888: Death of Charles the Fat (b.839), Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the youngest son of Louis the German and Hemma. Charles was a great-grandson of Charlemagne. He was the second-last emperor of the Carolingian dynasty and the last to rule, briefly, over a re-united Frankish empire. Over his lifetime, Charles became ruler of the various kingdoms of Charlemagne’s former Empire. Granted lordship over Alamannia in 876, following the division of East Francia, he succeeded to the Italian throne upon the abdication of his older brother Carloman of Bavaria who had been incapacitated by a stroke. Crowned Emperor in 881 by Pope John VIII, his succession to the territories of his brother Louis the Younger (Saxony and Bavaria) the following year reunited the kingdom of East Francia. Upon the death of his cousin Carloman II in 884, he inherited all of West Francia, thus reuniting the entire Carolingian Empire (wikipedia).
1412: The Medici family of Florence is formally appointed to act as banker to the Papacy, an account that greatly accelerated their rise as the most powerful family in Italy, to say nothing of hastening the development of modern banking and accounting methods to accurately deal with vast sums of money.
1584: Florentine explorer Gionvanni da Verrazzano sets sail from Madeira to find an ocean route to the Pacific. He explores much of the eastern coast of North America, mis-identifying Pamlico Sound as the Pacific Ocean. He discovered the entrance to New York harbor, and farther up the coast, Block Island. The narrows of NY harbor, and the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge is named after him.
1670: British pirate Henry Morgan, captures and sacks the city of Panama in the Spanish Main, burning it to the ground after taking anything and everything of value. For nearly 10 years, multiple Royal Governors of Jamaica ignored repeated edicts from the Crown to suppress piracy. Instead, they encouraged Morgan to range throughout the Caribbean attacking Spanish ships and port cities under Jamaican Letters of Marque, which somehow added legitimacy to his activities. Morgan kept his crews occupied with adventure and plunder, while enriching himself, his Governors, and the Crown itself with looted Spanish treasure. The sack of Panama, however, was the last straw for the Spanish: England was formally at peace with Spain in 1670, and the Spanish Crown demanded Morgan’s head. In 1672 he was arrested for the act, and returned to England for an expected trial and hanging. Instead, King Charles II knighted him for Services to the Crown and appointed him Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, where he served until 1683, living there until his death in 1688. Today, Captain Morgan’s Rum still sports an image of the Captain, swashbuckling in a scarlet jacket trimmed in gold.
1707: The Scottish Parliament ratifies the Act of Union with England, beginning the process of creating the United Kingdom of England, Scotland and Wales (and later, Northern Ireland).
1741: Birth of Benedict Arnold. During the American Revolution, Arnold distinguished himself through acts of intelligence and bravery. His actions included the Capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, defensive and delaying tactics at the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain in 1776 (allowing American forces time to prepare New York’s defenses), the Battle of Ridgefield, Connecticut (after which he was promoted to major general), operations in relief of the Siege of Fort Stanwix, and key actions during the pivotal Battles of Saratoga in 1777, in which he suffered leg injuries that halted his combat career for several years. Despite his successes, he was passed over for promotion by the Continental Congress, while other officers claimed credit for some of his accomplishments. Congress investigated his accounts and concluded that he was indebted to Congress (even as he had spent much of his own money on the war effort). Arnold was frustrated and bitter at this, as well as with the alliance with France and the failure of Congress to accept Britain’s 1778 proposal to grant full self-governance in the colonies. He decided to change sides (wikipedia).
1773: Captain James Cook, on his second voyage of discovery, becomes the first European explorer to sail below the Antarctic Circle, which lies at 66 degrees 33 minutes South (North) latitude, about 650 nautical miles south of Cape Horn. Part of Cook’s mission was to survey the northern extent of the summer icepack as well as the iceberg zone. This region is known to sailors as the “Roaring 40s,” where it is not unusual for near-hurricane force winds to occur for weeks at a time, causing the seas themselves to build into breakers approaching fifty feet in height. Cook conducted his survey from a wooden sailing ship.
1778: On his third Voyage of Discovery, Captain James Cook discovers a Central Pacific island chain he names the Sandwich Islands. They have since reverted to their native name, Hawaii. As an aside, the people who consider themselves the indigenous natives of the chain are working to further devolve the name into a near-phonetic transliteration of the Polynesian Hawai’i, which is itself derived from O-havai’i.
