Reading 3 of 12 free1776 Club · all 12 storiesWednesday, May 13
1846Featured · This day in history
Congress Declares War on Mexico, May 13, 1846
Three weeks after Captain Seth Thornton rode his 80-man dragoon company into a Mexican ambush along the Rio Grande — losing 14 men killed and the rest captured — President James K. Polk stood before Congress and declared that Mexico had "shed American blood upon the American soil." The declaration that followed on May 13, 1846, formalized a war rooted in the contested annexation of Texas, a disputed boundary between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, and a decade of unresolved claims between two nations that had never quite agreed on where one ended and the other began.
The war reshaped the United States more than almost any other 19th-century conflict. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo forced Mexico to cede Alta California, Nuevo México, and all claims to Texas — territory that became the future states of California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. The same lands immediately reignited the slavery-expansion debate that the Missouri Compromise had papered over, driving the sectional crisis that produced the Civil War fifteen years later.
Did you know
QWhat happened to Captain Seth Thornton — the man whose ambush started the war — before the war ended?
Thornton survived his capture at the Rio Grande ambush in April 1846 and was released in a prisoner exchange following the Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. He returned to the fight. On August 20, 1847, he was killed in action at Churubusco, just outside Mexico City — the final major engagement of the war before the capital fell. The soldier who fired the first shots of the conflict, in a manner of speaking, died in its last battle. His second in command at the original ambush, Captain William J. Hardee, survived and went on to write the standard U.S. Army infantry tactics manual used by both sides in the Civil War.
QHow did the Texas annexation joint-resolution maneuver in 1845 set a precedent used to annex Hawaii more than fifty years later?
The Tyler administration, unable to secure a two-thirds Senate majority for a treaty of annexation, pushed Texas into the Union in 1845 using a joint resolution requiring only simple majorities in both chambers — a constitutionally contested shortcut. When President McKinley revived Hawaiian annexation in 1897 and again faced a Senate short of the two-thirds threshold, congressional committees explicitly invoked the Tyler-Texas precedent. The same maneuver was applied, and Hawaii was annexed as an organized incorporated territory in July 1898. A workaround devised to absorb a slave republic on the Gulf of Mexico became the legal template for absorbing a Pacific archipelago half a century later.
QWhy did Mexico's military actually win the first major battle of the war — and what did that delay cost France, of all countries?
French troops were repulsed at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862 — sixteen years after the Mexican-American War ended — but the connection runs directly through the war's aftermath. Mexico's crushing defeat in 1848 left it financially exhausted, contributing to the debt crisis that prompted Benito Juárez to suspend foreign debt payments in 1861. France, seizing the pretext, launched its intervention to install Maximilian of Habsburg. But French forces lost at Puebla on May 5, 1862, delaying the occupation of Mexico City by over a year. The date of that French defeat is now commemorated as Cinco de Mayo — a holiday observed more widely in the United States than in Mexico itself.
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1985tragedy
Philadelphia Police Drop a Bomb on Osage Avenue, Killing 11
On the afternoon of May 13, 1985, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor ordered a bomb dropped on a row house at 6221 Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia. Lt. Frank Powell, flying in a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter, released two explosive devices onto the occupied building. The fire that followed burned for hours while officials allowed it to spread — destroying 61 homes across two city blocks, leaving 250 people homeless, and killing 11 people inside the house, five of them children.
The MOVE bombing stands as one of the only documented instances of an American city deliberately dropping an explosive device on its own civilian neighborhood. A federal jury later found the city liable for excessive force and Fourth Amendment violations. The case remains a reference point in American debates over police power, municipal accountability, and the limits of state authority against its own residents — and Philadelphia is still litigating its obligations to the block forty years later.
Did you know
QWhat happened to the bones of two children killed in the bombing — decades after the fire?
The remains of Tree Africa (Katricia Dotson, 14) and Delisha Orr Africa (12) were kept for decades at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 2021, the journalist outlet Billy Penn reported that the bones had been used by anthropologist Janet Monge as case studies in an online forensics course called 'Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology.' The same year, Philadelphia's Health Commissioner Thomas Farley resigned after it emerged that in 2017 he had ordered the cremation and disposal of victims' remains without identifying them or contacting their families. A day after his resignation, staff at the Medical Examiner's Office found a box labeled 'MOVE' in a refrigerated area of their office — the remains had never been destroyed. In November 2024, further remains believed to belong to Delisha Africa were found at Penn.
