By November little doubt remained that George Washington would be the winner of the presidential election slated for the following February. Attention now focused on the runner-up, who would hold the largely ceremonial role of Vice-President.
Alexander Hamilton offered two very different reasons why John Adams should be selected for the Vice-Presidency in the imminent federal election. On November 9, in a letter to Theodore Sedgwick of the Continental Congress, Hamilton wrote that Adams had shown “an ardent love for the public good.” But writing to James Madison on November 23, he warned that if Adams did not become Vice-President, he “will become a malcontent and possibly espouse and give additional weight to the opposition to the Government.”
Adams and Hamilton were political foes, and Hamilton hoped that the Vice-Presidency would keep Adams contentedly in public office without the danger of giving him real political power. Adams did win the Vice-Presidency, and eight years later, much to Hamilton’s chagrin, became the second President of the United States.
1813 One Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago
Faced with the onslaught of white settlers in Alabama and Georgia, the Creek Indians split into two factions. One faction, the White Sticks, re- mained loyal to the United States. The other group, the Red Sticks, wanted war.
War is what they got. In November troops under Gen. Andrew Jackson launched a bloody series of attacks in retaliation for an August massacre at Fort Minis in which Red Sticks killed more than 350 men, women, and children. On November 3 Tennessee soldiers destroyed the Red Stick settlement of Talishatchee. All 186 of the village’s warriors were killed. “We shot them like dogs,” recalled Davy Crockett, who fought in the battle.
Six days later hostile Creeks laid siege to the White Stick village of Talladega. General Jackson, with an illprovisioned force of twelve hundred infantry and eight hundred cavalry, raised the siege and killed 293 Red Sticks.
On November 29 Gen. John Floyd, commanding Georgia troops and four hundred White Stick allies, leveled the town of Auttosee on the Tallapoosa River. The defending Creeks fought desperately as their homes burned to the ground; two hundred of them were killed, while Floyd lost only eleven men.
The overwhelming superiority of U.S. forces drove many Indians off the warpath. After Talladega, a group of Creeks called the Hillabees sued for peace. Jackson accepted their surrender, but a contingent of East Tennessee volunteers led by Gen. James White, unaware of these developments, charged into the Hillabee towns and slaughtered more than sixty unresisting Indians.
The Creeks, understandably, interpreted this as the basest form of treachery, and even those Red Sticks once amenable to peace now saw no choice but to fight to the death. The war’s end, once almost at hand, continued until Jackson shattered the Red Stick forces the following year.
1863 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
On November 19 a dedication ceremony took place at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at the site of the recent Battle of Gettysburg. The featured speaker, Edward Everett, a Greek scholar and former senator, delivered a stirring two-hour oration. President Lincoln, invited to give “a few appropriate remarks,” read a suprisingly brief address that began “Fourscore and seven years ago. …”
The disastrous Union defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga left the Army of the Cumberland besieged at Chattanooga. Gen. Ulysses Grant and his troops came to the rescue, forcing open a supply line via Brown’s Ferry. The “cracker line” kept the army from starving as reinforcements trickled in.
Gen. Braxton Bragg committed a grave tactical error when he dispatched part of his force to retrieve Knoxville from Union hands. Thus diminished, the Rebel line partially encircling Chattanooga was ill prepared for the decisive battle to come.
On November 24 Gen. Joseph Hooker and his Army of the Potomac attacked the Confederate left, while Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and the Army of the Tennessee came in from the right. The following day the Army of the Cumberland, now under Gen. George Thomas, advanced in a furious charge that drove the Confederates from their position into a headlong retreat.
The decisive Battle of Chattanooga was a major setback for a Confederacy still shaken from defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Braxton Bragg’s demoralized army went into winter quarters in Dalton, Georgia, to wait until spring.
1888 One Hundred Years Ago
The American musical scene was in a sorry state, according to the November issue of The Atlantic. An article entitled “A Warning Note” lamented that “The Wagner school of music has proved itself the arch enemy of the human voice. … The unnatural demands made upon the vocal organs through Wagner’s total ignorance of the art of singing, and the abnormal development of the orchestra through the impatient yearnings of his unquiet soul, have banished for the time all chance of melody in music.”
With almost one hundred thousand more votes than his opponent, incumbent President Grover Cleveland nevertheless lost to Benjamin Harrison in the November 6 election. Despite his slim majority, the distribution by state of Cleveland’s votes gave him only 168 electoral votes to the challenger Harrison’s 233.
