political suicide and nullified her efforts for women's rights (she survives the vote and will be the only member of Congress to vote against America's entry into World War II). America enters its first truly global war. It will be the deciding factor in democracy's victory over imperialism.
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1862: General Ulysses S. Grant has used the night after the disastrous first day at Shiloh to great advantage. He has reformed his lines, reorganized his shattered divisions, replenished ammunition, adjusted field commanders, and obtained more than 25,000 fresh troops from another Union force led by General Buell. This second day of Shiloh is almost a mirror image of the first. The Rebel troops, tired, low on battle supplies, and bereft of their slain leader, General Johnston, cannot stand up to Grant's relentless attacks. By day's end Grant has regained all the ground lost the day before and more, but at terrible cost. Union losses in killed, wounded, and missing exceed 13,700. The rebels lose almost 11,000 men in the battle, but they cannot replace their losses as easily as Grant can. Worse, the spirit of individualism that is the hallmark (some say the plague) of the Confederate armies tends to show itself most strongly in times of crisis; by the end of the battle the rebel army, which numbered 40,000 the day before, can barely muster 20,000 men.
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1865: Sheridan's Union cavalry seizes Lynchburg, Virginia, and Appomattox Station, Virginia, hours ahead of Robert E. Lee and his retreating, increasingly ragged rebel army. Lee camps for the night at Appomattox Courthouse, and sits quietly as his scouts bring in the somber news. His army is surrounded; earlier in the afternoon a piece of it, one entire corps, was split from him and forced to surrender after a one-sided fight. In his heart, Lee knows that further resistance is futile. He dispatches messengers, seeking an audience with Ulysses S. Grant for the purpose of surrendering his army to the Union commander. Please see entry for 9 April 1865.
1913: The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution takes effect, providing for the direct election of Senators.
1958: President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposes mutual inspections to enforce a mutual nuclear test-ban treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviets categorically reject the proposal. Many years later, after the collapse of the morally bankrupt Soviet Union, it will become public knowledge that the Soviets systematically ignored such bans throughout the decades of the Cold War.
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1865: General Ulysses S. Grant and General Robert E. Lee meet at the home of Wilmer McLean at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. McLean, incidentally, had a home at Manassas, Virginia. It was centermost in the line of battle at the first battle of the Civil War; now, his home is the setting for the final contfrontation of that struggle. Their discussions are cordial and, for Lee, relievingly kind. Grant, acting on President Abraham Lincoln's instructions that the purpose of obtaining Lee's surrender is to end the war and reunite all Americans into one nation as quickly and compassionately as follows, demands the unconditional surrender of Lee's forces but permits soldiers, once having surrendered, to retain their personal firearms (which they will need for hunting) and their personal mounts (the horses being needed for spring plowing) and simply return home as quickly as possible. Thus begins the phase that Lincoln prays for when he urges the country, now that the American Civil War has finally ended, to proceed "with malice toward none and charity toward all." The war was and remains America's bloodiest conflict, having claimed between 600,000 and 800,000 American lives in four terrible years. But the tragedy has not run its full course yet. Please see entry for 14 April 1865.
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1790: Responding to demands by John Stevens, who in 1788 invented the steam boiler, for commercial protection for his unique invention, Congress establishes the United States Patent Office. Its purpose is to encourage research and invention by providing protection for inventors against unfair competition and give them incentives to invent new devices. Less than a hundred years later, the United States Commissioner of Patents will ask the President to close the office, averring that "everything that can be invented has been invented."
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1951: President Harry Truman relieves General Douglas MacArthur of his command of United States troops in Korea. MacArthur returns to a hero's welcome in New York City to address the United Nations, and for several months there is a serious effort to enlist him as a presidential candidate. Instead, MacArthur retires from the Army, giving his famous speech wherein he repeats the old camp song's line that "old soldiers never die, they simply fade away." A few months later, MacArthur will address the graduating class of cadets at West Point and deliver an even more stirring speech, using the hallmark motto of the United States Military Academy and speaking a fundamental truth about those who have worn our nation's colors: "Duty . . . honor . . . country . . . the long gray line has never failed us." In MacArthur's place comes general Matthew Ridgway, who embarks on his task in Korea with two simple objectives: To defeat the Communist forces decisively on the battlefield, while avoiding political entanglements that could spark a new world war. Ridgway will succeed excellently in both duties.
