Today in 1861, Colonel Robert E. Lee resigns from the United States Army two days after he was offered command of the Union army and three days after his native state, Virginia, seceded from the Union. This will be the Union’s biggest loss in terms of commanders,
Robert E. Lee, General CSA, Hero of the Confederacy
and there will be no one to challenge his skill and genius until a former Army captain returns to the Army, after several years of failure in civilian life. Lee opposed secession, but he was a loyal son of Virginia. His official resignation was only one sentence, but he wrote a longer explanation to his friend and mentor, General Winfield Scott, later that day. Lee had fought under Scott during the Mexican War (1846-48),
General Winfield Scott, Union Army commander
and he revealed to his former commander the depth of his struggle. Lee spoke with Scott on April 18, and explained that he would have resigned then “but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted the best years of my life and all the ability I possess.” Lee expressed gratitude for the kindness shown him by all in the army during his 25-year service, but Lee was most grateful to Scott. “To no one, general, have I been as much indebted as to yourself for uniform kindness and consideration…” He concluded with this poignant sentiment: “Save in the defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.”
But draw it he would. Two days later, Lee was appointed commander of Virginia’s forces with the rank of major general. He spent the next few months raising troops in Virginia, and in July he was sent to western Virginia to advise Confederate commanders struggling to maintain control over the mountainous region. Lee did little to build his reputation there as the Confederates experienced a series of setbacks, and he returned to Richmond when the Union gained control of the area. The next year, Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia after General Joseph Johnston was wounded in battle. Lee quickly turned the tables on Union General George B. McClellan, as he would
Joseph E. Johnston, General CSAUnion General George B. McClellan
several other commanders of the Army of the Potomac. His brilliance as a battlefield tactician earned him a place among the great military leaders of all time. Lee was able to outmaneuver or outwit every general who was forced to face him through the war. Every general but one, that is.
His name was Hiram. Although Hiram had a bad reputation that was mostly undeserved and exaggerated by his jealous colleagues, Hiram rose to prominence based upon his personal philosophy. That philosophy was forged in his time in the Mexican War, when he discovered that his fear of battle was matched by his opponent’s and he never forgot this vital lesson. Although he struggled with his studies, he was a master horseman. He had a superb level of concentration, and when he was at his desk writing, if he had to get up to get a paper, he maintained his seated posture all the way to the document and back to his chair, where he would continue writing as if he had never gotten up. It was later said that Hiram, when he rose to the top of the ladder, was the ONLY commander that Lee had any real trepidation about, because he knew that Hiram didn’t back up and wasn’t scared or bluffed into retreating, he just kept coming on. Hiram wasn’t known by his real name, due to an error back when he entered West Point. He was called Sam by his friends, but the name the world knew him by was Ulysses S. Grant.
Lt. General Ulysses Grant, Union Army
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On April 19, 1861, the first blood of the American Civil War is shed when a secessionist mob in Baltimore attacks Massachusetts troops bound for Washington, D.C. Four soldiers and 12 rioters were killed.
Residents of Baltimore, Maryland, attack a Union regiment while the group makes its way to Washington, D.C., today in 1861. Baltimore’s hostilities to the North were already well known, as just two percent of the city’s voters cast their ballots for Abraham Lincoln for president while nearly half supported John Breckinridge,the Southern Democratic Party candidate.
John C. Breckinridge, Southern Democratic Party candidate
Lincoln was to pass through Baltimore on his way to Washington for his inauguration, but after Allan Pinkerton warned the President-Elect
Allen Pinkerton. founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, creator of the “Private Eye”
about what he described as serious death threats forced the president-elect to slip through the city in the middle of the night in disguise. This subterfuge came back to hurt Lincoln very quickly.
Baltimore was a cauldron of secessionist feeling, and these tensions boiled over on April 18. Pro-Confederate volunteers gathered at Bolton Station to hurl insults and rocks at Pennsylvania troops as they changed trains en route to Washington. Now, on April 19, the 6th Massachusetts regiment disembarked from a train and was met with an even more hostile crowd. Tensions rose as the 11 companies of the 6th arrived. Cobblestones rained down on the soldiers as they prepared to transfer from the President Street Station to Camden Station. Shots were fired, and when the smoke cleared four Massachusetts soldiers lay dead along with 12 Baltimoreans, while 36 troops and an undeter-mined number of civilians were wounded.
