History Notes this week of April 5

33 A.D. — In Jerusalem, Roman governor Pontius Pilate confirms the Levitical heresy conviction of itinerant rabbi Jesus of Nazareth and sentences him to death. In accordance with Roman law he is flogged and beaten before hauling his own cross bar to the execution site. In a shift from normal procedure, the Roman soldiers use nails to pin him into place instead of ropes. After his death he is buried in an unused tomb owned by businessman Joseph of Arimathea. For security reasons authorities have sealed the tomb and posted guards. No further action is expected from his followers. Within three days, that expectation would prove to be the most consequential miscalculation in human history.

1199 — Death of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, from an arrow. The wound, inflicted by a crossbow bolt at the siege of Châlus-Chabrol, festered for eleven days before claiming the “Lion-Hearted” king at age 41 — a premature end for a man who spent roughly ten of his ten-year reign away from England, either crusading or imprisoned.

1581 — English privateer (that’s right: he was operating under Letters of Marque) Francis Drake arrives at Plymouth in his caravel Golden Hind, having completed a circumnavigation laden with Spanish plunder from around the globe. Queen Elizabeth I knights him for his spectacular successes. The Spanish, who regarded him simply as a pirate and demanded his execution, called him “El Draque” — and the distinction between privateer and pirate depended almost entirely on which flag you sailed under.

1588 — Birth of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679). He is probably best known for his rather gloomy view of the human condition and the need for a powerful sovereign to maintain order. In his magnum opus, Leviathan (1651), Hobbes described life of an unconstrained individual in a state of nature as “…solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Born prematurely — his mother reportedly went into labor upon hearing the Spanish Armada was approaching — Hobbes joked that “fear and I were born twins.” He lived to 91, perhaps vindicating a life of cautious pessimism.

1590 — Death of Francis Walsingham, one of Elizabeth I’s key advisors and mentors. Walsingham developed the world’s first professional intelligence service, with agents, spies and couriers posted throughout Europe, but most prominently within the Spanish-Scottish nexus, wherein dwelt persistent and dangerous attempts to restore the Catholic Queen Mary to the throne of England. Walsingham died deeply in debt, having funded much of his spy network out of his own pocket; the Crown was notoriously slow to reimburse its most indispensable servant.

1614 — Virginia native Pocahontas marries British subject and Jamestown leader John Rolfe. The union was diplomatically significant — her father Powhatan, paramount chief of the Tidewater confederacy, maintained an uneasy peace with the English colonists partly on the strength of it. Pocahontas would travel to London, be received at court, and die of illness at Gravesend in 1617, never returning to Virginia.

1621 — After wintering over in Cape Cod Bay, Mayflower sets sail from Plymouth, Massachusetts on its return trip to England. Of the 102 passengers who had crossed the Atlantic the previous autumn, 45 had died over the brutal winter. Remarkably, not a single member of the Mayflower’s crew defected to stay — though the colonists had negotiated the right to keep the ship through the winter precisely because they feared it.

1776 — Lacking a navy worthy of the name, the Continental Congress authorizes its first Letters of Marque and Reprisal. The practice of licensing private warships to harass enemy commerce was ancient and pragmatic — it outsourced naval warfare to entrepreneurs motivated by profit, and American privateers would capture or sink hundreds of British vessels over the course of the Revolution.

1776 — After his unlikely success in the siege of Boston, Major General George Washington begins to march his Continental Army south to the defense of New York. Washington had forced the British evacuation of Boston by hauling captured cannons from Fort Ticonderoga overnight onto Dorchester Heights, a feat of logistics that stunned the redcoats into abandoning the city. New York, however, would prove a far grimmer chapter.

1792 — President Washington issues the first presidential veto on a bill concerning apportionment of representatives between the several states. The veto — a power whose use the Founders had debated intensely — was overridden by Congress, establishing early on that the separation of powers was not merely theoretical. It also set the tone for Washington’s careful, precedent-conscious approach to every act of his presidency.