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1937: In a series of bitterly argued decisions (the nine justices repeatedly decide these cases on 5-4 votes), the United States Supreme Court upholds the legality of the National Labor Relations Act. This statute and its various enforcement regulations is the underpinning of labor unions' ability to bargain with--some say effect control of--the industries in which their members work. By the late 1990's, the questions of both the efficacy of the labor unions and the advisability of governmental interference in the marketplace, and the workplace, will be no nearer a consensus than the Supreme Court displayed in its decisions this fateful year.
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1970: "Houston, we have a problem." Apollo 13's commander, Jim Lovell, speaks these words with the calm born of a thorough professional, the most eloquent understatement, perhaps, in the twentieth century. Nearly every system aboard the Apollo spacecraft has just failed or is going haywire after a tremendous explosion. Lovell and his shipmates, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, are stranded midway between the Earth and the Moon, their planned mission to land on that satellite now gone. Over the next four days, the astronauts and NASA's ranks of personnel back on Earth will literally throw away the book and invent new procedures and devices to bring the astronauts home. The lunar excursion module (LEM) will be used as the spacecraft's thruster. Various components will be jury-rigged to scrub carbon dioxide from the capsule's air. Procedures for powering the spacecraft down and turning its power back on in such a way as not to overload its nearly crippled electrical supply will be devised. The result: All three astronauts will return home alive and unharmed. Throughout the history of America's space program, as of this writing, no astronauts have died in space, and only those aboard the ill-fated space shuttle Challenger will have died in flight. Three others aboard Apollo 1 will have died in a fire at the landing pad. Such is the price of discovery, a price brave men have been willing to pay and from whose valor we all reap the benefits.
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1775: British general Thomas Gage, also governor of the British colony of Massachusetts, receives an important dispatch from London. The preceding October, Massachusetts revolutionary patriots declared themselv King George III, not surprisingly, has taken umbrage at this act and has declared Massachusetts in a state of rebellion against the British crown. Gage's orders are to take immediate action to quell this uprising. He hits upon a plan to march his troops to Concord in a surprise raid and seize the Americans' arsenal there. Please see entry for 16 April 1775.
1865: President Abraham Lincoln and his wife travel to Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. to see a production of the popular comedy Our American Cousin. The mood is joyous and Lincoln, the emancipator of the slaves, the protector of the Union, the victor of the Civil War, and the man who has reunited the United States--is warmly received. He has no protection at the theater other than a few soldiers whose function is more that of an honor guard. The days of the United States Secret Service have not come. Suddenly, a gunshot halts the play. A man--John Wilkes Booth, a rebel sympathizer--shouts "Sic semper tyrannis"--"thus ever to tyrants"--and leaps from the presidential box, breaking his ankle on landing. As Booth flees the cry comes to the house, "They've shot the President!" Booth is one of a number of half-baked, disaffected rebels who see the assassination of Lincoln and his chief subordinates as the only way to restore Southern honor and reconstitute the now-dead Confederacy. The plotters miss Vice-President Andrew Johnson entirely but grievously wound Secretary of State Seward. Lincoln dies a few hours later. Booth will survive a few more days; the rest of the plotters, until July.
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1967: 100,000 people demonstrate in New York City, and 50,000 likewise demonstrate in San Francisco, against the United States's involvement in the Vietnam war. The numbers of demonstrations, and numbers of citizens involved in them, will grow as disaffection with the war in Southeast Asia spreads. Though some demonstrate because they have always opposed American involvement overseas, much of the anti-war movement will gain its momentum from the ridiculous policies clamped on America's military leaders by politicians who fail to understand the military's role or the exigencies of the situation. Frankly, the demonstrators should be respected for having exercised their rights to assemble peaceably (save for those who turn to violence as a means of self-expression), but tragically, the demonstrations will all too soon blur the line between opposing the war and dishonoring the warriors who answered their nation's call.
