History Confidential

Three Union soldiers on the morning of September 13, 1862 spot a paper package lying in the grass. The soldiers were in a clover field two miles south of Frederick, Maryland. When they opened the package they find 3 cigars and a two-page letter written by Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The letter detailed the battle strategy for his Maryland campaign. The letters came to be known as the “Union discovery of Special Orders No. 191.”

Wow, talk about hitting the jack-pot. These three soldiers took this letter to their superior officer, eventually the letter made it up the ranks, up to General George B. McClellan himself. McClellan came to the conclusion that the letters were not a ruse de guerre, that in fact the letters were genuine and contained helpful information. McClellan knew exactly what to do and was more than happy to have this epiphany, if you will, show the way.

The orders gave detailed instructions for placing all of Lee’s units. How on earth did this happen? I don’t know that we will ever know that. Were these plans dropped there on purpose, or by accident? Lee himself claimed that he didn’t understand how it could’ve happened. The couriers in charge of delivering orders were required to bring receipts when orders were safely delivered. It has been established that the orders found in the field were duplicates, and the original got to the intended confederate general. One Historian Wilbur D. Jones believes the culprit was Henry Kyd Douglas, a trusted courier who smoked cigars and whose “subsequent behavior raises a level of suspicion.”

Turning Point:

Having these orders readily available allowed the following course of events:

• Victory for the Union in the Battle of Antietam

• Lee’s defeat of this battle allowed President Abraham Lincoln gain the necessary political capital to sigh the Emancipation Proclamation

• Europe refused to recognize the Confederacy

• Lee withdrew his forces to Virginia which changed the course of the war and led to the eventual defeat of the Confederacy.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

source: Curious Events in History

We all know about the founding father John Adams, but did you know that his son John Quincy Adams was:

1. Was the first President whose father was also a President
2. First President elected without receiving a plurality of the popular vote
3. First President whose son was married in the White House

He also was the attorney, at age 76, for the slaves on the Armistad. He delivered an emotional eight hour appeal to the court asking the Africans be set free. Justice Story wrote to his wife about Adam’s compelling appeal: “extraordinary for its power, for its bitter sarcasm, and its dealing with topics far beyond the records and points of discussion.” The Supreme Court must’ve felt the same because they concurred and the Africans were set free. Adams must’ve had some affection for George Washington because he named one of his sons by the same name.

In 1620 the Mayflower left Plymouth, England and sailed across the Atlantic, and with it went the Pilgrims. But did you know that it also carried America’s first person to be convicted of murder? His name was John Billington.

Billington was not one of the separatist Puritans, the so called “Saints.” Rather, he belonged to the group of passengers who became known as the “strangers.” It is thought he left England to escape from his debts. His wife Elinor, and his teenage sons John, Jr., and Francis joined him on this voyage to the new world.

From the very beginning this family was trouble. One of his sons tried to blow up the Mayflower when he fired a musket near an open barrel of gunpowder. Had the barrel ignited we’d be reading another story about the first Pilgrims in our history books today. Historian George F. Willison believed, without question, that Billington was involved in the mutiny on the Mayflower which erupted when some passengers challenged the governing authority in their new land. This was preempted by the adoption of the Mayflower Compact, for which Billington was one of the signatories.

Shortly after the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth, John Billington was charged with “contempt of the Captain’s lawful command and opprobrious speeches.” His sentence was to have his neck and heels tied together. But Billington was later pardoned. He was implicated in the Oldham-Lyford scandal, a failed revolt against the Plymouth colony. Charges were later dropped due to insufficient evidence.

During the first winter in Plymouth, the typhus epidemic wiped out half the Pilgrim population. The Billingtons were the only family to not lose one family member in the epidemic. In fact, Elinor, John’s wife, was one of five women that survived. John and his teenage sons wreaked havoc in the colony and were notorious for their nefarious activities.

After 10 years in the colony, John’s crimes caught up to him. John got into a quarrel with John Newcomen, possibly over a woman, and shot him with a musket. This time the charges stuck. He was tried and found guilty “by plain and notorious evidence.” On September 30, 1630 John Billington became the first Englishman to be hanged in New England.

We always believe the first Thanksgiving was in 1621 when fifty colonists (Pilgrims) had a shin-ding with ninety members of the Wampanoag tribe. Well, what if I told you that was not the first Thanksgiving? The very first Thanksgiving in North America was observed on May 23, 1541 at the Palo Duro Canon in Texas. The Spanish nobleman Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and a group of Native Americans, which he called “tejas,” (where Texas gets its name) got together to celebrate his expedition’s discovery of food.

The Texas Society Daughters of the American Colonists commemorated this event in 1959 as the first Thanksgiving. Also, The Ford County Historical Society erected a permanent cross outside Fort Dodge, Kansas some 200 miles northeast of Palo Duro Canyon to mark the spot Vasquez supposedly held a Thanksgiving service or first “Christian Service” on June 29, 1541.

After this first Thanksgiving celebration, there were others predating the Pilgrim one. The second one is said to have been in 1565 in St Augustine, Florida. This one held by Pedro Menendez de Aviles and the Native people of St Augustine. The third was celebrated in 1598 near the site of San Elizario, Texas, by Don Juan de Onate and some Manso Indians from present day El Paso.

After 1621 Thanksgiving was celebrated randomly, no specific day or time of the year. Individual communities would often give thanks after the harvest, but Thanksgiving did not become a national holiday until the 19th century. And in the 20th century, On November 26, 1941 President Roosevelt passed a bill establishing the fourth Thursday in November as the national Thanksgiving holiday.

