South Carolina’s white population saw its gravest fears confirmed when a group of about twenty slaves began a rebellion near the Stono River, twenty miles from Charleston, on the morning of September 9. The insurrection appeared to be coordinated with the outbreak of war between England and Spain.
While the local planters were attending Sunday church services, the slaves pillaged a store for weapons, then started moving south along the road to the recently founded colony of Georgia, hoping to reach the city of St. Augustine in Spanish Florida. As their ranks swelled, the band gained confidence, chanting slogans, burning houses, and killing any whites they encountered. In
order to keep the alarm from spreading, the rebels made hostages of slaves who resisted joining them.
After marching more than ten miles and meeting no real resistance, the troop came to a halt in an open field that afternoon, certain that such a display of force would attract enough other slaves to make the group unstoppable. But the rebels had now made themselves vulnerable to a mounted assault by a militia of several dozen hastily assembled planters, whose firepower overmatched their own. The planters quickly killed all but a handful of the rebels. Many of the slaves who tried to return to their plantations were seized and shot; according to one account, the planters “cutt off their heads and set them up at every Mile Post they came to.” Approximately twenty whites and fifty slaves were killed during the confrontation.
Escaped slaves inspired by the Stono uprising continued to roam through the South Carolina countryside for several months, prompting many white families to move into towns, and the colony’s slave trade came to a standstill for most of the next decade.
1814 One Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago
As British and American infantry clashed outside the city of Baltimore, a British fleet trained its guns on Fort McHenry on the afternoon of September 13. For the rest of the day and throughout the night the British fired mortars, rockets, and shells at the out-gunned fort, and then they sent a landing party ashore to finish off the battered Americans.
A Washington, D.C., lawyer named Francis Scott Key watched the battle from where he was being held on the deck of a small British vessel in the harbor. (Key had been sent by the American government to arrange the release of a prominent Maryland doctor whom the British had captured during their retreat from Washington.) As dawn broke, Key anxiously sought a sign of victory for either side. Elated that the tattered American flag was still flying over the fort, Key composed a poem about the American victory that morning; “The Defense of Fort M’Henry” would appear in the September 21 edition of the Baltimore American and Commercial Daily. With music adapted from the tune of a British drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” it came to be known as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Congress adopted the song as the American national anthem in 1931.
1839 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” appeared in the September issue of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. Poe had been hired to co-edit the magazine in July at a salary of ten dollars per week and had immediately begun to remodel it. During his year at Burton’s Poe filled 132 pages of the magazine with his poetry, stories, and reviews, raising its circulation from five thousand to twenty thousand in the process. In characteristic fashion, however, Poe burned out on the job; his alcoholism and animosity toward the owner of Burton’s led to his departure in June of 1840.
∗On September 25 France signed a commercial treaty with the Republic of Texas, becoming the first European country to recognize Texan independence from Mexico.
1864 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Gen. William T. Sherman’s Federal army entered the abandoned city of Atlanta on September 2 following a five-week siege. As the manufacturing and transportation center of the Deep South, Atlanta had long been a focus of Union strategy; its loss effectively reduced the Confederacy to Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
When Sherman began his drive on Atlanta in May, his hundred-thousand-man army was twice the size of Joseph E. Johnston’s Confederate forces opposing him. But Sherman did not want to fight costly battles of attrition against a strongly positioned opponent on his way to Atlanta. Having explored this country as a young officer twenty years earlier, Sherman believed he “knew more of Georgia than the rebels did.” He maneuvered his large army through the mountainous terrain of northern Georgia with a mobility previously unseen in modern warfare. Flanking and countermarching, creating diversions, and attacking only when it was unavoidable, Sherman weaved his way south, forcing the Confederate Army of Tennessee to abandon favorable positions to cover the approach to Atlanta. “Sherman’ll never go to hell,” marveled one Confederate prisoner. “He’ll flank the devil and make heaven despite the guards.”
General Johnston, a specialist in defensive strategy, barely managed to beat Sherman to the trenches along Peach Tree Creek, just outside Atlanta. Despite the skill of Johnston’s retreat, the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, feared the city would be lost, and he installed the Kentuckian Gen. John Bell Hood in command. Hood, at thirty-three the youngest army commander of the war, was an aggressive fighter who rode strapped into his saddle after losing his right leg at the Battle of Chickamauga. Sherman was delighted to see the defensive strategist Johnston replaced; Hood acted exactly as Sherman had hoped, leaving the breastworks around Atlanta to engage the Union army in doomed frontal assaults. The Confederates lost nine thousand troops in these engagements.
Sherman rained artillery fire on the city for more than two weeks, ignoring the fact that it was still full of civilians. “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty,”Sherman said, “I will answer that war is war and not popularity-seeking.
If they want peace they and their relatives must stop war.” Hood finally had to abandon Atlanta on September 1 after Sherman had cut off its final railroad line. “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won” was Sherman’s laconic telegram announcing the most dramatic Union triumph of the war. The young historian Charles Francis Adams, serving in Grant’s army outside Richmond, declared Sherman’s campaign “like a sonorous epic… a poem.”
Sherman evacuated half the remaining civilian population of Atlanta and turned the city into a Federal military base from which he would spend the next several weeks trying to persuade Grant to allow him to continue the strategy he had defined early in the campaign with two words: “Salt water.”