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1775: Dr. Joseph Warren learns of General Gage's plan to raid the patriots' arsenal at Concord. He sends Paul Revere to Lexington to warn John Hancock and Samual Adams, and to tell the people in Concord that the British are coming and they should hide the sought-after weapons. Please see entry for 18 April 1775.
1862: Congress abolishes slavery in the District of Columbia.
1972: United States military aircraft return in force to North Vietnam, bombing Hanoi, Haiphong, and other principal cities in the Communist country. This is Operation ROLLING THUNDER II, and it is the strongest display of American air power in the entire Vietnam war. It is the first attempt by American aircraft to bomb North Vietnam's major cities since 1968. Press geniuses and others who have never heard a hostile shot predict staggering American losses, as North Vietnam and especially Hanoi and Haiphong have the "strongest antiaircraft defenses in the world." What the "geniuses" fail to consider is that the American planners know this and structure their air offensive accordingly. In a matter of days, North Vietnam's air defenses are shattered--and the B-52s keep coming. Destruction of industrial, communications, and transportation resources is staggering--and the B-52s keep coming. It is surmised today that this demonstration of America's true war-making potential persuaded the Communists that they had won all they could in an open conflict with the United States and turned their thinking to accepting the Paris Peace Accords, thus ending American participation in the Vietnam conflict. Certainly, the combination of ground and air combat has so battered the North Vietnamese that it will be three more years before they can conquer South Vietnam, by that time alone and virtually defenseless. American prisoners of war will confirm that their unbearable treatment at the hands of Communist guards finally lessened when the bombers began ROLLING THUNDER II. One cannot help but wonder whether Vietnam would be a Communist enclave today if the politicians, having encountered North Vietnamese intransigence in the 1960's, had let the thunder roll so effectively a decade earlier.
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1790: Benjamin Franklin, American patriot, statesman, diplomat, drafter of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, American ambassador to France, and inventor, dies in Philadelphia. He is eighty-four years old.
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1775: Late at night, British officers and sergeants rouse their troops from sleep and send them out of Boston heading for Concord and the cache of patriot arms there. Dr. Warren learns the British regulars are afoot (throughout the Revolutionary War, patriots' willingness to advise the Continental Army of the British moves will plague the enemy) and sends Paul Revere and other dispatch riders to Lexington and Concord. Revere, a silversmith in civilian life, mounts his horse and rides into history. By the time the British reach their objectives, the countryside will be roused against them. There will be a surprise on the morrow, but the British will not be inflicting it. Please see entry for 19 April 1775.
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1775: British troops arrive outside Lexington early in the morning. They find seventy-five minutement under the command of Captain John Parker ready and waiting for them. The British leader, Major Pitcairn, orders his men to surround and disarm the minutemen but not to fire on them. The British advance. No one knows who fires the first shot, but fighting erupts, killing eight minutemen and wounding nine. The minutemen disperse, and the British, after giving three cheers, reform their ranks and march to Concord. There, they find over 150 militia from Concord and nearby Lincoln advancing toward them. Outnumbered, the Americans withdraw through Concord, the British occupying the town. Their search for the contraband weapons is anything but precise. Outside Concord, the militia, seeing, the flames and smoke from gun carriages the British are burning, mistakenly believe the British are putting Concord to the torch and decide to attack. Their assault kills three three English soldiers and the British panic and run. By the time they reform and return to Concord, their commanders can see that Americans from all the nearby townships are filtering onto the battlefield from every point of the compass. It is now the British who are outnumbered, and they are being surrounded. They withdraw--and encounter ambush after ambush as they make their way back to Boston. By the close of the day's fighting, American muskets have killed seventy-three redcoats and wounded 174 more, with 26 missing. American losses are less than half that. There is no question now that war has come to America. A revolutionary war, that will end six years later in the victory of the new nation, the United States of America. At ten o'clock in the morning, while fighting is still going on in Concord, Philadelphia post rider Israel Bissel receives a dispatch bearing news of the skirmish between American and British forces at Lexington, Massachusetts. He mounts a horse and begins a ride through the New England countryside to alert patriots in various cities and towns. Bissell will complete his circuit and return to Philadelphia early in the morning on 24 April, having covered in five days a distance that the fastest stage of the time requires more than eight days to traverse.
