Union Col. William T. Sherman is promoted to brigadier general and transferred to Kentucky to serve under Brig. Gen. Robert Anderson, already famous for his defense of Fort Sumter in April.
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Lt. Col. John R. Baylor of the 2nd Texas Mounted Rifles issues a proclamation declaring all of the New Mexico Territory south of the 34th parallel to be the new Confederate Territory of Arizona.
Gen. Robert E. Lee leaves Monterey, Virginia, to begin his inspection of the Confederate troops in Western Virginia.
It's ironic that compromise has become a dirty word for many of the same politicians who profess such reverence for the Constitution and Founding Fathers.
We are a nation conceived in compromise, whose very existence was saved at least three times by deals cobbled together by politicians bitterly divided on principle.
At the start of the Constitutional Convention, delegates had such varied political views that few could imagine a strong Federal union emerging from the existing loose Confederation of separate and diverse former colonies. Small states so distrusted large ones that tiny Rhode Island never even showed up at the Convention.
It is highly doubtful the Southern states would ever have joined the new nation at its beginning without the compromise of the "Two Thirds Rule." This accommodation, which strikes modern observers as particularly abhorrent, meant that a plantation owner with 100 slaves could vote 60 times for Federal office holders while a Yankee farmer voted only once.