1863: Footsore Confederate soldiers in A. P. Hill's corps, learning that there may be a stockpile of shoes there, march toward Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Instead, they encounter Union cavalrymen on the ridges west of the town. A fierce battle begins and rapidly grows as Lee feeds more and more men from his Army of Northern Virginia into the fight. John Buford, commanding the cavalry division that is blocking Lee's leading brigades, recognizes the excellent defensive value of the terrain around and behind him. He notifies General Meade, commanding the Union Army of the Potomac, and Meade determines to fight Lee at Gettysburg. The first day sees savage fighting north and west of the town, and by day's end Meade's troops are digging in along fishhook-shaped high ground formed by Cemetery Ridge and Cemetery hill below Gettysburg. For three days, 62,000 rebels and more than 80,000 Union soldiers will fight one of the most important battles of the Civil War. See entries for 26 June 1863, 2 July 1863, and 3 July 1863.
1971: The Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution lowers the voting age in national elections from twenty-one to eighteen. One argument by those sponsoring this amendment was that it was unfair to make young Americans susceptible to the military draft (i.e., to expect them to defend their liberties with their lives) without granting them one of the greatest liberties our Republic may offer. Spinning off from this amendment, many states will lower the age at which one may purchase alcoholic beverages. Years later, claiming that it will curb teenage drinking and driving (that is, driving after drinking), many states will raise the drinking age back to twenty-one.
1980: President Carter signs into effect the Motor Carrier Act, reducing federal regulation of interstate trucking. Although his motive may have been to curry favor with organized labor in hopes of winning reelection this year, the step is still a refreshing one, proving that government can, on occasion, be reduced in its intrusion into its citizens' lives.
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1776: Congress at Philadelphia adopts a series of resolutions proposed by Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794) on 7 June. Lee's Resolutions, drafted by him after the Virginia Convention instructs him to propose independence from Great Britain, urge the colonies to make foreign alliances and to form a confederation under a constitution to be approved by each state. They also contend, "That these United States are and of right ought to be free and independent states." Please see entry for 4 July 1776.
1863: Lee's senior lieutenants cannot agree on what their commander's next step should be at Gettysburg. Despite heavy casualties the day before, Ewell and A. P. Hill, commanding his II and III Corps, recommend a renewed, all-out effort on Cemetery Hill, the lynchpin of the Union position. Longstreet, commanding I Corps, wants to strike along the Union left flank and turn their position from the rear. Lee holds back from either option, waiting for the rest of Longstreet's corps to arrive and praying for the appearance of J.E.B. Stuart and his cavalry, who has gone off on another "glory ride" somewhere in the Union rear (please see entry for 9 June, 1863). It is late in the day before Texan John Hood's division in Longstreet's corps reaches the battlefield. Meanwhile, Union general Sickles pushes his troops out from an easily defensible position in to the middle of a peach orchard and, when Hood obligingly attacks him, suffers a rupture of his corps. Rebel troops reach the Round Tops (two hills at the extreme southern end of Meade's line) after savage fighting in a rocky defillade known as the Devil's Den, moments after an observant Union officer notices that the position is undefended and hurries troops onto the hills. Hill is repulsed, and the savagery of the fighting seems to do something to General Longstreet. He temporarily loses his famous drive.
1940: Congress passes the Export Control Act, which gives the President the power to halt or prohibit the shipment of materials vital to U.S. defense. President Roosevelt will use the Act in October to embargo oil and steel shipments to Japan, after shipments to other Axis powers have not been halted. Japan will call this "an unfriendly act." The embargo causes great worry in the Japanese government, since the expansionists require great quantities of these strategic materials to continue their undeclared war in China and to fuel their plans for aggrandizement elsewhere in the Pacific. They begin looking at other sources of raw materials, notably in Southeast Asia, and they begin making plans for the military conquest of that region. A principal part of the plan that will evolve is a preemptive strike on American naval and air strength in the Philippines and at Pearl Harbor. Please see entry for 31 July 1940.
