Reading 3 of 16 free1776 Club · all 16 storiesSunday, June 21
From the desk
Dive into 1768 with James Otis Jr.'s defiant stand against the Crown, a pivotal moment that electrified the colonies. Also, catch up on New Hampshire's crucial role in ratifying the Constitution and the dramatic battle at Mahone's Ravine during the Civil War. These stories not only shape our understanding of American history but also highlight the courage and conflict that defined our nation's journey.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1768Featured · This day in history
James Otis Jr. Defies Crown and Parliament Before the Massachusetts General Court
By 1768, James Otis Jr. had already spent seven years making himself the most dangerous lawyer in Boston — a man who had argued, nearly single-handedly, that British search warrants were unconstitutional and that taxation without representation was tyranny. That September, he stood before the Massachusetts General Court and delivered a speech so pointed in its offenses to the King and Parliament that it sent shockwaves across the Atlantic. It was one of his last major acts at full capacity; within a year, a tax collector's cudgel would split open his head at the British Coffee House, and the man John Adams called "a flame of fire" would gradually go dark.
Old State House, Boston, MassachusettsStory page →
The American Throughline
Otis's argument that "an act against the constitution is void" — made in 1761 and refined through 1768 — seeded the doctrine of judicial review that would anchor American constitutionalism for centuries. His pamphlet phrase "taxation without representation is tyranny" became the Revolution's most durable slogan. John Adams, who watched Otis argue in 1761, said the child Independence was "then and there born." Without Otis, there is a plausible case that Adams himself never becomes a revolutionary.
Did you know
QWhat did John Adams say about Otis's wife — and why is her politics a small historical irony?
Ruth Cunningham, the wealthy merchant's daughter Otis married in 1755, was, by John Adams's account, 'a good Wife, and too good for him.' Adams also called her 'a High Tory' — meaning her political sympathies ran directly counter to everything her husband was risking his sanity and career to argue. Otis spent his adult life building the intellectual case for American independence; his wife, heiress to a fortune of £10,000, appears to have been broadly sympathetic to the Crown he was defying. Adams's dry aside is one of the few windows we have into the Otis household, and it raises questions that Otis himself foreclosed by burning most of his personal papers near the end of his life.
QWhy do historians know so little about Otis's private thoughts, despite his fame?
Near the end of his life, Otis burned the majority of his personal papers. The man who arguably coined 'taxation without representation is tyranny,' who delivered a five-hour oration that John Adams credited with starting the Revolution, and who published pamphlets arguing for the natural rights of all people regardless of race — that man left almost no private record of his own interior life. What historians know of Otis comes largely through Adams's journals and letters, Hutchinson's hostile dispatches, and the published pamphlets Otis chose to release. The destruction of his papers was likely connected to his mental deterioration in the early 1770s, but it remains one of the more consequential archival losses of the founding era.
QHow did Otis's 1761 argument against the writs of assistance anticipate a constitutional doctrine that wouldn't formally exist for decades?
In 1761, Otis argued before the Superior Court that 'an act against the constitution is void' — a principle that Parliament and the Crown flatly rejected. He lost the case. But the argument he made, that courts had both the power and the obligation to strike down legislation that violated fundamental law, is essentially the doctrine of judicial review that John Marshall would formalize in Marbury v. Madison in 1803. Otis arrived at this position not through statute but through natural law reasoning, drawing on the same tradition that would run through the Declaration of Independence. He was arguing for judicial review roughly forty years before the Supreme Court officially claimed it.
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1788government
New Hampshire Ratifies the Constitution, Making It the Law of the Land
By the summer of 1788, the Constitution drafted in Philadelphia the previous year had been sitting in limbo — eight states had approved it, but nine were required before it could take effect. New Hampshire's Federal Convention changed that on June 21, 1788, becoming the ninth state to ratify and clearing the threshold set by Article VII. The Congress of the Confederation certified eleven ratifications by September 17, 1788, then set the dates for the first Congress, the first presidential election, and the official launch of the new federal government. The country the Founders had argued over on paper was finally, legally real.
Article VII had set the number at nine — not thirteen, not a majority of the population, but nine states willing to try something new. New Hampshire supplied that final vote. The federal government Americans live under today, with its Congress, its presidency, and its Supreme Court, did not become legally operative until a convention in New Hampshire said yes. The date on which the United States government was born is June 21, 1788.
Did you know
QWhy did New Hampshire's ratification convention suspend itself in February 1788 before ultimately approving the Constitution in June?