1898: Congress, increasingly incensed over the belligerent attitude of the Spanish monarchy in the tense days following the sinking of the battleship Maine at Havana, approves a joint resolution calling for military action against Spain. The resolution is tantamount to a declaration of war. Tensions increase even more between the two powers. Please see entry for 22 April 1898.
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1836: General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, Presidente (i.e., dictator) of Mexico, arrives on a long low ridge in southeast Texas, overlooking scrub land and wooded groves backed by the sluggish Buffalo Bayou. Santa Anna commands approximately 750 men, part of the nearly 6,000 troops he brought into Texas on his punitive campaign to crush the Texans' bid for independence. He has spent the last week alternately pursuing Sam Houston's ragtag Texas Army and burning townships where he has failed to capture the Texas government. In the afternoon, Texas cavalry probe his lines but retreat when he sends forward several companies of Mexican infantry. Astonishingly, though Santa Anna holds the high ground, he surrenders this important advantage at day's end, withdrawing his entire army several hundred yards into wooded land bordering a marshy bog on the banks of the San Jacinto River. Throughout the night and most of the following day, though the Mexicans construct makeshift breastworks from their supply crates, they take no action either to locate or engage the Texas Army. Reinforcements will reach Santa Anna early the next morning, bringing his strength to approximately $1,500. Please see entry for 21 April 1836.
1918: 3,200 German troops, supported by a heavy concentration of artillery, attack Seicheprey in France, seeking a quick and humiliating defeat on the American troops stationed there. 470 sons of Connecticut, commanded by Major George Rau, stand and defend the town. In two days of hard fighting, the Americans, initially forced to concede the town, win it back and drive the Germans from the surrounding woods. It is America's first engagement, and first victory, in World War I. Liberty Bond sales soar as news of the fight reaches the home front.
1988: The United States Supreme Court rules that Congress may tax the interest earned on bonds issued by states and local governments. The effect of this ruling is immediate and startling; state and municipal bonds lose much of their attractiveness and investment potential. Another case of the government knowing what is best for everyone?
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1836: At 4:30 in the afternoon on a warm, humid April day, the scattered plains and swampland of San Jacinto, Texas, suddenly erupt with gunfire and the war cry, "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!" After weeks of retreating, after enduring the bitter news of defeats and massacres of Texans, General Sam Houston leads his army of approximately 850 men against Santa Anna's Mexican army, which is in bivouac on the shores of the San Jacinto River. Sherman's 2nd Texas Regiment strikes the Companias de preferencia on the Mexican right flank and the Mexican troops, unprepared for the assault, panic and rout almost immediately. They stream southward behind the Mexican breastworks, adding to the confusion of the Texan onslaught all along the Mexican lines and preventing their comrades from forming line of battle. Having been drilled in Napoleonic formal battle tactics, the Mexicans are not versed in sudden, fluid assault combat, and as the Texans strike savagely, rupturing the breastworks and smashing both the flanks and center of the Mexican line, Santa Anna's army comes apart. The battle itself is over in less than twenty minutes; the slaughter continues until after dark. More than 800 Mexicans die in the Texan's vengeance, and another 600 are taken prisoner. Captured and brought before Houston the next day, Santa Anna agrees to peace terms that make Texas a free nation--the only nation ever to elect to join the United States of America.
1945: American forces capture Nürnberg, Germany. This city, the "spiritual center of Naziism," was the home of the famous annual rallies of the Nazi Party. In the years immediately following World War II, Nürnberg will gain another bit of celebrity because of the Nazis. It will be the home of the war crimes trials held by the victorious Allied powers.