1943: Having learned the arts of amphibious and jungle warfare on Guadalcanal, the United States Army lands on New Georgia in the central Solomon Islands. The fierce, bitter fighting gains little notoriety against the backdrop of the continuing war, but in this otherwise nearly forgotten campaign one name stands above all others. Private Rodger Young is a member of a platoon-sized patrol that is ambushed by Japanese machine gunners concealed in a camouflaged and well fortified bunker. Wounded in the first burst of fire, Young nevertheless attacks the bunker, firing his rifle as he advances. He is wounded a second time but continues to close on the enemy position. Finally, at nearly arm's length range, he engages the enemy with grenades and gunfire, demolishing the bunker, but in so doing he receives a third, and fatal, wound. His unselfish bravery not only eliminates the Japanese ambushers but enables his platoon to escape without more casualties. For this, Young posthumously receives the Medal of Honor, and a place in history's hallowed roster of heroes, memorialized in the march, The Ballad of Rodger Young. "To the everlasting glory of the infantry / Shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young."
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1814: General Jacob Brown, leading a small but well trained American force, captures Fort Erie at the southern mouth of the Niagara River. The Americans push north along the river to Chippewa. This is the start of his campaign into Canada in this, the third year of the War of 1812 Please see entries for 5 July 1814 and 25 July 1814.
1863: At 1:00 p.m., 159 Confederate guns open on the Union center on Cemetery Ridge, south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. This preparatory bombardment is supposed to weaken the Union lines so that General George Pickett, leading 12,000 infantry, may pierce and defeat Meade's army. He has chosen to assault the Union line at a place where a stone wall fronts the fortified positions Meade's troops have dug. Above them, on the heights of the ridge, are massed hundreds of cannon. The rebel artillerymen do the best they can, but they are outnumbered, they have very limited ammunition, and the Union gunners are superbly trained. By 2:00, the commander of the rebel artillery urges Longstreet to commit his troops while the rebel guns still have ammunition to support the attack. Longstreet, a most experienced combat leader, probably knows what is about to happen and either cannot or will not bring himself to issue the order, and finally Pickett urges his men forward without their corps commander's instruction. Pickett's men go forward under a renewed and increasingly devastating Union artillery barrage. They must cross 2,000 yards--more than a mile--of open terrain, under fire every step of the way. Although a few troops do manage to penetrate the Union lines, they are quickly and easily disposed of by Union reserves and the issue is never really in doubt. What is left of Pickett's command withdraws from Cemetery Ridge after suffering appalling casualties. When Lee asks him about the state of his division, when it will be ready to fight again, Picket answers in anguish, "General, I have no division!" Lee himself says of the disastrous charge, "It is all my fault." Pickett will never be the same after Gettysburg, a battle in which more than 20,000 men on each side have died. Lee ends his invasion of the North, giving up on his dream of precipitating a political crisis in Washington, and retires his army to Virginia.
1958: The United States and Great Britain sign an agreement to cooperate in the development of nuclear weapons.
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1776: With American forces already engaged in fighting British troops, Congress in Philadelphia signs the Declaration of Independence. There are few enough documents in the world's history that set forth the principles of liberty, and none proclaim them as elegantly or as boldly as our Declaration. It is the foundation not only for the American Revolution but for the even greater documents that will issue from America's victory in the Revolutionary War--the Constitution and its first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights.
1850: President Zachary Taylor, 65, has a fondness for cherries. He especially likes them iced. He also is partial to iced milk. On this hot Fourth of July, he consumes an awesome quantity of both. He soon is suffering from gastroenteritis. Please see entry for 9 July 1850.
1863: General Ulysses S. Grant captures Vicksburg, Mississippi, after a brief but bitter siege. Vicksburg, the last rail and major ferry link on the Mississippi River, was not prepared by its commander, General Pemberton, for a siege and the citizens have been reduced to living in caves dug into the bluffs over the river and eating pets and rats. The defeat is crushing to the Confederacy in material and morale effects. Severing the Mississippi cuts the Confederacy in two, leaving its eastern and western states unable to help one another. Coming on the Fourth of July, and the day after the disaster at Gettysburg, it devastates morale. For years afterward, Vickburg's citizens refuse to celebrate July Fourth.