Washington was effectively cut off from the North. In the following months, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and hundreds of secessionist leaders were rounded up. Within six months, the Union was again in control of Baltimore.
One week earlier, on April 12, the Civil War began when Confederate shore batteries opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay. During a 34-hour period, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort. The fort’s garrison returned fire, but lacking men, ammunition, and food, it was forced to surrender on April 13. There were no casualties in the fighting, but one federal soldier was killed the next day when a store of gunpowder was accidentally ignited during the firing of the final surrender salute. Two other federal soldiers were wounded, one mortally.
On April 15, President Abraham Lincoln issued a public proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to help put down the Southern
Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President
“insurrection.” Northern states responded enthusiastically to the call, and within days the 6th Massachusetts Regiment was enroute to Washington. On April 19, the troops arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, by train, disembarked, and boarded horse-drawn cars that were to take them across the city to where the rail line picked up again. Secessionist sympathy was strong in Maryland, a border state where slavery was legal, and an angry mob of secessionists gathered to confront the Yankee troops. Intent on preventing the regiment from reaching the rail-road station, and thus Washington, the mob blocked the carriages, and the troops were forced to continue on foot. The mob followed close behind and then, joined by other rioters, surrounded the regiment. Jeering turned to brick and stone throwing, and several federal troops responded by firing into the crowd. In the ensuing mayhem, the troops fought their way to the train station, taking and inflicting more casualties. At the terminal, the infantrymen were aided by Baltimore police, who held the crowd back and allowed them to board their train and escape. Much of their equipment was left behind. Four soldiers and 12 rioters were killed in what is generally regarded as the first bloodshed of the Civil War.
Maryland officials demanded that no more federal troops be sent through the state, and secessionists destroyed rail bridges and telegraph lines to Washington to hinder the federal war effort. In May, Union troops occupied Baltimore, and martial law was declared. The federal occupation of Baltimore, and of other strategic points in Maryland, continued throughout the war. Because western Marylanders and workingmen supported the Union, and because federal authorities often jailed secessionist politicians, Maryland never voted for secession. Slavery was abolished in Maryland in 1864, the year before the Civil War’s end. Eventually, more than 50,000 Marylanders fought for the Union while about 22,000 volunteered for the Confederacy.
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A devastating earthquake begins to shake the city of San Francisco in the morning hours of this day in 1906.
The first of two vicious tremors shook San Francisco at 5:13 a.m., and a second followed not long after. The quake was powerful enough to be recorded thousands of miles away in Cape Town, South Africa, and its effect on San Francisco was cataclysmic. Thousands of structures collapsed as a result of the quake itself. However, the greatest devastation resulted from the fires that followed the quake. The initial tremors destroyed the city’s water mains, leaving overwhelmed firefighters with no means of combating the growing inferno. The blaze burned for four days and engulfed the vast majority of the city.
By the time a heavy rainfall tamed the massive fire, the once proud city of San Francisco was in shambles. More than 28,000 buildings burned to the ground and the city suffered more than $500 million in damages. The human toll was equally disastrous: authorities estimated that the quake and fires killed 700 people, and left a quarter of a million people homeless. The famous writer and San Francisco resident Jack London noted, “Surrender was complete.”
Jack London (at 26), writer, adventurer
Despite the utter devastation, San Francisco quickly recovered from the great earthquake of 1906. During the next four years, the city arose from its ashes. Ironically, the destruction actually allowed city planners to create a new and better San Francisco. A classic western boom- town, San Francisco had grown in a haphazard manner since the Gold Rush of 1849. Working from a nearly clean slate, San Franciscans could rebuild the city with a more logical and elegant structure. The destruction of the urban center at San Francisco also encouraged the growth of new towns around the bay, making room for a new population boom arriving from the U.S. and abroad. Within a decade, San Francisco had resumed its status as the crown jewel of the American West.