1784: The new United States government ratifies the Treaty of Paris, which acknowledges its existence as an independent political entity.
1786: The Virginia General Assembly accepts the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, written by Thomas Jefferson– as part of the supreme law of the Commonwealth. Jefferson insisted it be included in his epitaph.
1808: Birth of Salmon P. Chase (d.1873), a prominent New Yorker and principled “Free Soil” abolitionist. Chase ran for the 1860 Republican nomination for President, but lost to Abraham Lincoln, who nevertheless brought him into his Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury, where he established the framework for a national banking system, and created a viable market for government bonds supported by paper money. His financial reforms provided the crucial capital necessary for financing the war effort against the Confederacy. Chase, after threatening resignation several times, was appointed by Lincoln (after accepting the resignation) to sit as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, where he served until his death. The Chase banking empire in New York was named in his honor, even though Chase himself had no fiduciary interest in the corporation.
1831: Birth of Horatio Alger, Jr. American writer of inspiring books about boys who rise from humble circumstances to accomplish great things.
1875: Birth of Albert Schweitzer (d.1965), musician, theologian, and medical doctor whose work in easing the lives of African tribesmen in Gabon, and his deep intellectual response to the real problems of both colonialism and the de-colonizing movement earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.
1943: After over 6 months of brutal combat and continuing losses to the U.S. Marines, the Japanese army completes Operation KE, the evacuation of Guadalcanal.
1943: Start of the First Warsaw Uprising in the Jewish Ghetto. After four years of being crammed into a single ghetto, the Jews of Warsaw revolt against the Nazi occupation. Armed with pistols, rifles and Molotov cocktails, the fighters seek to forcibly oppose the renewed transports of the Jewish population to the death camps. The rising lasted through May, forcing the Germans into a complete military operation in order to put the revolt down.
1943: First day of the Casablanca Conference between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill with representatives of the Free French forces. Joseph Stalin was invited but declined to attend because of the ongoing siege of Stalingrad. This conference publicly declared unconditional surrender as the core Allied war aim against Germany. To get there, Roosevelt became the first President to fly in an airplane while serving in office, taking a plane between Miami and Casablanca across the Atlantic Ocean.
1945: The Red Army captures what’s left of Warsaw, Poland. After six years of war, the city is reduced to heaps of rubble, with a population struggling for subsistence.
1945: With Soviet forces nearing, the Nazi administrators of Auschwitz begin to evacuate the death camp.
1945: The Soviet sweep into Eastern Europe winds up arresting Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg off the streets of Budapest, where he established a “Swedish Cultural Zone” to protect the Jews of Budapest from Nazi deportation.
1950: First flight of the prototype MiG-17 fighter plane, a workhorse of the communist bloc through the 1980s.
1966: An armed B-52 on a routine deterrent patrol suffers a mid-air collision with its KC-135 tanker over Polomares, Spain. Both planes break up in flight, and three of the four B-28 thermonuclear bombs on board the B-52 fall onto farmland. Two of them detonate conventionally, spreading nuclear material over a wide area. Cleanup efforts involved removing some 1,400 tons of dirt, and transporting it back to the Savannah River Plant in the United States for burning and disposal. The fourth bomb fell into the sea just offshore, but remained unlocated for over three months. During the (34 Navy ships) search effort, which finally succeeded with the deep submersible Alvin, the regular U.S. press, unable by security rules to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons, was left making statements like, “I don’t know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you think we are looking for.” Quoted in Anthony Lake, “Lying Around Washington,” Foreign Policy,no. 2 (Spring 1971), p. 93 [Extracted from (Brookings website)]
About the Author
As a young person many years ago in New York state, where many of Benedict Arnold’s military exploits took place, I first became acquainted with Benedict Arnold as a high school student immersed in Revolutionary War history in New York state, as the pivotal Battle of Saratoga and the so-called Battle of Bennington took place proximate to where I grew up as a child.
Before Saratoga, which was in 1777, in September 1775, early in the American Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold, then a Colonel, led a force of 1,100 Continental Army troops on an expedition from Cambridge in the Province of Massachusetts Bay to the gates of Quebec City as part of a two-pronged invasion of the British Province of Quebec, passing through the wilderness of what is now Maine to get there.