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1814: General Winfield Scott, leading his 1,300-man brigade of Brown's army, reinforced by approximately 1,300 militia and Indians, attacks a British force of approximately equal size and composition led by General Riall at Chippewa. Scott captures Chippewa after a brief but fierce fight. After the battle, Brown will advance as far as Fort George at the northern mouth of the Niagara (emptying into Lake Ontario), but lacking support, he will have to withdraw, eventually back to Fort Erie Please see entry for 25 July 1814.
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1960: President Eisenhower, responding to Fidel Castro's threats to seize all American-owned property and business interests in Cuba, cuts Cuba's sugar quota by 95 percent July 6 and declares that the United States will never permit a regime "dominated by international Communism" to exist in the Western Hemisphere. Soviet premier Khrushchev threatens to use Soviet missiles to protect Cuba from U.S. military intervention.
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1865: Most of the rebel conspirators who took part in John Wilkes Booth's plot to murder President Abraham Lincoln are executed by hanging. One conspirator is spared, but spends his life in prison. Sic semper murderers.
1937: Japanese forces, acting on the order of the new Prime Minister Konoye, invade China. Although they will seize Beijing on 28 July and end up controlling much of China's coastal area, the Japanese will never be able to dominate their ancient enemy. The brutality of their invasion (the Japanese will massacre some 200,000 Chinese civilians in Nanking alone) will rouse world opinion against Japan and will unite the Nationalists under Chang Kai-Shek and the Communists under Mao Tse-Tung, who will (temporarily) put aside their mutual hatred to fight a common enemy. Japan's invasion of China will be one important factor behind President Franklin Roosevelt's later decision to freeze Japanese assets in the United States and to restrict oil, rubber, and other strategic materials from Japan . . . which, in turn, will lead the Japanese to consider new military expansion throughout the Pacific, beginning with a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
1978: The Solomon Islands gain independence from Great Britain. They have been a British possession for eighty-five years. Bitter fighting in 1942 and 1943 reclaimed the islands from the Japanese, who invaded them as part of their "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." Please see entry for 2 July 1943.
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1853: Commodore Matthew Perry, commanding seven U.S. Naval vessels, arrives in Edo Bay, Japan. Dispatched by President Fillmore to end Japan's "closed nation" practice and to seek a treaty with Japan, Perry insists that the treaty is "a matter of right . . . not . . . a favor." He departs on 16 July, stating that he will return the following spring for the Japanese reply.
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1850: President Taylor dies of gastroenteritis. Vice President Millard Fillmore succeeds to the Presidency.
1943: Paratroopers of the 505th Airborne Regiment jump over Sicily in the opening move of Operation HUSKY, the Anglo-American invasion of that island. The jump takes place at night, and high winds drive many of the paratroopers and glider-borne troops off course. Americans and soldiers from a brigade of the British 1st Airborne Division find themselves scattered all over the southeastern end of the Mediterranean island. Nevertheless, the 505th seizes the high ground near Vittoria and Ragusa, sets up road blocks, demoralizes the local defenders, and assists in blocking the Axis counterattack the next day. Paratroopers from the 504th Airborne Regiment will reinforce them on 11 July.
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1938: Douglas Corrigan flies nonstop from Los Angeles to New York Please see entry for 16 July 1938.
1943: Operation HUSKY, the Allied invasion of Sicily, begins. Sicily is the logical next step after the Allies' success in driving German troops, led by Erwin Rommel, from North Africa; it is a vital strategic point in the central Mediterranean Sea, and a stepping stone to the "boot" of Italy and thus the continent of Europe. Its capture will also weaken the Italians' will to continue fighting and, Eisenhower and his planners hope, precipitate Italy's withdrawal from the war. The Allies commit two armies to this invasion: The British Eighth, under Bernard Montgomery, and the United States Seventh Army, commanded by General George S. Patton, Jr. Initially assigned only a supporting role for the British, Patton will take the Seventh Army on a fierce offensive across the western and then northern sides of the island, earning him a reputation for bold, maneuver-oriented warfare, as well as censure over comments and actions involving soldiers supposedly suffering from "shell shock."