“You ask me to say what I saw and what I did during the terrible days which witnessed the destruction of San Francisco? Well, there have been many accounts of my so-called adventures published in the American papers, and most of them have not been quite correct.” So began one of the most widely read firsthand accounts of the greatest natural disaster ever to befall a North American city. The words were those of the world’s greatest tenor, Enrico Caruso, who along with
Enrico Caruso, Italian operatic tenor
the entire traveling company of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, survived the devastating earthquake and fire that struck San Francisco on this day in 1906.
The previous evening had been the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera Company’s San Francisco engagement. Caruso—already a worldwide sensation—had sung the part of Don José in Bizet’s Carmen at the Mission Opera House. He went to bed that night feeling pleased about his performance. “But what an awaken- ing!” he wrote in the account published later that spring in London’s The Sketch. “I wake up about 5 o’clock, feeling my bed rocking as though I am in a ship on the ocean….I get up and go to the window, raise the shade and look out. And what I see makes me tremble with fear. I see the buildings toppling over, big pieces of masonry falling, and from the street below I hear the cries and screams of men and women and children.”
The Palace Hotel, where Caruso and many others in the company were staying, would collapse by late afternoon, but not before all of its guests managed to escape safely. Caruso—or, rather, his unbelievably devoted valet—even managed to remove the bulk of his luggage, which included 54 steamer trunks containing, among other things, some 50 self-portraits. “My valet, brave fellow that he is, goes back and bundles all my things into trunks and drags them down six flights of stairs and out into the open one by one.” That same valet would eventually find a horse and cart to carry the great Caruso and his many belongings to the water- front Ferry Building—no mean accomplishment on a day when tens of thousands were attempting to escape the fires ravaging the city.
“We pass terrible scenes on the way: buildings in ruins, and everywhere there seems to be smoke and dust. The driver seems in no hurry, which makes me impatient at times, for I am longing to return to New York, where I know I shall find a ship to take me to my beautiful Italy and my wife and my little boys.” By nightfall, Caruso was across the bay in Oakland and boarding a train headed east—news that reached anxious New Yorkers the following day.
Amadeo Peter Giannini, founder of Bank of Italy
Amadeo Peter Giannini was a survivor of the Earthquake, and his story is an interesting one. He was born on May 6, 1870, the son of Italian immigrants. Giannini began his stellar career working as a produce broker, commission merchant and produce dealer for farms in the Santa Clara Valley. In 1892, A. P. married the daughter of a North Beach real estate magnate. He later became a director of the Columbus Savings & Loan, in which his father-in-law owned an interest. At that time in America, banks were run for the benefit of the wealthy and the well-connected. Giannini observed an opportunity to service the increasing immigrant population that were without a bank. The big banks in the town would lend money to big businesses, but not to the little man. In 1904, in frustration because the other directors did not share his sentiment, he quit the board in frustration. Amadeo opened up a brand new bank on a brand new concept. A. P. Ginnanini’s bank was going to be differ-ent, they were going to be there for the little man. And they were. He was always there for the little man, and he also broke tradition by seeking clients. He called his bank the Bank of Italy. It was growing very fast, and by 1906, he had some serious investors in his bank.
After the earthquake, the city was a wide spread disaster area and all the other banks were unable to get into their vaults, because the fires and shaking had rendered the steel doors of the banks either inoperable or impossible to open. Giannini took the money out of his vaults and took it to his home outside the fire zone in then-rural San Mateo. It was an 18-mile trip by horse and wagon, and A. P. carried it in a garbage wagon, owned by Hayward resident Giobatta Cepollina, who was himself a native of Italy (Loano). The cargo was disguised beneath garbage to protect against theft by making it look uninvit-ing to prospective thieves. It was Giannini’s goal to set up a temporary bank, collecting deposits, making loans, and he proclaimed that San Francisco would rise from the ashes. Giannini ran his bank from a plank across two barrels in the street. Giannini made loans on a handshake to those interested in rebuilding. Years later, he would recount that every loan was repaid. In 1928. A. P. merged with another bank, and the Bank of America began to grow.