1793 — The Committee of Public Safety assumes executive control over the government of revolutionary France, four years into the turmoil we now recognize as the French Revolution. The Committee, under the leadership of Citizen Maximilian Robespierre, begins its work to suppress counter-revolutionary activity, particularly of the Girondins, toxic enemies of Robespierre and his Jacobin faction. By July the Committee had reorganized itself to the task of physically eliminating all opposition, which led to la Terreur — during which the guillotine (“the National Razor”) lopped off nearly 40,000 French heads of various political persuasions. The public orgy of death accelerated into la Grande Terreur until it finally disposed of the chief terrorist of them all — Robespierre himself — in July of 1794. The Revolution, as the saying goes, devoured its own children; Robespierre went to the blade he had sent so many others to, unmourned and unrepentant.

1841 — After only 31 days as President, William Henry Harrison (b. 1773) dies of pneumonia. His Vice President, John Tyler, becomes the first to ascend to the office due to the death of the President. Harrison’s campaign began the modern era of personality campaigning (“Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”). He was not only the first to die in office, he was the oldest to be elected (until Reagan in 1980, and now Biden in 2020), the last to be born before the American Revolution, and the first to be photographed. Harrison delivered the longest inaugural address in presidential history — nearly two hours in cold, wet weather without a hat or coat, apparently determined to prove his vigor. He was dead within the month.

1860 — Pony Express mail service begins between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California. The money-losing service inspired the country with its dramatic rides and colorful riders (including William “Buffalo Bill” Cody), but quickly lost its reason for being with the rapid expansion of the telegraph and railroad services. The last horses ran in October, 1861. The entire operational life of the Pony Express lasted just 18 months, yet it has secured a near-mythological place in the American imagination entirely disproportionate to its brief and unprofitable existence.

1865 (April 3) — Union forces enter Richmond, where they find little but the burned-out shells of its downtown buildings, fired by the retreating Confederates. Robert E. Lee leads the remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia up the Appomattox River to meet with a promised supply train near Lynchburg. The Confederate government had fled by train the night before, Jefferson Davis departing with what gold remained in the treasury — a symbolic end to a capital that had defied Union capture for four grinding years.

1865 (April 4) — Following the Confederate evacuation of the city, President Abraham Lincoln visits Richmond, Virginia, including during his tour a short sit in Jefferson Davis’ chair. As he becomes recognized, a growing number of black workers join the procession through town and bow down to him. Lincoln responds, “Kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will heretofore enjoy.” Lincoln walked through the former Confederate capital with minimal security, shaking hands and visibly moved — it was one of the most remarkable scenes of the entire war, and he had just ten days left to live.

1865 (April 6) — Battle of Sailor’s Creek. Three days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee abandoned the defenses of Petersburg, the cavalry of Union General Phil Sheridan cut off his planned route to meet up with Joe Johnston at Danville. Marching without food, and with a promise from the Confederate Commissary General for 80,000 rations waiting for him in Farmville, Lee shifted direction and began moving his army due west. But Lee’s shift to the right was countered by a further swing of Sheridan’s cavalry, effectively surrounding and capturing in a short, sharp battle nearly a quarter of Lee’s army, including 8 general officers — and, unknown to Lee, the Confederate commissary train itself. Although a Union victory, it came at a cost of nearly 1,200 casualties. When Lee saw the remnants of the fight streaming along the road, he exclaimed aloud, “My God! Has the army dissolved?” Three days later, Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

1882 — Former Confederate guerrilla (and participant in the 1863 massacre at Lawrence, Kansas) Jesse James is shot in the back by a member of his own gang, Robert Ford. Ford had secretly arranged a pardon with Missouri Governor Thomas Crittenden in exchange for James’s death, then shot him while he stood on a chair to straighten a picture. The act made Ford infamous rather than celebrated — “that dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard” ensured he was booed off stages for the rest of his short life.