1945: With air bases on Okinawa and in the Mariana Islands now fully operational, United States air forces are now able to begin full-scale, unrestricted bombing operations against Japan. Domination of the air will be a central part of the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands.
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1863: Conscription for the Union Army begins. Men may purchase exemptions, however, by paying another $300.00 to fight in their place.
1995: Mrs. Clinton's husband, whose service in the Vietnam War consisted solely of promising that he would enroll in ROTC if he received a student deferment and then writing a self-serving monograph justifying his lie, grants full diplomatic recognition to Communist Vietnam without first obtaining an honest accounting of its mistreatment of American POWs during the war, or any meaningful accounting of MIAs.
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1960: Nikita Khrushchev, Premier of the Soviet Union, proclaims that the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 "has died a natural death." The Monroe Doctrine states that the American continents are closed to colonization by European powers and that the U.S. will view with displeasure any European intervention in the Americas. Please see entry for 14 July 1960; please see entry for 14 October 1962.
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1953: United States aircraft bomb North Korean dams, flooding rice fields. This marks the renewal of fighting in the last days before the treaty ending the Korean War Please see entry for 27 July 1953.
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1960: President Eisenhower, responding to Soviet Premier Khrushchev's declaration that the Monroe Doctrine is dead, reaffirms the Doctrine and accuses the Soviet Union of attempting to create a "Bolshevik doctrine" for worldwide Communism expansion. Eisenhower's accusation will show merit in October, 1962, when his successor, President Kennedy, will confront Khrushchev over Soviet attempts to place ballistic missiles on the island of Cuba.
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1938: Howard Hughes sets a new speed record for flying around the world in a twin-engine Lockheed plane in 3 days, 19 hours, 14 minutes, 28 seconds.
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1938: Douglas Corrigan takes off in his 1929 Curtiss Robin, ostensibly on his return flight. Twenty-eight hours later, he lands in Dublin, Ireland. Corrigan, forever after known as "Wrong Way," insists that compass trouble led him to think he was flying west. Common people on both sides of the Atlantic lionize him. Government authorities complain that his flight and his landing were illegal.
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1979: Anastasio Somoza, dictator of Nicaragua, resigns his presidency following a seven-week civil war. He and 45 of his aides take refuge in Miami. This ends his family's 46-year dynasty in Nicaragua Please see entry for 20 July 1979.
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1945: The first atomic bomb is tested successfully at Alamagordo, New Mexico. The success of the test validates the work of the Manhattan Project and gives American military planners a viable alternative to Operation OLYMPIC, the planned invasion of Japan. Casualty projections for that operation, anticipating that the Japanese will continue the suicidal defensive tactics displayed on Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and by their kamikaze pilots, envision that as many as one million Allied troops and several times that many Japanese soldiers and civilians will be killed in the invasion. The success at Alamagordo will lead to President Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only times in history that such weapons have been used against enemy targets. Approximately 275,000 Japanese will die from the bombings or their aftermaths, but as terrible as this is, compared appropriately to the loss of life that OLYMPIC would have entailed, the atomic bombs are a better and ultimately more humane alternative.
1969: At or near midnight, Senator Edward Kennedy leaves a party held on Chappaquiddick Island. In his company is a twenty-eight-year-old lady, Mary Jo Kopechne. According to the Senator, the couple takes a wrong turn on the island, that is near Martha's Vineyard, and the car the Senator is driving falls into Poucha Pond. Senator Kennedy escapes with his life, but Miss Kopechne drowns in the accident. Strangely, the Senator will not report the incident for several hours. Almost thirty years later, although all official inquiries have ended, much controversy continues to surround this tragedy.
1975: As American politicians, having lost the spark of exploration ignited by President Kennedy and apparently having forgotten the U. S. landing on the Moon, turn off the fiscal taps for space exploration in order to spend even more on welfare, Apollo astronauts Donald Slayton, Thomas Stafford, and Van Brand link up with a Soyuz spacecraft flown by two Soviet cosmonauts. Today, American-Russian cooperation in space continues.