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Today in 1864, Confederate forces attack Plymouth, North Carolina, in an attempt to recapture ports they had lost to the Union two years before. The four-day battle ended with the fall of Plymouth, but the Yankees kept the city bottled up with a flotilla on nearby Albemarle Sound.
In 1862, the Union had captured Plymouth and several other points along the North Carolina coast and in doing so, they deprived the Confederacy of several ports for blockade-runners and the agri-cultural products from several fertile counties. In the spring of 1864, the Confederates mounted a campaign to improve morale and reverse these defeats. General George Pickett led a division to the area and
CSA General George Pickett, sartorial dandy and lowest in his class at West Point.
launched a failed attack on New Bern in February. Now, General Robert Hoke assumed command and moved his army against Plymouth,
CSA General Robert Hoke
fifty miles north of New Bern. He planned an attack using the C.S.S. Albemarle, an ironclad that was still being built on the Roanoke River inland from Plymouth. With 7,000 men, Hoke attacked the 2,800-man Union garrison at Plymouth on April 17. His troops began to capture some of the outer defenses, but he needed the Albemarle to bomb the city from the river. The ironclad moved from its makeshift shipyard on April 17, but it was still under construction. With the workers still aboard, Captain James Cooke moved down the Roanoke. The Albemarle’s rudder broke and the engine stalled, so it took two days to reach Plymouth. When it arrived, the Rebel ship took on two Yankee ships, sinking one and forcing the other to retreat. With the ironclad on the scene, Hoke’s men captured Plymouth on April 20.
The Confederates lost 163 men killed and 554 wounded, but captured the entire Union garrison and vast amounts of supplies and arms. The Union lost about 150 killed and wounded, while several hundred of the captured soldiers eventually died at the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia. The Rebel victory was limited by the fact that the Albemarle was still pinned in the Roanoke River. The crew tried to fight past a Union flotilla on Albemarle Sound on May 5, but it could not escape. It was destroyed in a Union raid on Plymouth on October 27, 1864. Yankee troops recaptured the city four days later.
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Union Admiral David Dixon Porter leads 12 ships past the heavy barrage of Confederate artillery at Vicksburg, Mississippi, today in 1863.
US Admiral David Dixon Porter. He helped Grant take Vicksburg
He lost only one ship, and the operation speeded General Ulysses S. Grant‘s movement against Vicksburg. Grant had been trying unsuccessfully to capture Vicksburg for the last six months.
Lt. General Ulysses Grant, Union Army
A first attempt failed when General William Sherman’s troops were unsuccessful in attacking Vicksburg from the north.
William Tecumseh Sherman, scourge of Georgia
Grant now planned to move his army down the opposite bank of the river, cross back to Mississippi, and approach the city from the east. The soggy spring conditions slowed his advance to a crawl as his force had to build bridges over the bayous on the Louisiana side of the river. To speed the operation, Grant called on Porter to take the ships loaded with men and supplies and run past the powerful Vicksburg batteries.
The flotilla quietly moved down the river on the dark night of April 16. The exhausts on the steam-boats were vented into the paddle wheel housing to muffle the noise. The boats were positioned off center so that if a ship were hit, the following craft could pass safely. The ships were stacked with cotton bales to act as a soft armor in the event of a direct hit. Confederate pickets spotted the flotilla and sent word to the batteries, and the bombardment began. The commanding Confederate, General John Pemberton, was attending a ball and was quickly
CSA General John C. Pemberton
summoned to the scene. Some Rebel soldiers even rowed across the Mississippi River to set fire to the trees on the western bank and provide backlighting for their gunners on the eastern shore.
It took over two hours for the ships and attached barges to pass. The Union lost only one ship and two barges, and Grant’s plan proceeded. Within six weeks, he had locked up Vicksburg from the east and the siege began. Vicksburg would surrender on July 4, 1863.
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Today, in 1865, at 7:22 a.m., President Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, dies
Abraham Lincoln, Martyred 16th US President
from an assassin’s bullet. Lincoln had lived for a long nine hours before finally succumbing to the severe head wound he sustained at Ford’s Theater in Washington the night before. An angry Con-federate actor and radical Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth, had
John WIlkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln
shot Lincoln in the back of the head while the presidential party had been attending Laura Keene’s acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at a performance at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. the night before.
