History Notes this week of Dec 8

1282: The last native Prince of Wales is killed by the forces of England’s Edward I at the Battle of Orewin Bridge, earning himself the distinctive title of Llywelyn the Last. After this battle, Edward solemnly and systematically dismembered all of Llywelyn’s royal trappings, including his wife’s jewels and crown, melting them down and fashioning them into a set of English royal diadems and chalices. With the extinction of the Welsh line of succession, Edward then assumed the title Prince of Wales for the heir of the British throne.

1520: Confirming his principled opposition to what he identified as the un-Biblical rule of the Pope, Augustinian monk Martin Luther publicly burns the Papal Bull Exsurge Domine, in which Pope Leo X demands from Luther a recantation of 41 “errors of the faith” derived from his 95 theses published three years earlier. As he burned his copy of the bull, Luther is reported to have said, “Because you have confounded the truth of God, today the Lord confounds you. Into the fire with you!” It should come as no surprise that Leo was not amused by this act.

1660: An actual woman- identity ambiguous between Margaret Hughes or Anne Marshall- appears on stage for the first time, in the role of Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello. 

1703: The Great Storm… A powerful extra-tropical cyclone lashes the south of England for three days, toppling thousands of chimneys in London, peeling the lead-shingled roof off of Westminster Abbey, tearing scores of ships from their moorings and onto the rocks of the lee shore, where they and their crews were destroyed by the pounding surf, suffering a loss of over 1,500 seamen. One Royal Navy flagship, HMS Association,  broke free at Harwich, on the east coast north of London, and was driven by the wind and wave across the North Sea all the way to Gothenburg, Sweden, before the crew could control the ship enough to turn around and make their way back to England. Over 4,000 trees were downed in the New Forest. The original Eddystone Lighthouse was swept from its treacherous rocks, killing all six in residence, including its builder, Henry Winstanley, who intentionally made a trip out to the light the day prior in order to confirm its strength during a storm.

1724: Birth of Samuel Hood (d.1816), one of the great English admirals from the age of fighting sail, with a sterling 55 year career at sea. He is probably best remembered as Horatio Nelson’s mentor, beginning from the time when Nelson was a young frigate commander in the Caribbean in 1782.  We also remember him having been part, under Admiral Thomas Graves, of the Battle of the Virginia Capes.

1725: Birth of Virginian George Mason (d.1792), a key intellectual partner of Patrick Henry, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, and a crucial voice of ensuring the rights of citizens during the development of a functioning, but limited republican government in the newly independent United States. Mason was the driving force for insisting on the inclusion of the Bill of Rights as integral to the Constitution.

1745: Birth of John Jay (d.1829), first Chief Justice of the United State Supreme Court.

1768: Publication in Edinburgh of the first edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, a systematic attempt to categorize and explain in English the world’s catalog of knowledge.

1787: The sovereign state of Delaware ratifies the new Constitution of the United States of America, the first of the Several States to do so. 

1790: The United States Congress moves the capital of the country from New York City to Philadelphia.

1792: French King Louis XVI, jailed since August, is paraded through Paris before appearing before the National Convention to hear the charges of Treason Against the State levied against him. You already know how this is going to turn out, but one cannot overstate the drama of this particular day, as all the symbolism of the three year old Revolution and the eternal Monarchy meet this day under the cold reality of treason. The packed Parisian streets were silent as their king passed by, and as the charges were read to Citizen Louis Capet, not King Louis the Sixteenth, no-one could be in doubt that France had crossed a threshold from which it could not return.

1806: Birth of Stand Waite (d.1871), tribal Chief of the Cherokee nation in Georgia, colonel of Confederate cavalry during the Civil War, and the only Native American to be made general officer on either side of the war. Waite’s forces remained effective and active in Arkansas and east Texas throughout the war. With his surrender after a battle in the Indian Territory in late June 1865, he became the last Land Confederate leader to surrender his forces to the Union. Note: Captain James Waddell of CSS Alabama bears the honor of being the last-last Confederate to surrender, and he did it with the British, not the Yankees.