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1779: Former privateer Dudley Saltonsall leaves Boston in command of the largest American naval armada of the Revolution. His orders are to eject the British from a fort they are building at the head of Penobscot Bay. Saltonstall, though he has ninetten armed vessels and 2,000 troops, refuses to attack the British force of only 700 men. Two hundred American troops do land by receive poor artillery support from the expedition's artillery commander, Paul Revere. When British reinforcements arrive on 14 August, the Americans will flee to Bangor where they will ground and destroy their ships, returning to Boston on foot. Saltonstall will be cashiered for incompetence, while Revere faces court-martial for "cowardly misconduct."
1911: The State of New York removes the tolls from the Williamsburg Bridge, built in 1903. What a pity those legislators did not pass their genes on to future generations of elected leaders, for today the final payment on a toll road or bridge seems merely to be an excuse to shift the tolls to another sacred political cow.
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1979: Communist Sandinista rebels enter Managua, Nicaragua and take power over the county. One of the first acts of the five-man junta that assumes control is to expropriate all property of the Somozas and any of their supporters. Doubtlessly done "for the good of the people," very little of the expropriation ever works its way to the common folk. Judging from the many televised press conferences, however, a considerable sum will be spent keeping the head of the junta, Daniel Ortega, in crisp, freshly-starched fatigues. Well, the world needs even dapper guerrilla leaders, perhaps.
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1959: The first nuclear-powered merchant vessel the S.S. Savannah, slides down the ways at the Camden, New Jersey shipyard. Almost four decades later, despite the proven reliability and safety of nuclear power and the demonstrated value of it by the military for providing power and propulsion to maritime vessels, the number of nuclear-powered civilian craft is ridiculously small.
1969: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." These are the words Neal Armstrong speaks as he steps off of the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module and onto the surface of the moon, the first man ever to do so. The landing is even more dramatic than it seems to the millions of people watching it on television; the Eagle, the Lunar Excursion Module landing the astronauts on the moon, has only a few seconds of fuel left in its landing stage when Armstrong finds a spot smooth and stable enough to permit a safe landing. His first step on the Earth's only natural satellite marks the completion of the promise made by President Kennedy that America would be the first nation to send a man to the moon and return him home alive. One of Armstrong's Apollo XI crewmates, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, also walks on the moon, while the third member of the crew, Michael Collins, is orbiting the moon in the Apollo command module. Good luck, Mister Gorsky.
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1864: General William Tecumseh Sherman captures Atlanta, Georgia, and defeats Confederate general John Hood after a five-week siege of the important southern city. Atlanta's capital all but destroys the rebel economy and commercial network and leaves the Confederate capital, Richmond, as the only major city not under Union control. By this time, the rebels' always limited manpower pool has nearly dried up, and attrition from combat, disease, and desertion forces the rebels to fill their dwindling ranks with teenaged boys and older men. But the war will go on for almost another nine months.
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1851: Sioux Indian chiefs sign a treaty with the United States government, ceding all Sioux lands in Iowa and some lands in Minnesota to the United States.
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1870: The first through train from New York reaches the Pacific coast, completing the Trans-Continental Railway project begun years earlier by the nation's regional railroads.
1948: Soviet Premier (and all-time mass murderer) Josef Stalin orders Soviet forces in the Soviet-occupied sector of Germany to close all road and rail connections between West Berlin and West Germany. He does this in a blatant effort to starve the city into accepting "unification" with East Berlin and, thus, assimilation by the Communist regime in East Germany (which is completely under the control of the Soviet Union) Please see entry for 25 July 1948.
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1814: In the savage, five-hour Battle of Lundy's Lane, American forces under Generals Jacob Brown and Winfield Scott fight a British force under Riall and Drummond to a standstill. Brown, Scott, Riall, and Drummon all are wounded in the fighting. The Americans retire to Fort Erie and fortify it. British siege efforts and assaults on the fort in August will fail, and the Americans will hold the fort until they abandon it for winter quarters in November.
1898: United States troops, under command of General Miles, invade Puerto Rico. They will accept the surrender of the Spanish commander in Puerto Rico, Ponce, on 28 July, in one of the last major events of the Spanish-American war.
