On Good Friday fire engulfed New Orleans, leaving four-fifths of the town in ruins. The conflagration began at a private home, where candles burning unattended ignited the curtains. Church bells were customarily used to alert citizens to a fire, but, according to one account, local priests balked at ringing the bells on a holy day, thus preventing timely containment of the blaze. Driven by a robust south wind, the fire spread quickly. New Orleans had no official firefighting force, only soldiers and samaritans armed with water buckets; in the end, 854 of her 1,100 buildings were destroyed.
1863 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
With Union ranks thinning due to casualties, discharges, and lagging voluntary enlistment, Congress passed the first national conscription act on March 3. The Enrollment Act rendered males between the ages of twenty and fortyfive eligible for compulsory military service. Draftees could avoid taking up arms by paying a three-hundred-dollar commutation fee or hiring a substitute.
The law provoked outrage among supporters of state sovereignty, particularly Horatio Seymour, the Democratic governor of New York, who termed the act a “violation of the supreme constitutional law” and warned of the dire results of any efforts “to exact obedience at the point of the bayonet.” Previously conscription was handled by state and local bodies. The new draft bill established a complex bureaucratic apparatus to enlist new recruits and empowered federal marshals to engage in offensive search-and-seizure tactics to root out evasive conscripts. Draft riots erupted throughout the North. In New York City an attack on a draft office triggered three days of looting and mayhem so ugly that line troops had to be called north from Pennsylvania to restore order.
Congress passed the act primarily to spur voluntary enlistment; many men preferred to volunteer rather than carry the stigma of being drafted. State and local authorities further encouraged volunteering by offering sizable bounties to recruits. This led to the notorious practice of bounty jumping: enlistees would collect their bounties, desert, reenlist, collect an additional bounty, desert, and so on. Out of the quartermillion men who were called upon, some eighty-six thousand paid the commutation fee, while among conscripts, substitutes outnumbered direct draftees by more than two to one.
The Confederate ranger John S. Mosby was a small man with a propensity for getting wounded, but he and his band of guerrillas were the bane of Federal troops in Virginia. On March 9 Mosby’s Rangers mounted their most daring raid to date, converging undetected on the Fairfax courthouse, where the 2d Vermont Brigade was headquartered.
Mosby launched the raid in hopes of capturing the cavalry leader Sir Percy Wyndham, a very proper British mercenary who had once fought under Garibaldi and who had a personal distaste for Mosby’s tactics; to Wyndham, the Southerner was simply a “horse thief.” Wyndham turned out to be in Washington at the time, but in all other respects the raid was a smashing success. Mosby personally roused the sleeping brigade commander, Brig. Gen. Edwin H. Stoughton, while his men rounded up officers, soldiers, and horses. The post commander, Colonel Johnstone, escaped by fleeing nude and hiding for a time beneath an outhouse.
In his report to Gen. J. E. B. Stuart, Mosby wrote, “The fruits of this expedition are 1 brigadier general (Stoughton), 2 captains, and 30 men prisoners. We also brought off 58 horses, most of them very fine, belonging to officers; also a considerable number of arms.”
Blame for the Rangers’ easy entrance into the encampment centered on the young and lovely Antonia Ford, an intimate acquaintance of Stoughton. Suspiciously, she held the honorary rank of major in the Rebel army. After her arrest for espionage both Mosby and General Stuart insisted on her innocence. She was released after several months and later married the Federal agent who arrested her.
The raid ruined the career of General Stoughton, whose reputation owed more to his debauchery than to his military prowess. Stoughton had established himself royally at the Fairfax courthouse while his troops, quartered in tents five miles away, grumbled about their commander’s frequent parties and illicit recreations. Of the capture, President Lincoln is reported to have said, “For that I am sorry, for I can make brigadier generals, but I can’t make horses.”
1888 One Hundred Years Ago
The Great Blizzard buried New York City under snow on March 12. Harper’s Weekly reported: “The snow was fine and dry and copious, and was driven by gales from the west and north. The city had known higher winds and snowfalls as heavy, but never a combination which was so furious. At four o’clock in the morning the snow came so fast that five minutes sufficed to obliterate the footprints of a man or a horse in the streets. Car after car became stalled on the surface roads. At sunrise the city was snowed under…. Those who would open their front door in the morning without admitting a snowdrift of respectable size, poked their heads out for a moment and let their business run itself.”