In thinking of that, consider that Quebec City, a stone citadel, is far to the north of us in the land of ice and snow, and Arnold’s expedition was setting off through some horrible, swampy wilderness with winter coming on in Maine.
The other expedition that invaded Quebec from Lake Champlain was led by Richard Montgomery, a beloved general who was killed in Quebec.
Not surprisingly, unanticipated problems beset the expedition as soon as it left the last significant colonial outposts in Maine.
The portages up the Kennebec River proved grueling, and the boats frequently leaked, ruining gunpowder and spoiling food supplies.
More than a third of the men turned back before reaching the height of land between the Kennebec and Chaudière rivers.
The areas on either side of the height of land were swampy tangles of lakes and streams, and the traversal was made more difficult by bad weather and inaccurate maps, while many of the troops lacked experience handling boats in white water, which led to the destruction of more boats and supplies in the descent to the Saint Lawrence River via the fast-flowing Chaudière.
By the time that Arnold reached the settlements above the Saint Lawrence River in November, his force was reduced to 600 starving men.
They had traveled about 350 miles (560 km) through poorly charted wilderness, twice the distance that they had expected to cover.
Arnold’s troops crossed the Saint Lawrence on November 13 and 14, assisted by the local French-speaking Canadiens, and attempted to put Quebec City under siege.
Failing in this, they withdrew to Point-aux-Trembles until Montgomery arrived to lead an unsuccessful attack on the city.
Arnold was rewarded for his effort in leading the expedition with a promotion to brigadier general.
Prior to that fiasco, on May 10, 1775, shortly after the American Revolutionary War began, Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen led an expedition that captured Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in the British Province of New York.
According to history, Allen and Arnold were aware that Quebec was lightly defended with there only being about 600 regular troops in the entire province.
According to Wikipedia, Arnold, who had done business in the province before the war, also had intelligence that the French-speaking Canadiens would be favorably disposed toward a colonial force, so Arnold and Allen each made arguments to the Second Continental Congress that Quebec could and should be taken from the British, pointing out that the British could use Quebec as a staging area for attacks down Lake Champlain and into the Hudson River valley, which is exactly what “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, the playwright and British general, did in 1777.
For their part, Congress did not want to alarm the people of Quebec, so they rejected these arguments, but in July 1775, amid concerns that the British might use Quebec as a base for military movements into New York, they changed their position, and authorized an invasion of Quebec via Lake Champlain, assigning the task to Major General Philip Schuyler of New York.
As to Philip Schuyler, he was born in 1733 in Albany, New York, to a wealthy and influential Dutch family.
His mother was Cornelia Van Cortlandt, the daughter of the first lord of Cortlandt Manor.
The Van Cortlandt family was another influential land-owning family of New York and as a result, Schuyler inherited a considerable amount of property when he came of age in 1754.
It has been estimated that Schuyler held between ten to twenty thousand acres of land in and around Albany, with the vast majority of his landholdings in the Saratoga area on the upper Hudson River.
In 1755, he married Catharine Van Rensselaer, the daughter of John Van Rensselaer, proprietor of Crailo and the Claverack estates of about 60,000 acres, and first cousin to the Lord of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck.
Getting back to Saratoga, where Benedict Arnold disobeyed “Granny” Gates, the American commander at the time of the climatic Saratoga battles, himself a retired British officer who was said to be quaking in his boots at Saratoga at the thought of fighting British regulars, due to a combination of sectionalism amongst the states, class conflict, political intrigue and personal ambition, it was “Granny” Gates who received credit for the stunning victory while Major General Philip Schuyler, the architect of the victorious campaign, was condemned as a military incompetent, and possibly even a traitor, despite his acquittal from a court martial in 1778, for evacuating Fort Ticonderoga after the British hauled cannons to the top of overlooking Mt. Defiance and made occupation of Fort Ticonderoga, a stone star fort built by the French during the French and Indian War, untenable.
Mount Defiance, then known as a height called Sugar Loaf overlooked both Ticonderoga and Fort Independence across Lake Champlain, and large cannons on that height would make the fort impossible to defend, a tactical problem which had been pointed out to “Granny” Gates by John Trumbull when Gates was in command.
Gates believed it to be impossible for the British to place cannons on the heights, even though Trumbull, Anthony Wayne, and an injured Benedict Arnold had climbed to the top and noted that gun carriages could probably be dragged up, which they were by the British, despite it being “impossible” when Burgoyne’s troops came south to wreck havoc on the rebellious American colonies.