1913 Seventy-five Years Ago
Notre Dame’s quarterback, Gus Dorais, and its team captain, Knute Rockne, orchestrated an upset victory over Army on November 1, when, through innovative use of the forward pass, the Fighting Irish racked up 35 points to the Cadets’ 13.
The forward pass had been introduced in 1906, but most quarterbacks crudely lobbed the football to stationary receivers. Rockne and Dorais, who was also a star pitcher on Notre Dame’s baseball team, fine-tuned the pass play with precision throws to moving receivers. In front of three thousand amazed spectatrrs, Notre Dame premiered its new tactic, clobbered Army, and changed forever the way the game was played.
Determined to ensure the establishment of a democratic, constitutional government in Mexico, President Woodrow Wilson called for the resignation of Mexico’s military dictator, Victoriano Huerta. Wilson had withheld U.S. recognition of the Huerta government, which had come to power through the murder of the populist leader Francisco Madero. “I will not recognize a government of butchers,” Wilson had said privately. Hopes of conciliation glimmered briefly when Huerta promised free elections, but a martial crackdown and the arrest of 110 members of the Madero government confirmed Wilson’s suspicion that Huerta was a full-fledged tyrant. On November 7 Wilson warned that he considered it his “immediate duty to require Huerta’s retirement” and “to employ such means as may be necessary to secure this result.”
Wilson’s stance led to military intervention the following year; U.S. troops occupied Veracruz, and Huerta fled to Spain soon thereafter.
1938 Fifty Years Ago
Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850 – 1917) became the first American citizen to be beatified by the Catholic Church on November 13. Mother Cabrini, who was canonized in 1946, founded schools, orphanages, and hospitals throughout the United States, South America, and Europe.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations held its first convention in Pittsburgh on November 15. The ClO, representing the interests of laborers in mass-production industries, had split from the craftsman-oriented American Federation of Labor in 1935. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers was unanimously elected the CIO’s first president.
The novelist Pearl S. Buck, who wrote of peasant life in China in such novels as The Good Earth, received the Nobel Prize for literature in November.
1963 Twenty-five Years Ago
In South Vietnam a military coup toppled the government of Ngo Dinh Diem on November 1. Saigon had been wracked by endless feuding among military, religious, and ideological factions. The United States had tacitly encouraged the overthrow of the authoritarian and ineffectual Diem government, but it had not anticipated the brutal murders of Diem and his scheming brother Ngo Dinh Nhu.
The United States had once hailed the Diem regime as a model of progressive democratic leadership and had heavily financed the South Vietnamese army in the struggle against Communist insurgency. But Diem’s government degenerated to yet another petty dictatorship. Henry Cabot Lodge, President Kennedy’s ambassador to Saigon, saw the revolt as an encouraging development. A few days after the coup, he wrote: “The prospects now are for a shorter war.”
The Broadway adaptation of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest opened on November 15. Kesey’s darkly comic novel of an insurrection at a mental hospital became emblematic of the spirit of dislocation and dissent that propelled many through the troubled decade of the 1960s. The stage version featured Kirk Douglas as Randle P. McMurphy.
Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” died on November 21 at the age of seventy-three. Stroud became an authority on bird diseases while serving a life sentence for murder. Imprisoned since 1909, the violent and anti-social Stroud became interested in the care of birds in 1920, when a tree branch ripped loose by a storm landed in the prison yard at Leavenworth, Kansas. The branch held a nest and four baby sparrows, one with a broken leg. The convict nursed the sparrow back to health.
Over the years Stroud became an expert on avian ailments. Stroud’s Digest of the Diseases of Birds, published in 1942, was acknowledged as the definitive volume in the field. That year Stroud was transferred to Alcatraz because of disciplinary problems. Despite growing outside support, Stroud failed to obtain his freedom, and he died in a prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri.
November 22: On this day a three-story building collapsed in Flushing, New York; Governor George Romney of Michigan expressed concern that the Republican party was in danger of becoming identified with right-wing “fanatics” such as the presidential contender Barry Goldwater; a federal judge refused to dismiss grand jury charges of conspiracy and perjury against the attorney Roy M. Cohn; House and Senate negotiators killed a foreign aid bill provision banning aid to Latin American regimes that had come to power through the overthrow of constitutional governments; Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, died in Los Angeles at the age of sixty-nine; and in Dallas, a twenty-four-year-old ex-marine named Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John F. Kennedy.