∗Nevada entered the Union as the thirty-sixth state on October 31. Though the Nevada Territory had contained only about one-sixth of the population required for statehood, the federal government in Washington, D.C., encouraged Nevadans to seek statehood. President Lincoln wanted to add Republican votes to Congress in order to ensure passage of an antislavery amendment, while Congress believed the additional votes would give it more authority over Reconstruction. So great was the
eagerness for Nevada’s admission that when the territory passed its proposed state constitution, it was telegraphed whole to Washington, at a cost of $3,416.77.
1889 One Hundred Years Ago
Hull House opened in Chicago’s impoverished Nineteenth Ward on September 14. Founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, former classmates who had been shocked by their encounter with urban poverty during a tour of Europe, Hull House offered a range of health services, English classes, child day care, and cultural activities to Chicago’s underprivileged.
With Addams financing the house out of her own income for the first several years, Hull House was soon providing community services to more than two thousand people a week. Addams’s work at Hull House earned her a national reputation that she used to promote progressive views on feminism, pacifism, and social reform. Her activism was unpopular in some circles, but by the time of her death in 1935 she was recognized as one of the moral forerunners of the New Deal.
1914 Seventy-five Years Ago
Two separate events on September 5 laid the groundwork for America’s eventual entry into World War I. In Washington, D.C., President Woodrow Wilson ordered that the U.S. Navy provide wireless stations in Europe for direct transatlantic communications. Wilson allowed belligerent nations on both sides to use the wireless to send encoded messages, a gesture of American neutrality that Germany later abused by using the line to propose a military alliance with Mexico against the United States. Revelation of this, the “Zimmerman Telegram,” would be decisive in Wilson’s decision to declare war on Germany.
In France the German offensive was stopped cold at the First Battle of the Marne. French troops who had been driven mercilessly backward throughout the month of August rose up and destroyed Germany’s plan to overrun France and end the war quickly. “French élan, just when it is on the point of being extinguished, flames up powerfully,” wrote the German commander Helmuth von Moltke during the battle. The kaiser’s armies were forced to retreat to the Aisne River and dig the trenches that would characterize the next three deadlocked years on the western front. This failure compelled Germany to rely increasingly on submarine warfare in the Atlantic, a strategy that backfired in 1917 when their U-boats sank several unarmed American ships and convinced Wilson that war was unavoidable.
1939 Fifty Years Ago
World War II began in Europe on the morning of September 1 when one-and-a-half million German troops stormed into Poland in a high-speed armored wave. The German leader Adolf Hitler, addressing the Reichstag, insisted that the Polish army had started the shooting, and declared himself “determined to eliminate from the German frontier the element of insecurity.…”
Britain and France both declared war on Germany two days later but were unable to do anything to save Poland from the German blitzkrieg. With the Russian army invading from the east at Germany’s invitation, the antiquated Polish military lasted less than a month, and its government was forced to flee the country.
Other nations, among them the United States, Italy, and Spain, declared their neutrality. The American proclamation of neutrality came on September 5, and President Roosevelt, in an October fireside chat, offered vehement reassurances about his position: “In and out of Congress we have heard orators … beating their breasts proclaiming against sending the boys of American mothers to fight on the battlefields of Europe. That I do not hesitate to label as one of the worst fakes in current history. It is a deliberate setup of an imaginary bogy.”
∗On September 15 Westinghouse engineers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, trapped and measured a bolt of natural lightning for the first time in history. They estimated that the bolt would have been able to power forty thousand electric lights.
1964 Twenty-five Years Ago
The Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof opened on September 22 with Zero Mostel in the leading role. Eight year later it would break the record for Broadway performances set by Life with Father in 1947.
∗Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe debuted at the New York Film Festival in September. Lumet’s film cast Henry Fonda as an American President facing an accidental nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union, dramatizing a theme that Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb had satirized earlier in the year.
∗The Warren Commission released its report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy on September 27. The seven-man commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded from reams of evidence and the testimony of 552 witnesses that Lee Harvey Oswald was the man who murdered President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and that neither he nor Jack Ruby, the man who killed Oswald two days later, was “a member of a foreign or domestic conspiracy of any kind.”
The report criticized the police and district attorney of Dallas, who in their efforts to keep the press informed about their investigation released “unchecked information [that] provided much of the basis for the myths and rumors that came into being soon after the President’s death.” The commission regarded the case as clear-cut, with Oswald’s motive being the only unanswered question. “The facts“,” declared The New York Times the next day, “destroy the basis for the conspiracy theories that have grown weedlike in this country and abroad.”
But rumors persisted that Oswald did not act alone, and in December 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations agreed. Its report, based on further examination of acoustical evidence, concluded that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy” and that there was a “high probability that two gunmen fired.” The committee could offer no new evidence as to the identity of the other assassin, however, and the mystery remains unsolved.
∗The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., won the Nobel Peace Prize on October 14. Though King was pleased to be acknowledged as a world leader for peace, he considered the award to be “a tribute to the discipline, wise restraint and majestic courage of the millions … who have followed a nonviolent course in seeking to establish a reign of justice and rule of love across this nation.…” King donated the $54,600 in prize money to the civil rights movement.
∗On the night of October 29, thieves stole several of the most magnificent jewels in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Breaking in through a window and opening the jewel cases with a glass cutter, the thieves made off with the 565-carat Star of India (the world’s largest sapphire) and the 100-carat DeLong ruby, both priceless. Several days later the FBI arrested two professional swimmers, Allan Kuhn and Jack (Murph the Surf) Murphy, along with a beach bum named Roger Clark. The trio of thieves gave back most of the jewels in return for a lenient sentence after their conviction the following April; the DeLong ruby, which they had managed to fence before they were caught, was ransomed separately in September.