1830: Birth of poet Emily Dickinson (d.1886), whose exalted position in the role of American Letters occurred only after her death, when the troves of her poetry were finally cataloged and published under her own name. 

1862: Just outside the little farming community of Prairie Grove, Arkansas,  a substantial force of over 9,000 Union soldiers under the command of Brigadier General James Blunt squared off against some 11,000 Confederates under Major General Thomas Hindman in a short, sharp battle that saw the combined use of very accurate Union artillery fire against specific Confederate artillery batteries, followed by an infantry attack that was met by Confederate cavalry on one side and charging Rebel infantry on two other sides. The Federals retreated back towards their lines, where Union artillery was re-loaded with canister shot that devastated the Confederates. By nightfall, Union reinforcements began to arrive, and Hindman, recognizing his depleted ammunition supplies and exhausted troops could not withstand another similar day of battle, withdrew what remained of his forces towards Van Buren, Arkansas, essentially opening the door for the ultimate Union occupation and control of northwest Arkansas.Casualty count was 1,200 Union, 1,300 Confederate. With essentially no change in the opening positions, the battle was technically a draw, but in reality was a strategic victory for the Union. FYI- Prairie Grove is just a short drive from where I did some private Learjet flying out of Springdale, AR. The battlefield is very nicely preserved and easily walkable. It surprised me to find such a significant Civil War site so far from what we traditionally consider the center of the action here in the mid-Atlantic region. But control of this part of Arkansas played a crucial role in stabilizing the Western Theater of operations.

1862: The Union gunship USS Cairo, operating in a mine-clearing operation on the Yazoo River just upstream from Vicksburg, Mississippi, is struck by two electrically detonated mines and sinks in thirty feet of muddy water. Although there are two huge holes in the bow, the entire crew escapes, and within a few years the ship is completely silted in and forgotten. Re-discovered in 1958, she is finally raised and put on display on the Mississippi shoreline near Vicksburg. 

1864: Four weeks after setting out from the ruins of Atlanta with an army made up solely of fighting men (i.e., no supply train), Union General William Sherman arrives at the perimeter defenses of Savannah, having left a massive swath of destruction in his wake.

1865: The legislature of the former Confederate State of Georgia votes to approve the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, providing the final ratification of the end of slavery in the Supreme Law of the Land.

1869: Not-yet notorious bad man Jesse James robs his first bank, a branch in Gallatin, Missouri.

1898: The Treaty of Paris formally ends the United States’ ten-month long “Splendid Little War” with Spain, ceding to the U.S. control of the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam. Spain also cedes control over the Philippines for a payment of $20 million. Despite the popularity of the war with the public at large, Senate ratification was not a foregone conclusion, with much principled argument about how a constitutional republic of enumerated powers could become an imperial power over non-citizens in distant lands. The debate came to a final vote in February, 1899, and passed 57-27, one vote more than the 2/3 majority needed for ratification.

1901: British inventor Guglielmo Marconi, working from a receiving station on Signal Hill in Saint Johns, Newfoundland, positively receives the first trans-Atlantic radio signal, broadcast from a sister station in southern England. The experiment was not an unqualified success, however, and it took years of continuous technical improvements, patent fights and corporate battles with undersea cable operators before the wireless became the critical communications tool we know today. Marconi won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on harnessing the electromagnetic spectrum for radio.

1904:  President Theodore Roosevelt issues what he calls a “corollary” to the Monroe doctrine, stating that it was the policy of the United States to affirmatively intervene in the affairs of Latin American governments if they show themselves incapable or unstable in their governance. The policy underlay the next three decades of U.S. military intervention in the multiple “banana wars” throughout the Caribbean and Central America.

1912: The German Imperial War Council meets informally to talk through the decaying military and diplomatic situation metastasizing in Europe. Tensions were high over both the Balkans and ever-expanding “protectorate” –style colonialism along the North African coast, and Russia’s buildup of its “Great Military Program,” to say nothing of Britain’s overt concerns about Germany’s expanding High Seas Fleet and its traditional insistence on maintaining a balance of power on the Continent. Participants at this meeting included the Kaiser himself, his chiefs of the Army and Navy, and senior diplomats. The issue was the eventuality of war, and how to manage it to the advantage of Imperial Germany.