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1625: The Dutch West India Company establishes a trade outpost on Manhattan Island, naming it New Amsterdam. Today, we know that city as New York City.
1875: J. Sterling Morton, an agriculturalist living in Nebraska, comes up with the idea of encouraging Americans to plant trees, both for beauty and to prevent soil erosion. His idea takes off, and within ten years more than forty states will make this day Arbor Day, now recognized nationally.
1898: American warships standing off of Cuba exchange fire with Spanish coastal fortifications. Please see entry for 24 April 1898.
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1956: The United States Supreme Court rules that it is illegal to segregate passengers on intrastate public transportation according to race. This is one of several rulings by which the Supreme Court tears apart the morally repugnant practice known as "separate but equal." A generation later, Americans will seek the abolition of another such system, in another country--the policies of apartheid practiced in South Africa.
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1898: The kingdom of Spain declares war on the United States. Please see entry for 25 April 1898.
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1898: Congress declares war on Spain. American military forces begin to converge on Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Please see entry for 27 April 1898.
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1865: John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, is brought to bay in an abandoned barn after an intensive manhunt by military forces. What happens next is still unclear. Either Booth commits suicide or, as the Army determines, one of its soldiers shoots him as he refuses to leave the now-burning barn. Either way, Booth is dead--and so is born the first great presidential assassination conspiracy theory, which even today has advocates. The historical record does support a conspiracy, but it is the one that was known in 1865.
1976: Pan American Airlines becomes the first airline in the world to have nonstop service between New York and Tokyo, Japan. It thus continues its tradition of air service to the Far East, a tradition born in the 1930's with the series of flying boats that Pan-Am operated under the names "China Clippers."
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1898: Admiral George Dewey, having concentrated his fleet, steams into the South China Sea. His destination: Manila Bay in the Philippine Islands. Please see entry for 30 April 1898.
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1945: Communist partisans capture Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and twelve of Mussolini's Fascist cabinet as they attempt to flee Italy to the north. Mussolini fell from power and was imprisoned by the resurgent Italian monarchy, but was rescued by German commando genius Otto Skorzeny on Hitler's direct orders. He has maintained the semblance of a rump Fascist government in northern Italy, but with the Axis collapse in the closing days of World War II, he fell again. The partisans execute all of their prisoners and hang Mussolini and his mistress' bodies from the wreckage of a gas station. Mussolini's erstwhile savior, Adolf Hitler, will outlive his Italian ally by only a few days.
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1970: The South Vietnamese army begins Operation LAM SON 719, a major drive into Communist enclaves in Cambodia. Their plan is to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, severing the supply lines for Communist forces in South Vietnam and Cambodia. American ground forces are not part of the offensive, although American advisors do participate with South Vietnamese units and American aircraft, particularly helicopters, are heavily involved in the operation. The offensive's initial successes startle the North Vietnamese; if the South Vietnamese forces seize their objectives and turn north instead of south, the whole of North Vietnam lies open to them. The Communists reinforce and counterattack quickly, and ultimately the offensive is a costly failure. American losses are small, but losses among American helicopter crews are extremely high. Still, the offensive cripples much of North Vietnam's offensive potential and disrupts enemy supply and communications traffic for many months to come. If the South Vietnamese and Americans had tried this route several years earlier, the face of the war in Vietnam might have been very much different. Another case of "too little, too late."
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1789: George Washington begins his first of two terms as America's first President.
1898: Admiral Dewey's American naval vessels arrive off Manila Bay. His intelligence apprises him that the Spanish fleet in Philippine waters, while ostensibly larger than his, is "barely able to deal with a flotilla of Chinese junks." The only modern Spanish warship in Manila Bay is one cruiser that cannot take to sea because her hull leaks. Still, Dewey's fleet represents the only American naval force able to intervene in the Philippine Islands, while Spain has the potential to reinforce her positions. If Dewey is to take the Philippines, he must act quickly and decisively.
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