1948: President Truman, responding to the Berlin Blockade, orders American forces to provide supplies to the beleaguered city. An airlift begins immediately, and between July and September the predominantly American relief effort will provide the city with virtually everything its two million inhabitants need to survive, some 4,500 tons of necessaries per day. Truman also deploys B-29 Superfortresses to forward air bases, placing much of the Soviet Union within range of the strategic bombers. The message to Stalin is clear: If the Soviets escalate the crisis to the level of military force, the American military response will include atomic bombs, which at present the Soviets do not have.
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1758: British forces (which at that time included American colonial troops, commanded by men such as George Washington), capture the French Canadian fortress of Louisburg in the continuing fighting of the French and Indian War.
1980: Reza Pahlevi, former Shah of Iran, dies of cancer in Egypt. With his death ends the dynasty that had ruled Iran since 1921. His arrival in the United States for medical treatment spurred Iranian hooligans to seize the United States embassy in Teheran, taking its personnel hostage. In true obedience to ancient Islamic traditions of mercy and compassion, they refuse to release their hostages, and will remain intransigent until the inauguration of President Reagan the following January.
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1866: Cyrus Field completes a new transatlantic telegraph cable between the United States and England.
1915: Direct wireless communication begins between the United States and Japan. Radio transmissions from Japan will play a crucial role when Japan attacks the United States in 1941, precipitating our nation's entry into World War II. False radio transmissions in late 1941 will mislead American intercept operators to believe the Japanese fleet is still in home waters when it is actually closing on the island of Oahu. Decryption of Japanese radio traffic the next year will enable American naval commanders to deal that same fleet a mortal blow at the Battle of Midway.
1953: A treaty ends the three-year-long Korean War. North Korean and Chinese aggression cost the lives of 344,227 Allies and 1,540,000 of their own people. As of this writing, there still is no memorial in Washington, D.C. honoring the 25,604 Americans who died or the 103,492 who were wounded in the "forgotten war."
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1914: The Austro-Hungarian Empire declares war on tiny Serbia. Serbian terrorists assassinated the heir to the crown a month before during his trip to Bosnia. Austria-Hungary has demanded many concessions of Serbia and the miniscule nation has accepted all but one--amalgamation into Austria-Hungary. On the surface, it appears that Austria-Hungary cannot lose. It is immense compared to Serbia, with a large standing army and, more importantly, an alliance with the even more powerful German Empire. But three things sit in the background. First, Serbia is a mountainous, easily defensible territory with an army of its own. Second, the Austro-Hungarian army, like its empire, is a decaying institution. And third, Serbia has a defensive alliance with Russia . . . which has an alliance in turn with France . . . and Britain . . . and so are sown the seeds of World War I. Please see entry for 1 August 1914.
1975: Congress extends the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to include Spanish-speaking Americans and other "language minorities."
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1858: The United States and Japan sign a commercial treaty addressing tariffs and diplomatic exchanges. This treaty is the work of U.S. consul Townsend Harris, who persuades Prime Minister Ii Naosuke to support it by pointing out how China has suffered from European imperialists. Harris persuades the Japanese that this treaty has favorable terms and will help protect Japan from suffering China's fate.
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1942: Congress authorizes the creation of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) to support the United States Navy. Wellesley College president Mildred McAfee is the first head of the naval auxiliary service.
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1940: The United States prohibits the shipment of aviation gasoline outside the Western Hemisphere. This step, one of several urged by President Franklin Roosevelt, ostensibly maintain American neutrality in the spreading World War II but in reality strike at Nazi and Japanese aggression by denying those totalitarian states access to American-controlled strategic materials. In the coming October, President Roosevelt will prohibit scrap iron from going to Japan. Oil, gasoline, steel: These are the ingredients not only of war, but of modern industrial production. Japan will respond in its own way.
1951: Congress extends the Defense Production Act, passed in 1950. The Act, proposed by President Truman, established a system of priorities for materials, implemented wage and price controls, and curbed installment buying. Although extended, the Act loses much of its anti-inflationary power.
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