1914: In a naval action far from the primary theater of the Great War, the Royal Navy tracks down and destroys a German cruiser fleet that was in position to make a raid on British supply depot at Port Stanley in the Falklands. Despite near-parity of the opposing forces, casualties in the Battle of the Falkland Islands were amazingly lopsided, with nearly 1,900 German sailors killed, 215 captured and four warships and two transports sent to the bottom. The Royal Navy suffered 10 killed and 19 wounded with otherwise minor damage to their ships.

1917: After six months as commander in chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, Field Marshall Edmund Allenby reaches the climax of his campaign against the Ottoman Turks by defeating them in a series of short, sharp engagements that lead to the Turks’ surrender and evacuation of Jerusalem. Although fighting continued northward into the Levant and Syria, Jerusalem itself remained the crown jewel of the British-Allied conquest of Ottoman lands in the Middle East.

1921: The government of the United Kingdom and representatives of the nascent Republic of Ireland sign an agreement establishing the Irish Free State as a self-governing state within the British Commonwealth of Nations, and ending the shockingly vicious civil war that wracked the island for the last five years.  The pact gives the counties of Ulster the right to opt out of the agreement, a right they immediately exercised in order to remain part of the United Kingdom.

1922: The Irish Free State is formally established per the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of the year prior. No surprise, the counties of Ulster re-affirmed their legal option to not be a part of the Irish state.

1936: King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland signs the Instrument of Abdication, with which he plunged the nation into a constitutional crises in order to marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson, recently divorced from her American husband. The two move out into the world as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

1937: Japanese warplanes bomb and strafe the American gunboat USS Panay, sending her to the bottom of the Yangtze River in China at Nanking. Three US sailors died and 45 were wounded in the attack. Although the Japanese government apologized and paid indemnity, the incident did nothing to improve US-Japanese relations during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Panay was part of the US Asiatic Squadron that was on patrol along the Chinese coast and up the major rivers to protect American lives and interests.

1939: The army of Finland defeats the Soviet Red Army at the Battle of Tolvajarvi, part of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union, fought on the fringes of the larger European war.

1941: The Empire of Japan, intent on consolidating its hegemony over the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, launches a flawlessly planned and executed attack on the United States Navy’s Pacific Fleet moored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Despite disparate indications that something was afoot, the attack comes as a complete surprise, and obliterates the main striking force of the Navy in a single stroke.

1941: Three days into their astonishing juggernaut, Japanese torpedo bombers attack and sink the Royal Navy battleships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse off the coast of Malaysia. The loss of the two ships sends an existential shock to Great Britain not unlike what happened to the United States just three days earlier.

1941: In accordance with the terms of the Tripartite Pact with Japan, Germany and Italy declare war on the United States. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill breathes a sigh of relief.

1941: The Japanese army lands on Mindanao to begin the conquest of the Philippines.

1941: Cascading war declarations continue as a direct result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor last week. Today: The United Kingdom declares war on Bulgaria; Hungary and Romania declare war on the United States; India declares war on Japan. It is now a world war de jure and de facto.

1949: As the Chinese Civil War collapses under pressure from the communists of Mao Tse-Tung, the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-Sheck abandons Nanjing and sets up its “provisional capital” in Taipei, on the Chinese island of Taiwan. 75 years later, they’re still there: They still claim to be the legitimate government of China, and the United States still promises to assist in the defense of the island in the event of an invasion by mainland forces.  

1961: Tanganyika, the East African territory taken from Germany at the Treaty of Versailles and given as a mandate to Great Britain, becomes an independent member of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Within three years, it will form an alliance with Zanzibar to become the modern state of Tanzania. 

1972: Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt land in the Moon’s Tarus-Littrow Valley, to begin a three-day sojourn of geologic discovery that climaxes the Apollo program. Command Module pilot Richard Evans remained in orbit performing extensive survey and mapping tasks while his crewmates were on the surface. Apollo 17 became the last flight of the moon program   

1980: Death of former Beatle John Lennon (b.1940), gunned down on the sidewalk in front of his apartment in NYC.