With his usual threats of death to deserters, Gen. Andrew Jackson led two thousand troops through the wilderness of eastern Alabama for a final confrontation with hostile Creek Indians. About nine hundred Creeks had chosen a peninsula formed by a bend in the Tallapoosa River as the perfect site for a defense. They had barricaded the neck of the peninsula with thick log breastworks and were ready with canoes at the riverside if escape became necessary. Jackson saw immediately upon his arrival on March 27 that they had merely penned themselves up for slaughter.
Jackson began the Battle of Horseshoe Bend by firing cannonballs at the wall while Gen. John Coffee surrounded the peninsula from the other side of the river. Coffee sent his best swimmers across the Tallapoosa to cut loose the Creeks’ canoes and set fire to their village; as the smoke appeared, Jackson ordered an assault on the fortification.
That afternoon saw fierce handto-hand fighting as Jackson’s troops stormed the Creek bastion. A young ensign named Sam Houston, who twentyone years later would lead the Texas war of independence, caught a barbed arrow in his thigh but went over the wall anyway and fought until the Creek stronghold was taken. A fellow officer would need three excruciating yanks to tear the arrow from Houston’s leg.
At afternoon’s close most of the remaining Creeks were hiding securely below the bluffs of the river, completely under cover. Houston appeared again, still bleeding, and single-handedly invaded the Creek refuge, his platoon having ignored his order to follow. Two musket balls in his shoulder finally finished Houston for the day. Jackson saw that such an attack was futile and chose instead simply to burn the sanctuary and shoot those who fled.
More than 750 Indians were killed that day, compared with 55 United States troops. “If I had an army, I would yet fight,” lamented the Creek leader Red Eagle as he surrendered a few days later. “My people are all gone.” Jackson concluded his brilliant military campaign by seizing twentythree million acres of land in a shamefully unfair treaty forced upon both hostile and friendly Creek Indians.
After spending six weeks in Chile’s Valparaíso Harbor under a British blockade, the American frigate Essex, commanded by Capt. David Porter, made a desperate attempt to escape on March 28. In a conflict largely fought over military piracy on the high seas, Porter’s Essex had followed an appropriately swashbuckling course throughout the War of 1812.
Having broken off from his squadron late in 1812, Porter led the Essex and its smaller companion, the Essex Junior, on a privateering crusade against British shipping that took him around Cape Horn and made his ship the first U.S. Navy vessel to enter the Pacific Ocean. For more than a year Porter provisioned his ships with supplies, ammunition, and money commandeered from captured ships. He had a special affection for British whaling ships, which were unusually well stocked for long voyages. Based at the Galápagos Islands for one six-month period, the Essex plundered twelve of the roughly twenty British whalers known to be in the Pacific.
When word of an approaching British squadron reached Porter late in 1813, he judged his service in the Galápagos to be complete and sailed the Essex southwest to the remote Marquesas Islands. Six months of overhauling gave Porter enough confidence to approach the British warships near Valparaiso, a neutral port. Finding himself badly outgunned, Porter decided to remain at anchor in the harbor while the British waited outside.
On March 28 strong winds snapped an anchor cable on the Essex, and with his ship drifting out to sea, Porter began to run the blockade until the wind tore down his main-topmast. With the Essex still in neutral waters, the British men-of-war Phoebe and Cherub took advantage of the superior range of their long guns and leisurely lobbed cannonballs at it. Powerless to resist or escape, Porter ordered the Essex abandoned.
More than half of Porter’s crew were reported to be dead, wounded, or missing. Among those who were captured was a twelve-yearold midshipman named David Farragut, a favorite of Porter, who, as an admiral in the U.S. Navy a half-century later, would become one of the heroes of the Civil War.
1864 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Ulysses S. Grant, the author of resounding victories at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, was a national hero when he arrived in Washington, D.C., on March 8 to assume supreme command of the Union armies. Grant was to be promoted by an act of Congress to lieutenant general, a newly revived rank that was second in authority only to the commander in chief. By this time newspapers across the North were suggesting that even lieutenant general was too low a rank for Grant.
The general quieted presidential rumors by ignoring them; indeed, once in Washington he seemed to want nothing so much as to leave. He quietly accepted his orders and broke with custom by deciding to move his Union command headquarters out of Washington, to the front with the Army of the Potomac. He revealed his impression of the city when he declined Lincoln’s invitation to dine at the White House. “Really, Mr. President,” Grant said, “I have had enough of this show business.”
1889 One Hundred Years Ago
The quarter-century that had passed since Appomattox had begun its healing work on the bitter feelings left in the wake of the Civil War. On March 30 Harper’s Weekly denounced a Republican reader who had written to the editor complaining about the behavior of some Democratic politicians in West Virginia. The correspondent called for Harper’s to chide the West Virginians (and thereby prove to him the magazine’s “love of fair play”). Instead the editors took him to task for keeping alive old animosities: he was “evidently under the delusion that any word in regard to the Southern States which is not contemptuous and hostile shows a servile disposition. Our corresDondent should make an effort to comprehend his country, and ‘to know the time of day.’ He is still groping in the Dark Ages. We are not fighting slavery now, nor waging the war for the Union. We are not trying to misunderstand, but to understand. Slavery is gone. The war is over. It is to-day, not yesterday. But here and there a Rip Van Winkle like our correspondent raises his head and hears with bewilderment that it is not the year 1859, but thirty years later.”