Booth, who had remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, had orig-inally intended only to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Even worse news lay ahead, as two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth had hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy.
Learning that Lincoln was to attend Ford’s Theater on April 14, Booth plotted the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into a paralyzing disarray.
William Henry Seward, Secretary of State under President Lincoln
On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward’s home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln’s private theater box unnoticed and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth leapt to the stage and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]–the South is avenged!” Although Booth broke his leg jumping from Lincoln’s box, he managed to escape Washington on horseback. A 23-year-old doctor named Charles Leale was in the audience and rushed up to the presidential box immediately upon hearing the shot and Mrs. Lincoln’s scream. He found the president slumped in his chair, paralyzed and struggling to breathe. Several soldiers carried Lincoln to a house across the street and placed him on a bed. When the surgeon general arrived at the house, he concluded that Lincoln could not be saved and would die during the night.
Vice President Andrew Johnson, members of Lincoln’s cabinet and several of the president’s closest friends stood vigil by Lincoln’s bedside until he was officially pronounced dead at 7:22 am. The first lady lay on a bed in an adjoining room with her eldest son Robert at her side, overwhelmed with shock and grief.
The president’s body was placed in a temporary coffin, draped with a flag and escorted by armed cavalry to the White House, where surgeons conducted a thorough autopsy. Edward Curtis, an Army surgeon in attendance, later wrote that, during the autopsy, while he removed Lincoln’s brain, a bullet dropped out through my fingers into a basin with a clatter. The doctors stopped to stare at the offending bullet, the cause of such mighty changes in the world’s history as we may perhaps never realize. During the autopsy, Mary Lincoln sent the surgeons a note requesting they cut a lock of Lincoln’s hair for her.
Booth, pursued by the army and secret service forces, was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet wound as the barn was burned to the ground. Another story, and the one that is more commonly believed, is that he was killed by one of the soldiers, Boston Corbett, who shot Booth through the openings between the slats in the burning tobacco barn. Of the eight other persons eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were jailed (including the doctor, Samuel Mudd, who added his name to popular lexicon as a synonym for losing popular support) and four were hanged, including a woman and the mother of one of the co-conspirators, Mary Surrat.
Mary Surratt, a victim of circumstantial evidence and mob mentality
The president’s death came only six days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War. Lincoln had just served the most difficult presidency in history, successfully leading the country through civil war. His job was exhausting and overwhelming at times. He had to manage a tre-mendous military effort, deal with diverse opinions in his own Republican party, counter his Demo-cratic critics, maintain morale on the northern home front, and keep foreign countries such as France and Great Britain from recognizing the Confederacy. He did all of this, and changed American history when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, converting the war goal from reunion of the nation to a crusade to end slavery.
Now, the great man was dead. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said, “Now, he belongs to the ages.” Word spread quickly across the nation, stunning a people who were still celebrating the Union vic-tory. Troops in the field wept, as did General Ulysses S. Grant, the overall Union commander. Per-haps no group was more grief stricken than the freed slaves. Although the abolitionists considered Lincoln slow in moving against slavery, many freedmen saw “Father Abraham” as their savior. They faced an uncertain world, and now had lost their most powerful proponent.
News of the president’s death had traveled quickly and, by the end of the day, flags across the country flew at half-staff, businesses were closed and people who had recently rejoiced at the end of the Civil War mourned Lincoln’s shocking assassination. Lincoln’s funeral was held on April 19, before a funeral train carried his body back to his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. During the two-week journey, hundreds of thousands gathered along the railroad tracks to pay their respects, and the casket was unloaded for public viewing at several stops. He and his son, Willie, who died in the White House of typhoid fever in 1862, were interred on May 4.