1884 — Birth of Yamamoto Isoroku. The architect of the Pearl Harbor attacks dies in 1943 when his airplane is intercepted and shot down over Bougainville Island. Yamamoto had studied at Harvard and served as a naval attaché in Washington — he knew American industrial capacity better than almost any of his colleagues, and reportedly warned that attacking the U.S. would mean “awakening a sleeping giant.” He was overruled, and then ordered to execute the plan himself.

1887 — Anne Sullivan teaches the word “water” to Helen Keller. The moment, described in Keller’s own memoir, came at a water pump in Tuscumbia, Alabama — Sullivan spelled W-A-T-E-R into Keller’s hand as water flowed over it, and something clicked. Keller later wrote that she ran about touching everything, demanding its name, having understood for the first time that things had names — and that she had a way to reach the world.

1896 — The first modern Olympic Games opens in Athens. The revival was the brainchild of French educator Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who believed organized international athletic competition could promote peace and cross-cultural understanding. Fourteen nations and 241 athletes participated; all of them were male. The marathon course was run from the town of Marathon — naturally — and won by a Greek shepherd, Spyridon Louis, to the delirious joy of the home crowd.

1917 — Vladimir I. Lenin arrives in St. Petersburg from Switzerland, via Germany and Sweden. There is a fascinating sub-plot to this story, in that the putative leader of Russia’s Bolsheviks was in exile in Switzerland when the original Russian Revolution broke out in February, and was thus unable to influence the immediate course of events. As the Kerensky government vainly tried to find its post-czarist footing, the Imperial German government sensed a unique opportunity to consolidate its dominant military victories on the eastern front with a decisive political victory that would decapitate the Russian government. The Germans made secret arrangements for a guarded “extra-territorial” train to transport a small cadre of their nominal Russian enemies from their Swiss exile in order to foment continued revolution, with the goal of generating a separate peace between Russia and Germany. The plan worked exactly as expected, with Lenin’s Bolshevik faction seizing power in October and making it their first order of business to conclude the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918. Russia thence continued its descent into Soviet Communism, prompting Winston Churchill to offer his typically concise summation of how it started:

“Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.” (–Speech to the House of Commons, November, 1919)

The Germans got their separate peace — and, in doing so, handed Lenin the platform from which to build a regime that would outlast the Kaiser’s Germany by seven decades and cost the world incalculably more than the war it was meant to end.

1922 — Joseph Stalin becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin reportedly came to regard the appointment as a catastrophic error — too late. His Testament, dictated during his final illness, urged the Party to remove Stalin from the post. The document was suppressed. Stalin would hold power for 31 years.

1931 — Fox Studios fires John Wayne from its list of in-house actors. The dismissal followed the box-office failure of his first starring role in The Big Trail, a widescreen epic that was technically ahead of its time but commercially disastrous. Wayne spent the next nine years grinding through B-westerns before John Ford cast him in Stagecoach in 1939 and made him a star.

1936 — Richard Bruno Hauptmann is executed by the electric chair for the kidnapping and murder of Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s baby. Although the term “media circus” had yet to be invented, media coverage of the kidnapping and trial defines the genre to this day. The case directly prompted the federal Lindbergh Law, making interstate kidnapping a capital crime. Doubts about Hauptmann’s guilt have never entirely disappeared, and the circus atmosphere of the trial — H.L. Mencken called it “the greatest story since the Resurrection” — raised serious questions about whether justice was ever truly possible amid such frenzy.

1937 — Birth of Colin Powell (d. 2021). The son of Jamaican immigrants, Powell rose to become the first Black National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State — a trajectory he later said was made possible by the Army’s early commitment to integration after Truman’s 1948 executive order. His reputation was permanently shadowed by his 2003 UN presentation making the case for the Iraq War, a speech he called “a blot” on his record.

1941 — Birth of Don “The Snake” Prudhomme. One of drag racing’s all-time legends, Prudhomme won four consecutive NHRA Top Fuel championships and later four more in Funny Car, becoming one of the sport’s most recognizable figures and a pioneer in bringing corporate sponsorship — most famously with the Hot Wheels Army car — to professional drag racing.