Like Benedict Arnold, truly a military hero, Schuyler’s contributions were vital to the American war effort during the campaign leading up to the critical battles of Saratoga, which took place on September 19 and October 7, 1777.
Although Schuyler was no longer in command when the actual battles took place, nevertheless, his uses of the Fabian tactics of delay and evasion rather than direct confrontation were successful in stalling Burgoyne’s troops as they marched from Canada into northern New York.
Also, Schuyler audaciously split his forces in the face of the enemy’s main onslaught from the north to counter a British feint from the west along the Mohawk River valley.
Without Schuyler’s daring improvisations prior to the Saratoga battles, it is very possible that the campaign of 1777 would have turned out badly for the Americans.
“Granny” Gates himself, who was born in Essex County, England, and served in the British Army during the War of the Austrian Succession and the French and Indian War, and being frustrated by his inability to advance in the army, sold his commission and established a small plantation in Virginia, has been described as “one of the Revolution’s most controversial military figures” because of his role in the Conway Cabal, which attempted to discredit and replace George Washington; and his actions during and after his defeat at Camden, where he set a land speed record for a general fleeing battle on horseback, covering 170 miles (270 km) in three days on horseback, heading north in retreat.
Getting back to Saratoga, British General John Burgoyne launched a three-column attack against General Horatio Gates and his American forces in the First Battle of Saratoga, also known as the Battle of Freeman’s Farm.
Coming under heavy cannon fire from the approaching British troops, General Gates initially ordered the Northern Army to be patient and wait until the British neared before launching a counter-attack.
However, General Gates’ second in command, American Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, strongly disagreed with Gates’ orders and did not hesitate to share his opinion with his superior.
After arguing for several hours, General Arnold was finally able to convince Gates to order American troops onto the battlefield to meet the center column of the approaching British, and to dispatch a regiment of riflemen to intercept the British right flank.
Due to their heated argument and disagreement over military decisions at the First Battle of Saratoga, General Gates removed General Arnold as his second in command and confined him to his quarters.
As History.net tells the story, the season was changing with hot afternoons giving way to cool evenings and cooler mornings as summer turned to autumn in New York’s upper Hudson Valley.
Beneath the green, red, and orange canopy of leaves shrouding the hills that straddled the Hudson River, a different sort of transformation was taking place.
Four months into British Lieutenant General John Burgoyne’s invasion of the northern colonies, his army had collided with Major General Horatio Gates’s entrenched Americans.
Now, on September 19, 1777, the first of two fateful battles–bound to alter the course of the American Revolution–had begun.
At Gates’s headquarters behind the American lines on Bemis Heights (named for Jotham Bemis, a local tavern keeper), 36-year-old Major General Benedict Arnold seethed with impatience.
The fiery Connecticut native held command of the American left wing, which Burgoyne had attacked that morning.
After directing the American defense for much of the day, Arnold now found himself wasting his energy by repeatedly requesting that Gates give him reinforcements.
He ached to sweep the field before dark.
Gates eventually sent portions of Brigadier General Ebenezer Learned’s brigade to support the Americans who were battling across a wide, stump-filled field called Freeman’s Farm.
Shortly afterward, Deputy Quartermaster Colonel Morgan Lewis reported in at headquarters and told Gates of the indecisive fighting.
That was enough for Arnold.
‘By God, I will soon put an end to it’ he declared, and mounted a horse to go and lead the troops himself.
‘You had better order him back,’ Lewis told Gates.
‘The action is going well.’
‘He may, by some rash act, do mischief.’
Gates immediately sent an aide to bring him back, and Arnold angrily complied.
By this time Learned’s unguided infantry had wandered too far to the west, where they were all but wiped out by Brigadier General Simon Fraser’s British troops.
Meanwhile, 500 German soldiers under Major General Baron Friedrich von Riedesel had marched to Freeman’s Farm and stopped the final American advance.
Darkness then descended, ending the contest.
Left in command of the field, Burgoyne could technically claim victory in the First Battle of Saratoga (also known as the Battle of Freeman’s Farm), but he had suffered 560 casualties, almost twice the American total.
The British Army had shrunk to less than 7,000 effectives, while Gates could boast of nearly 12,000 Continentals and militia.