His body was taken to the White House, where it lay until April 18, at which point it was carried to the Capitol rotunda to lay in state on a catafalque. On April 21, Lincoln’s body was taken to the railroad station and boarded on a train that conveyed it to Springfield, Illinois, his home be-fore becoming president. Tens of thousands of Americans lined the train’s railroad route and paid their respects to their fallen leader during the train’s solemn progression through the North. Lincoln was buried on May 4, 1865, at Oak Ridge Cemetery, near Springfield.
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April 14: This is going to be a special presentation today, because there were two disasters that I have always been fascinated by that took place on this day in history. I have been trying to make up my mind which one to highlight since the first of the year, and now it is today and I still can’t decide. So, I decided to present both of them.
On this day in 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and fantatical Confederate sympathizer, fatally shoots President Abraham Lincoln at a play
John WIlkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln
at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War.
John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head while the president, first lady Mary Todd Lincoln and another couple were attending
Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of President Abraham Lincoln
Laura Keene’s acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at a performance at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. the night before.
Laura Keene, actress and unwilling witness to the assassination of President Lincoln
General Ulysses Grant and his wife, Julia Dent Grant had been invited first, but Julia Grant did not like Mrs. Lincoln and told her husband they were going instead to visit their children in Vermont. This decision very likely saved Grant’s life. Lincoln didn’t press the issue, because he knew Mary was very jealous of the attention Mrs. Grant would show him. Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris,the daughter of
Major Henry Rathbone, another unwilling witness to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln
New York Senator Ira Harris were subsequently asked and they accepted the fateful invitation. The tragedy didn’t stop there for Major Harris. He could never shake off the guilt he felt for failing to protect the President, and eighteen years later, he ended up killing his wife and trying to stab himself several times, and he died in a hospital for the criminally insane.
Booth, a Maryland native born in 1838, who remained in the North during the war despite his Con-federate sympathies, had initially plotted only to capture President Lincoln and smuggle him into Richmond, the Confederate capital, to trade for peace and the victory. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with Con-federate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confed-eracy. Learning that Lincoln was to attend Laura Keene’s acclaimed performance in “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater on April 14, Booth masterminded the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and
Andrew Johnson, 17th President, successor by assassination.
Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to
William Henry Seward, Secretary of State under President Lincoln
throw the U.S. government into disarray and avenge the South’s loss of the war. On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell
Lewis Thornton Powell (April 22, 1844 – July 7, 1865), also known as Lewis Payne and Lewis Paine,
broke into Secretary of State Seward’s home, seriously wounding him, his son and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after 10 pm., Booth entered Lincoln’s private theater box unnoticed and shot the
George Atzerodt, lost his nerve and failed to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson
president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Slashing at Major Rathbone’s arm, Booth leapt to the stage and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]–the South is avenged!” Although Booth broke his leg jumping from Lincoln’s box, he managed to escape Washington on horseback.
Booth, was pursued by the army and secret service forces, until he was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet wound as the barn was burned to the ground. Another story, and the one more commonly believed, is that he was killed by a soldier, Boston Corbett, who shot Booth through the openings between the slats in the burning tobacco barn.
Boston Corbett, the soldier who is said to have shot John Wilkes Booth through the slats of a burning barn.
Of the eight other persons eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were jailed (including the doctor who set Booth’s leg, broken in his jump to the stage, Samuel Mudd, who later added his name to
Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, physician and accused accomplice to John Wilkes Booth
popular lexicon as a synonym for losing popular support) and four were hanged, including a woman and the mother of one of the co-conspirators, Mary Surrat. There was nothing but circumstantial evidence against her, because her son had been involved with Booth.
The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a lodging house opposite Ford’s Theater. About 7:22 a.m. the next morning, Lincoln, age 56, died–the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president, was buried on May 4, 1865, in Springfield, Illinois.
Just before midnight in the North Atlantic, the RMS Titanic fails to divert its course from an iceberg, ruptures its hull, and begins to sink. The lookout hadn’t see the iceberg, despite the warnings, because he had no binoculars – the officer on duty before him had taken them with him. The wind was very still, so the water didn’t show up against the iceberg. He didn’t see it until they were almost on top of it, and a ship as big as the Titanic took a lot of time to make a turn.