We can say that since the 1500’s people in America have set aside a day or even a couple of days a year to give thanks to God for harvests, blessings, health, and peace. No Thanksgiving prayer better said than James Madison’s at the end of the War of 1812 for “devout acknowledgments to Almighty God for His great goodness manifested in restoring to them the blessing of peace.”

The election of 1840 was the first campaign with slogans, songs and modern campaign paraphernalia. The slogan that became best known was “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” Tippecanoe was the battle that William Henry Harrison won against the Indians in 1811. The Whigs remade Harrison, who had been an uninspired military leader, into a great war hero.

William Henry Harrison won 80 percent of the Electoral College votes making him the first candidate to earn more than one million votes. Though economics, enslavement, and employment were all major issues, the election was typified by cider. In the words of one newspaper: “We have had almost eleven years experiment of a rum-and- whiskey administration. It is time for a change. Let us try the hard cider.”

CHANGE WAS SHORT-LIVED. Harrison caught a cold, which quickly developed into pneumonia and 30 days into his first term, on April 4, 1841, he died–the first President to die in office–and with him died the Whig program.

Czar Peter was one of the greatest leaders that Russia has ever had. After much conflict in the royal family, Czar Peter had full control of Russia in 1694. Russia at the time was blinkered and isolated. Czar Peter called for reform and modernization of Russia. He embarked on a 2 year tour of Europe before implementing any reforms. The two year tour was not for leisure, but rather to learn the ways of the West. He recruited Western engineers, miners, shipbuilders, architects, and other skilled workers and brought their expertise to Russia. He himself learned dentistry, seamanship, and shipbuilding and used this knowledge to build an impressive and modern Navy.

Czar Peter built the city of St Petersburg, but at a heavy price. The city is also known as “the city built on bones.” He changed the educational system, opened up trade routes and imported Western goods. He even changed fashion. He told his nobleman to wear clothes rather than the traditional Oriental costumes. He demanded they have no beards. In fact, in 1698 he assembled the chief officials and personally clipped off their beards and moustaches. On top of the demand, he demanded a “beard tax” from all men with the exception of peasants. He started a committee to specifically think of ways to tax people. He taxed virtually everything such as: beehives, boots, candles, chimneys, hats, horses and last, but not least, drinking water! He may have reformed Russia, but at a heavy price.

The year is 1938, the night October 30th, and millions in America are sitting around their Radio. Sunday evenings at 8:00 PM was prime time in the Golden age of Radio. A young 23-year-old radio announcer by the name of Orson Welles decides to update H.G. Wells’ 19th- century science fiction novel “War of The Worlds” for national radio. Although young, Orson Welles had been in radio for several years prior to this, and was well known by listeners as the voice of the “The Shadow.”

Orson did not know his realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth would cause a great panic across America. The show starts off:

A voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.”

Now remember I said that 8:00 PM was prime time, well most Americans were listening to another popular show at 8:00 PM called “Charlie McCarthy,” on NBC, and only tuned in to CBS at 8:12 PM and by then the story of the Martian invasion was underway.

I can see how this all turned out the way it did. At first Welles introduces his radio play with a spoken intro. A weather report follows, and seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.” The music kept playing and then an announcer breaks in with this report: “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory” had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Music returns and again interrupted with an alert announcing that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer’s field in Grovers Mills New Jersey. He then begins to describe a Martian emerging from a “Martian cylinder.”

“Good heavens,” he declared, “something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here’s another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me … I can see the thing’s body now. It’s large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it …it … ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.”

The announcer goes on to say that the Martians mounted walking war machines and fired “heat-ray” weapons at the puny humans gathered around the crash site. They annihilated a force of 7,000 National Guardsman, and after being attacked by artillery and bombers the Martians released a poisonous gas into the air. Soon “Martian cylinders” landed in Chicago and St. Louis.

The radio play was extremely realistic. Welles used great sound effects and his actors put on a show as terrified announcers and other characters. They made it sound as if this invasion was really happening. They described widespread panic, and thousands trying to flee. Little did they know that that was true.

It is said that as many as a million listeners believed that the invasion was happening. They took to the streets, jammed highways, ran away from the Martians and sought refuge. People begged police for masks to save them from toxic gas. They called the electric companies to turn off all lights so that that the Martians wouldn’t see them. One woman ran into an Indianapolis church where evening services were being held and yelled, “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!” It was even rumored that some committed suicide, but that was never proved.

CBS finally gets wind of the panic and Welles goes on the air to remind listeners that it was all fiction. The FCC investigated and found that no law was broken. Networks took this as a lesson in using more caution in their programming. Welles thought that his career was over, but what this actually did was get him a contract with a Hollywood studio, and in 1941 he starred, directed, wrote, and produced the greatest movie in history, “Citizen Kane.”

source: history.com

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) a hero of the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt served as governor of New York and, later, as vice president under William McKinley. After McKinley’s assassination, he became the 26th president of the US. His administration was marked by the regulation of trusts, the building of the Panama Canal, and a foreign policy based on the motto “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” In 1906, he became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1955 on this day, at the tender age of 24, James Dean and his mechanic Rolf Wuetherich, got in his Porsche 550, nicknamed “Little Bastard,” and headed out to a car race in Salinas, California. What was probably thought of as a leisurely ride to the races turned out to be Dean’s last day on earth. His car was involved in a head-on collision. The other car involved was driven by a 23-year-old college student named Donald Turnaspeed. Dean was taken to Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital, and pronounced dead at 5:59 p.m. Turnspeed who was thrown from the car, survived with minor injuries. No charges were ever filed against Turnspeed.

Achievements to note:

• Dean beat out Paul Newman for the role of Cal Trask in East of Eden …an incredible feat.

• Dean was the first actor to be awarded a posthumous Academy Award nomination for his role in East of Eden.