The Americans could still win a victory.
All the soldiers needed, Arnold believed, was inspiration, but he doubted it would come from his commander, “Granny” Gates.
Gates’ achievements in America far exceeded anything he could have achieved in his native England, where he had been born a commoner.
Writer Hoffman Nickerson characterized Gates as ‘a snob of the first water’ who possessed ‘an unctuously pious way with him.’
Although Gates was an ambitious man, dynamic leadership was not part of his makeup, which was to cause the rift between him and Benedict Arnold. because Gates, the former British officer, did not believe American troops could stand up to British infantry in the open field.
Though his men clearly outnumbered those of his opponent, Gates remained cautious and believed his army was better off fighting from behind fortifications, hence the nickname, “Granny.”
Arnold, in contrast, was daring and imaginative.
He had proven his abilities during the doomed attempt to capture Quebec in 1775 and at the Battle of Valcour Island the next year.
At Saratoga his views differed from those held by Gates, and had Gates prevailed, we likely would still be tugging the forelock and bending the knee to an English king or queen.
Enough for now, more yet to come, for that is an intriguing story of Benedict Arnold and American history as it really happened.
With respect to Benedict Arnold’s traitorous acts, the name that must be considered as a causative factor is that of Margaret “Peggy” Shippen, who was the wife of Benedict Arnold when he was at West Point.
In the article “Love and the Revolution” by Victoria Cooney in HUMANITIES, September/October 2013 | Volume 34, Number 5, we are told that Lucy Flucker of Boston and Peggy Shippen of Philadelphia were beautiful, well-born, and well-bred specimens of the ideal eighteenth-century American lady when love altered the course of their lives and thrust them into the action and intrigue of the American Revolution.
Nancy Rubin Stuart, author of Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married—a dual biography of Lucy Flucker Knox and Peggy Shippen Arnold—draws these two women out of the footnotes of their husbands’ lives and presents them as multi-dimensional characters in their own right, with admirable and condemnable qualities, mixed loyalties, and distinct, if convoluted, motivations.
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Today, Peggy Shippen would be called a drama queen, perhaps.
Getting back to the article, Peggy Shippen met Benedict Arnold in the summer of 1778 when the crippled officer was stationed in Philadelphia as a military governor.
Arnold was a former apothecary from Connecticut, more than twice her age, widowed, and the father of three.
Shippen’s father, a neutralist judge and a member of the Philadelphia provincial council, did not approve of the match.
“But Peggy would have gone into what one friend called a ‘dancing fury’ if her father didn’t cave in and let her marry Benedict Arnold,” says Stuart.
Thus did Peggy come to wed the man who would betray America to the British only fourteen months later—with her help and support.
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I don’t recall at what age Peggy Shippen came into the picture in my mind as a causative factor in Benedict Arnold’s treasonous conduct, but I believe history bears me out on that account, as this article above at least intimates.
Getting back to the article, Stuart came across Peggy and Lucy’s parallel, real-life “forbidden love” stories when searching through archives for letters and diaries written by women of the Revolutionary period, hoping to find something that might shed light on their private lives.
“There were 2.5 million people alive during the American Revolution in what became the U.S. and at least a million of them, probably more, were women,” she says.
“We know they tended the hearth, and birthed babies, and made candles, they sewed and [did] needlepoint, but we don’t know much about their interior lives.”
As to her role in Arnold’s treasonous acts, we are told as follows:
Peggy served as Arnold’s accomplice in his famous act of treachery against the United States, not only helping him secure an audience with John André, a British officer she had befriended as a young woman in Philadelphia, but also flirting and cajoling Robert R. Livingston into securing Arnold’s strategic position at West Point.
It was West Point, the “Gibraltar of America,” which Arnold hoped to give the British, providing them with control of the Hudson and a way to cut off the Continental Army’s supplies and communication.
When Arnold was exposed, Peggy helped him escape and destroyed evidence.
In order to protect herself from questioning, imprisonment, and (if found guilty) death by hanging, Peggy threw herself into a hysteric fit.
The episode convinced Washington and Alexander Hamilton that she was completely surprised by her husband’s treachery.
“I wished myself her brother, to have a right to become her defender,” Hamilton wrote.
It wasn’t until several months later that questions began to circulate regarding her role in the affair.
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But for the love of a young woman, would Benedict Arnold have stayed loyal?