Four days earlier, the Titanic, one of the largest and most luxurious ocean liners ever built, departed Southampton, England, on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. While leaving port, the massive ship came within a couple of feet of the steamer New York but passed safely by, causing a general sigh of relief from the passengers massed on the ship’s decks.
The Titanic was designed by the Thomas Andrews, and built in the great Harland and Wolf docks. It spanned 883 feet from stern to bow. Its hull was divided into 16 compartments that were presumed to be watertight. Because four of these compartments could be flooded without causing a critical loss of buoyancy, the Titanic was considered unsinkable. The bulkhead doors did not go all the way to the top, because to do that, it would have cut into the deck space of the first class passengers. On its first journey across the highly competitive Atlantic ferry route, the ship carried some 2,200 passengers and crew.
After stopping at Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland, to pick up some final passengers, the massive vessel set out at full speed for New York City. However, just before midnight on April 14, the ship hit an iceberg, and five of the Titanic‘s compartments were ruptured along its starboard side. At about 2:20 a.m. on the morning of April 15, the massive vessel sank into the North Atlantic.
Because of a shortage of lifeboats and the lack of satisfactory emergency procedures, more than 1,500 people went down in the sinking ship or froze to death in the icy North Atlantic waters. Most of the approximately 700 survivors were women and children. A number of notable American and British citizens died in the tragedy, including the noted British journalist William Thomas Stead and heirs to the Straus, Astor, and Guggenheim fortunes. The announcement of details of the disaster led to outrage on both sides of the Atlantic. The sinking of the Titanic did have some positive effects, however, as more stringent safety regulations were adopted on public ships, and regular patrols were initiated to trace the locations of deadly Atlantic icebergs.
After a 33-hour bombardment by Confederate cannons, Union forces surrender Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. The first engagement of the war ended in Rebel victory, today in 1861.
The surrender concluded a standoff that began with South Carolina’s secession from the Union on December 20, 1860. When President Abraham Lincoln sent word to Charleston in early April that he planned to send food to the beleaguered garrison, the Confederates took action. They opened fire on Sumter in the predawn of April 12. Over the next day, nearly 4,000 rounds were hurled toward the black silhouette of Fort Sumter.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President
Inside Sumter was its commander, Major Robert Anderson, 9 officers, 68 enlisted men, 8 musicians, and 43 construction workers who were still putting the finishing touches on the fort.
Major Robert Anderson, Commander of Ft. Sumter, he lowered the flag as he left, and raised it again when the war was over.
Union Captain Abner Doubleday, the man often inaccurately credited with inventing the game of baseball, returned fire nearly two hours after the barrage began. By the morning of April 13, the garrison in Sumter was in dire straits. The soldiers had sustained only minor injuries, but they could not hold out much longer. The fort was badly damaged, and the Confederate’s shots were becoming more precise.
Major General Abner Doubleday, Union officer and falsely credited with inventing baseball.
Around noon, the flagstaff was shot away. Louis Wigfall, a former U.S. senator from Texas, rowed out without permission to see if the garrison was trying to surrender. Anderson decided that further resistance was futile, and he ran a white flag up a makeshift flagpole.
Louis Trevezant WIgfall, Texas senator
The first engagement of the war was over, and the only casualty had been a Confederate horse. The Union force was allowed to leave for the north; before leaving, the soldiers fired a 100-gun salute. During the salute, one soldier was killed and another mortally wounded by a prematurely exploding cartridge. The Civil War had officially begun.
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The bloodiest four years in American history begin when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay.
Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard
Because of his strong secessionist views and the widely held belief that he fired the first shot of the Battle of Fort Sumter, Edmund Ruffin is credited as “firing the first shot of the Civil War.”
Edmund Ruffin, a firebarnd, long redited with firing the first cannon onto Ft. Sumter and starting the Civil War.
During the next 34 hours, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort. On April 13, U.S. Major Robert Anderson surrendered the fort.
Major Robert Anderson, Commander of Ft. Sumter, he lowered the flag as he left, and raised it again when the war was over.
Two days later, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to quell the Southern “insurrection.”
Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President
As early as 1858, the ongoing conflict between North and South over the issue of slavery had led Southern leadership to discuss a unified separation from the United States. By 1860, the majority of the slave states were publicly threatening secession if the Republicans, the anti-slavery party, won the presidency. Following Republican Abraham Lincoln’s victory over the divided Democratic Party in November 1860, South Carolina immediately initiated secession proceedings. On December 20, the South Carolina legislature passed the “Ordinance of Secession,” which declared that “the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved.” After the declaration, South Carolina set about seizing forts, arsenals, and other strategic locations within the state. Within six weeks, five more Southern states–Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana–had followed South Carolina’s lead.
In February 1861, delegates from those states convened to establish a unified government. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was subsequently elected the first… and as it turns out, the ONLY, president of the Confederate States of America.
Jefferson Davis, President of the CSA
When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, a total of seven states (Texas had joined the pack) had seceded from the Union, and federal troops held only Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Fort Pickens off the Florida coast, and a handful of minor outposts in the South. Four years after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the Confederacy was defeated at the total cost of 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead.
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In one of the great surprises in diplomatic history, French Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand makes an offer to sell all of their Louisiana Territory to the United States.
Charles Maurice Tallyrand, French Foreign Minister for Bonaparte
Talleyrand was no fool. As the foreign minister to French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, he was one of the most powerful men in the world. Three years earlier, Talleyrand had convinced Napoleon that he could create a new French Empire in North America. The French had long had a tenuous claim to the vast area west of the Mississippi River known as Louisiana Territory. In 1800, Napoleon secretly signed a treaty with Spain that officially gave France full control of the territory. Then he began to prepare France’s mighty army to occupy New Orleans and bolster French dominion.
Thomas Jefferson, President, inventor, surveyor, architect, author, statesman and diplomat
When President Thomas Jefferson learned of Napoleon’s plans in 1802, he was understandably alarmed. Jefferson had long hoped the U.S. would expand westward beyond the Mississippi, but the young American republic was in no position militarily to challenge France for the territory. Jefferson hoped that his minister in France, Robert Livingston, might at least be able to negotiate an agreement whereby Napoleon would give the U.S. control of New Orleans, the gateway to the Mississippi River.
Robert R. Livingston, lawyer, politician, diplomat from New York, and a Founding Father of the United States
At first, the situation looked bleak because Livingston’s initial attempts at reaching a diplomatic agreement failed. In early 1803, Jefferson sent his young Virginia friend James Monroe to Paris to assist Livingston. Fortunately for the U.S., by that time Napoleon’s situation in Europe had changed for the worse. War between France and Great Britain was imminent and Napoleon could no longer spare the military resources needed to secure control of Louisiana Territory. Realizing that the powerful British navy would probably take the territory by force, Napoleon reasoned it would be better to sell Louisiana to the Americans than have it fall into the hands of his enemy.
After months of having fruitlessly negotiated over the fate of New Orleans, Livingston again met with Talleyrand on this day in 1803. To Livingston’s immense surprise, this time the cagey French minister coolly asked, “What will you give for the whole?” He meant not the whole of New Orleans, but the whole of Louisiana Territory. Quickly recognizing that this was an offer of potentially immense significance for the U.S., Livingston and Monroe began to discuss France’s proposed cost for the territory. Several weeks later, on April 30, 1803, the American emissaries signed a treaty with France for a purchase of the vast territory consisting of 828,000 square miles for $11,250,000. That works out to $ 28.035 per square mile in 1803. Including interest, the U.S. finally paid $23,213,568 for the Louisiana territory. What cost the fledgling United States $11,250,000 in 1803 would cost a whopping $369,756,808.94 in 2015, which would be $446.566 per square mile.
Just two weeks later, Great Britain declared war on France. With the sale of the Louisiana Territory, Napoleon abandoned his dreams of a North American empire, but he also achieved a goal that he thought more important. “The sale [of Louisiana] assures forever the power of the United States,” Napoleon later wrote, “and I have given England a rival who, sooner or later, will humble her pride.” Truly, a case of “The enemy of my enemy, is my friend.”
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Photo courtesy of wikipedia.com
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