1949 — NATO is established at a treaty-signing ceremony in Washington, D.C. The Alliance’s founding principle — Article 5, holding that an attack on one member is an attack on all — was a direct response to Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe and represented the most sweeping peacetime military commitment in American history. It has been invoked only once: on September 12, 2001.

1955 — Citing health reasons, the 80-year-old Sir Winston Churchill resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He remains a back-bencher in Parliament until 1964 and died in his home at age 90 in January, 1965. Churchill had suffered a serious stroke in 1953, a fact kept secret from the public and much of the Cabinet. His second premiership (1951–55) was largely overshadowed by his declining health, but he remained a towering symbolic figure — and a remarkably productive writer — to the very end.

1962 — Civilian test pilot Neil Armstrong takes the X-15 rocket plane to 180,000 feet altitude. The X-15 program was pushing the edges of what defined “flight” at all — above 50 miles, the Air Force awarded astronaut wings; Armstrong’s flights qualified. Seven years later he would take a somewhat longer journey, stepping onto the surface of the Moon.

1968 — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is shot in Memphis, Tennessee. King had come to Memphis in support of the city’s striking sanitation workers — Black men who labored under dangerous, demeaning conditions and were paid wages that kept them in poverty. He was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel when James Earl Ray’s bullet found him. He was 39 years old.

1974 — Hank Aaron ties Babe Ruth’s 714 home run record. Aaron had pursued the record under extraordinary pressure — including a torrent of death threats and racist hate mail so severe that the FBI became involved. He broke the record four days later in Atlanta, April 8th, hitting No. 715 off Al Downing of the Dodgers. He later said the experience left him more relieved than joyful.

1974 — Opening day for the new World Trade Center twin towers in Manhattan. At 1,368 and 1,362 feet respectively, the Twin Towers briefly held the title of world’s tallest buildings before being surpassed by Chicago’s Sears Tower later that year. They stood for 27 years.

1976 — Death of movie mogul, aviation pioneer, industrialist and fabulously wealthy eccentric Howard Hughes (b. 1905). Hughes died aboard an aircraft en route from Acapulco to Houston — fittingly airborne to the last. The man who had once set world air speed records and dated Hollywood’s biggest stars died so emaciated and reclusive that the FBI had to use fingerprints to confirm his identity.

1982 — The United Kingdom deploys the initial flotilla of the Royal Navy task force ordered to re-take the Falkland Islands from Argentina. The Argentine junta had calculated that Britain would not fight for a remote South Atlantic archipelago with a population of fewer than 2,000. They miscalculated Margaret Thatcher, who dispatched a task force of over 100 ships 8,000 miles to retake it — a campaign that, ten weeks later, she won.

1984 — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (born Lou Alcindor) breaks Wilt Chamberlain’s all-time scoring record of 31,419 (i.e., he hit the two-pointer to make 31,421). Kareem’s signature weapon — the sky hook, a sweeping one-handed shot released at the apex of his 7’2″ frame — was virtually unblockable and remained lethal well into his late 30s. He would retire in 1989 with 38,387 career points, a record that stood until LeBron James surpassed it in 2023.

1996 — Theodore Kaczynski is arrested. The Unabomber sent his first letter bomb in 1978; his casualties totaled 3 dead and 26 wounded. Kaczynski was a genuine mathematical prodigy who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and briefly taught at Berkeley before withdrawing entirely from society to a Montana cabin without electricity or running water. His own brother David recognized his writing style in the published manifesto and tipped off the FBI — an act of civic courage that cost the family enormously.

2005 — Death of Polish prelate Karol Józef Wojtyła, better known as Pope John Paul II (b. 1920), and canonized as Saint in April of 2014. His 26-year papacy was among the longest and most consequential in modern history. A survivor of both Nazi occupation and Soviet communism in his native Poland, he became one of the pivotal figures in the collapse of the Soviet bloc — Mikhail Gorbachev himself credited John Paul II as instrumental in the fall of communism in Europe.

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Wayne Creed

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