In all, some four hundred persons succumbed to the storm, among them the former senator Roscoe Conkling. Walking from Wall Street to the New York Club at Twenty-fifth Street, the athletic Conkling sank into a snowdrift at Union Square. Though exhausted and nearly blinded, he eventually freed himself. Conkling never fully recovered from the strain of the exertion, however, and he died a month later.
Hundred-mile-an-hour winds destroyed nearly two hundred ships, but among the vessels that managed to struggle safely to New York Harbor was one carrying H. N. Davidsohn, the grandfather of this magazine’s senior editor Carla Davidson. He had just arrived from Eastern Europe and, stepping ashore in the blinding murk of what he concluded was his new home’s usual climate, he glumly decided he might as well have emigrated to Siberia.
Secretary of State Charles F. Bayard and the Chinese minister signed a treaty on March 12 agreeing to bar Chinese laborers from the United States for the next twenty years. In return, the Chinese government received $276,619 to compensate for the deaths of Chinese immigrants in anticoolie riots in the West.
1913 Seventy-five Years Ago
More than five thousand suffragists paraded through the streets of Washington, D.C., on March 3, the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. The suffragists held banners reading “Votes for Women” and “Tell Your Troubles to Woodrow.” A mob of angry counterdemonstrators broke through police barriers on Pennsylvania Avenue and nearly brought the parade to a halt.
In his inaugural address the following day, President Wilson mentioned such weighty issues as conservation, tariff reform, and better conditions for the working classes, but not women’s suffrage. “Men’s hearts wait upon us; men’s lives hang in the balance; men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do,” he said. “I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side.”
Vaudeville’s premier showcase, the Palace Theater, opened on March 24. The Palace was the most opulent theater on Broadway and, at 1800 seats, one of the largest. For an unprecedented two-dollar admission, opening-night theatergoers were treated to a high-wire act, the pantomimes of La Napierkowska, Leo Fall’s operetta “The Eternal Waltz,” and the comedian Ed Wynn. The Palace lost money in its first weeks of business but quickly recouped its losses when names like Ethel Barrymore and Sarah Bernhardt began appearing on the bill.
1938 Fifty Years Ago
On March 28 former President Herbert Hoover returned from his first trip to Europe in almost twenty years. Hoover found the underlying mood there to be one of fear: “Fear by nations of one another, fear by governments of their citizens, fear by citizens of their governments and the fear of people everywhere that general war is upon them again.”
1963 Twenty-five Years Ago
“In our adversary system of criminal justice,” said Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black on March 18, “any person haled into court who is too poor to hire a lawyer cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him. This seems to us to be an obvious truth.”
The year before, fifty-one-year-old Clarence Earl Gideon, a down-and-out electrician, sometime gambler, and onetime petty burglar, went on trial for breaking into a Panama City, Florida, pool hall. Gideon had asked for a lawyer and been refused. He had no choice but to conduct his own defense. Despite the rather flimsy evidence arrayed against him, he was found guilty and sentenced to five years in a state penitentiary.
With more pluck than legal perspicacity, Gideon petitioned the Supreme Court, contending that his civil rights had been violated. His otherwise unexceptional case raised an important constitutional question. The Bill of Rights stipulated that “in all criminal prosecutions the accused shall … have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.” But this applied only to federal cases. In 1868, however, the Fourteenth Amendment deemed that “no state shall … deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”
But what, exactly, constituted “due process”? Many legal scholars argued that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights and therefore, among other things, required states to appoint counsel to those who could not afford to hire a lawyer. But in Betts v. Brady (1942) the Court ruled that in state criminal prosecutions, refusing a defendant counsel represented a denial of due process only under “special circumstances.” It was left to the states to determine special circumstances on a case-by-case basis.
Gideon, however, did not claim any special circumstances. He simply and firmly believed that a fair trial was not possible without defense counsel. And many agreed with him. By the time of Gideon v. Wainwright, thirty-seven states provided the indigent with free counsel in all felony cases. Dissatisfaction with Betts was widespread in the legal community.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Gideon’s favor. Reading from his opinion, Justice Black said, “Lawyers to prosecute are everywhere deemed essential to protect the public’s interest in an orderly society. Similarly, there are few defendants charged with a crime … who fail to hire the best lawyers they can to prepare and present their defenses. That government hires lawyers to prosecute and defendants who have the money hire lawyers to defend are the strongest indications of the widespread belief that lawyers in criminal courts are necessities, not luxuries. The right of one charged with crime to counsel may not be deemed fundamental and essential to fair trials in some countries, but it is in ours.”
Gideon’s case was remanded to the Florida Supreme Court. He again went on trial, this time with counsel. He was found not guilty.