QHow did the city's promise to rebuild the destroyed block turn into a second scandal twenty years later?
By late 1985, the city had contracted with a private developer to rebuild the 61 destroyed homes on Osage Avenue. Displaced residents moved back in — and quickly found the construction defective. In 1995, the Ed Rendell administration brought in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which confirmed the rebuilt houses were not up to code. The city spent another decade trying to remedy the defects without success. By 2005, Philadelphia simply gave up and offered $150,000 to any resident willing to leave. More than two-thirds accepted and abandoned their homes. The block that police had destroyed in 1985 was emptied again, this time by the city's own buyout, twenty years later.
QWhat was the sole criminal conviction to come out of the bombing — and who served time?
Not a single city official or police officer was criminally charged for the bombing, the deaths, or the destruction of 61 homes. The only person convicted in connection with the events of May 13 was Ramona Africa, the sole surviving adult MOVE member. She refused to testify in court and was charged and convicted on counts of riot and conspiracy. She served seven years in prison. In 1996, a federal jury awarded her $500,000 in a civil suit for the pain, suffering, and physical harm she endured in the fire — part of a $1.5 million judgment against the city that also covered relatives of two people killed in the bombing.
1780government
The Cumberland Compact Is Signed at French Lick, 1780
At a longhunter trading post near the salt springs the French called "Big Salt Lick" on the Cumberland River, 256 settlers gathered on May 13, 1780, to sign a governing document for their new settlement — a place they were already calling Fort Nashborough. Led by James Robertson and John Donelson, the signers established an elected council of twelve judges, a clause allowing the people to remove those judges from office, and a pay scale denominated entirely in animal skins. The compact held until Tennessee became a state sixteen years later.
French Lick / Fort Nashborough, Nashville, TennesseeStory page →
The American Throughline
The Cumberland Compact is a direct ancestor of Tennessee's constitutional tradition, modeled on the earlier Watauga Association of 1772 — itself regarded as the first constitutional government west of the Appalachians. Its recall clause, allowing voters to remove elected judges, predated most state constitutions. The settlement it governed grew into Nashville, the capital of the sixteenth state admitted to the Union, in 1796.
Did you know
QHow were government officials paid under the Cumberland Compact, and what did a constable earn per warrant?
The compact established a salary schedule denominated entirely in animal pelts. The governor received 1,000 deerskins annually; the secretary earned 450 otter skins; the county clerk was paid 500 raccoon skins. A constable, at the bottom of the scale, collected exactly one mink skin for every warrant he served. Hard currency was scarce to nonexistent on the Cumberland frontier, and the fur trade provided the only stable medium of exchange the settlers trusted. The specificity of the schedule — different species for different offices — suggests the signers thought carefully about relative market values. A mink skin per warrant was not nothing; it was a negotiated rate for dangerous work in a settlement surrounded by contested territory.
QWhat happened to the only surviving copy of the Cumberland Compact, and where did it turn up?
The compact vanished from the historical record after 1780 and was not seen again for sixty-six years. In 1846, it was discovered inside a trunk that had belonged to Colonel Samuel Barton, one of the original pioneer founders who had signed the document. Where the trunk had been in the intervening decades is not recorded. The recovered copy is slightly damaged but otherwise intact and fully legible. It is now held in the Tennessee State Archives in Nashville — the city that grew directly from the settlement the compact was written to govern. It is the sole surviving physical record of the agreement.
QWhat recall provision did the Cumberland Compact include that set it apart from most governing documents of its era?
The compact established that the twelve elected judges on the governing council could be removed from office by the people who had elected them — a recall clause that was uncommon, and in some respects ahead of its time, in 1780. Most governing charters of the period focused on how officials were chosen, not on how they could be ousted mid-term. The provision reflected the settlers' practical situation: they were far from any external authority and could not afford to wait out a corrupt or incompetent judge. The clause also traced a line of influence: the Cumberland Compact was itself modeled on the 1772 Watauga Association, already considered the first constitutional government west of the Appalachian Mountains.