As an illustration of the sort of maganimity the 188Os required, the magazine spoke of a series of recent parties given in New York and elsewhere to raise money for the National Confederate Soldiers’ Home. The former President Rutherford Hayes, a Union veteran who had been wounded at South Mountain and had campaigned with Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley and fought at Winchester, sent a check with a note saying that anything that could be done for the comfort of his sometime enemies “is surely in the pathway both of humanity and patriotism.” Ulysses S. Grant’s son also wrote the sponsors: “General Grant’s kindly feeling toward the Southern people, though they were once his enemies, is Mrs. Grant’s reason for sending the enclosed check. She wishes you success in your efforts.”
1939 Fifty Years Ago
March 3: With correspondents from several Boston newspapers on hand, Lothrop Withington, Jr., a Harvard College undergraduate, won a ten-dollar bet by swallowing a live goldfish in the college union. Withington was merely duplicating for his friends a feat he had seen on a Honolulu beach years before, but the publicity that came out of Boston inspired a mania for goldfish swallowing that emptied aquariums in college towns all across the United States.
As the novelty waned, students tried to swallow more and more goldfish at a sitting, but when one young epicure was suspended from his classes at Kutztown State Teachers College in Reading, Pennsylvania, for swallowing a record forty-three goldfish, the stakes seemed to have gone too high. The craze burned itself out in about a month, by which time pioneering students were eating magazines at Lafayette College and 78-rpm records at the University of Chicago.
March 15: German troops invaded Czechoslovakia one day after Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain had excluded that country from the British-French guarantee against aggression. The attack finished a job Britain and France had begun six months earlier, when they allowed Hitler to annex the Czech Sudetenland. Two days after the invasion President Roosevelt argued that the U.S. Neutrality Act would put America “on the side of Hitler” unless it was revised. The next week he recalled the U.S. ambassador to Germany in protest against Hitler’s aggression.
Labeled “box-office poison” in Hollywood, Katharine Hepburn opened on Broadway in The Philadelphia Story on March 28. Hepburn had bought out her contract with RKO Radio Pictures in 1937 rather than appear in B movies, and after failing to land the role she really wanted, that of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, she decided to return to the theater in a play that Philip Barry had written specially for her. The Philadelphia Story ran for 417 performances at the Shubert Theater and was especially profitable for Hepburn, who owned 25 percent of the play. “I made more money doing The Philadelphia Story as a play than in my whole time in Hollywood,” she would remember. Hepburn’s performance in the 1940 film adaptation of the play returned her to the first rank of Hollywood stars.
1964 Twenty-five Years Ago
James R. Hoffa, president of the Teamsters union, was convicted on March 4 of tampering with a federal jury in 1962. After three years of appeals, durine which he retained his union presidency, Hoffa entered a federal prison in Pennsylvania to begin a thirteen-year term. President Richard M. Nixon commuted the sentence in December 1971 on the condition that Hoffa not be involved with union management until 1980. Hoffa was fighting to regain control of the Teamsters when he disappeared on July 30, 1975. The FBI has never been able to prove its suspicion that Hoffa was murdered by enemies in organized crime.
March 4: President Lyndon Johnson appointed ten women to government posts in a move designed to end “stag government.” His major appointee, Katherine E. White, became the U.S. ambassador to Denmark. “Our determination to enlist women in this administration… will be a continuing aim not because it is politic but because it is sound,” the President told his audience at the Women’s National Press Club dinner. “I am unabashedly in favor of women.”
March 9: The Supreme Court of the United States struck a blow for free speech when it ruled that a public servant could not receive libel damages for criticism of his official conduct without proving malice. The court delivered this opinion in a judgment reversing an Alabama circuit court’s halfmillion-dollar libel award against The New York Times. The police commissioner of Montgomery had brought the suit against the newspaper and four black ministers for an advertisement critical of Montgomery’s handling of civil rights demonstrations. The Alabama court had decided that under state law the advertisement was libelous even though it mentioned no names.
In striking down Alabama’s libel law, the Supreme Court judged that “libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations.” Justices Hugo Black and Arthur Goldberg went further, writing separate opinions arguing that even malicious criticism of public officials should be an absolute privilege. The Court’s decision was expected to open up media coverage of the civil rights movement.
March 15: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were married in Canada at a small ceremony in a Montreal church. After Taylor’s divorce from Eddie Fisher became final on March 5, it had been expected that she and Burton would marry soon afterward. Taylor and Burton had begun their romance two years earlier during the filming in Rome of the movie Cleopatra. Publicity surrounding their relationship ended both their marriages. It was Taylor’s fifth marriage, Burton’s second.
March 17: The Republican presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller were stung by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge’s surprising victory in the New Hampshire primary. Lodge, who was serving in Saigon as the Johnson administration’s ambassador to South Vietnam, won 35 percent of the New Hampshire vote as a write-in candidate. President Johnson, the winner of the Democratic primary, indicated no desire to remove Lodge from his diplomatic post.
March 21: The UCLA Bruins defeated the Duke Blue Devils 98-83 in the final game of the NCAA basketball tournament to complete the first undefeated season by a major college team in seven years. The championship heralded a remarkable era in which UCLA basketball teams would win ten NCAA titles in twelve years.
March 27: One of the strongest earthquakes in history rocked southern Alaska and sent tsunamis racing across the Pacific Ocean. The earthquake, which was powerful enough to knock out seismic measuring equipment, reduced Anchorage’s main street to rubble; the sparsity of Alaska’s population kept the number of deaths to a surprisingly low 117. Up to fifteen-foot waves emanating from the quake reached Japan and Hawaii, and according to one account, shock waves raised the ground level of Houston, Texas, by four feet.