When New Hampshire's delegates first convened in February 1788, the vote count was running against ratification — enough delegates were skeptical or outright opposed that supporters feared a formal rejection would be worse than no vote at all. A no from a ninth state could have been devastating to the ratification momentum building in other states. Federalist delegates moved to adjourn the convention rather than allow a losing vote to be recorded. When the convention reconvened in June, supporters had spent the intervening months persuading wavering delegates, and the final vote came out in favor. The delay, in other words, was a deliberate political maneuver — and it worked.
QWhat was unusual about the closing endorsement on the Constitution itself — 'Done in Convention, by the unanimous consent of the States present'?
The phrase was carefully drafted by Gouverneur Morris to paper over the fact that the convention was not actually unanimous. Several delegates refused to sign — including Edmund Randolph and George Mason of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, all of whom had serious objections to the final document. The wording 'unanimous consent of the States present' referred to the states as units, not to every individual delegate, and it allowed the document to project a unity it did not quite possess. Benjamin Franklin, in his closing remarks to the convention, acknowledged the imperfection of the document while urging everyone to sign — a speech that became famous precisely because unanimity had to be argued for rather than assumed.
QThe Constitution was certified by the very government it was replacing — how did the Congress of the Confederation handle ratifying its own successor?
The Congress of the Confederation, operating under the Articles of Confederation it was about to render obsolete, certified the ratification of eleven states on September 17, 1788, and then set the dates for the new government to begin. It was a strange act of institutional self-dissolution — the existing Congress effectively scheduling its own replacement. The date chosen for that certification was not coincidental: September 17, 1788 was exactly one year after the Constitution had been signed in Philadelphia. Whether that symmetry was intentional or a bureaucratic coincidence, the historical record does not say. But the press, one suspects, did not miss it.
1942military
Japanese Submarine I-25 Shells Fort Stevens, Oregon
By the summer of 1942, the West Coast felt close to the war in ways the rest of the country did not. Late on the night of June 21, Commander Akiji Tagami surfaced the Imperial Japanese submarine I-25 at the mouth of the Columbia River and ordered his deck gun crew to open fire on Fort Stevens — a Civil War-era installation defending Oregon's Pacific coast. Seventeen shells fell on the fort, most landing in a baseball field or a nearby swamp. Colonel Carl S. Doney ordered a blackout, refused to return fire, and the I-25 slipped away undamaged — leaving behind cut telephone cables and the distinction of being the only Axis attack on a military installation in the contiguous United States during World War II.
Fort Stevens was the only military base in the contiguous 48 states ever shelled by an Axis power in World War II. The attack, combined with the Aleutian Islands Campaign that same month, triggered a full-scale West Coast invasion scare that reshaped coastal defense posture — barbed wire went up from the Columbia River mouth southward, and the Army's approach to protecting Pacific shorelines never quite recovered its prewar complacency.
Did you know
QWhy did Colonel Doney refuse to return fire at a submarine actively shelling his fort?
A depression position finder — an instrument used to calculate the angle and distance to a target — showed Doney's crews that the I-25 was sitting beyond the effective range of Fort Stevens' guns. Firing back would have done nothing to the submarine but would have lit up every battery position on the shoreline for Tagami's crew to record. Doney ordered a blackout instead, and the Japanese shells fell blind into a baseball field and a swamp. It was a tactically sound call, though it was not universally popular with the men who had just been shelled and ordered to do nothing about it.
QWhat was the I-25 carrying besides its deck gun — and how did it use that cargo later?
The I-25 was a submarine transport fitted with a watertight hangar for a Yokosuka E14Y floatplane, a small single-engine reconnaissance aircraft. On the night of the Fort Stevens shelling, the plane went unused. But the I-25 returned to Oregon's coast later in the summer and launched the E14Y on incendiary missions over the Oregon forests — the only time in the war that an enemy aircraft dropped bombs on the continental United States. The floatplane started a small fire in the Siskiyou National Forest. The submarine that shelled Fort Stevens and the submarine that bombed Oregon's forests were the same vessel.
QHow did a wrecked 19th-century British sailing ship end up tangled in World War II coastal defenses?
The Peter Iredale was a steel-hulled British barque that ran aground on the Oregon coast in 1906. By 1942 its rusting skeleton had become something of a local landmark — visible at low tide, slowly collapsing into the sand at the mouth of the Columbia River. When Army engineers strung barbed wire southward from Point Adams after the Fort Stevens shelling, the wire ran directly through the wreck, incorporating it into the coastal defense perimeter. It stayed entangled in the wire for the duration of the war. The hulk is still there today, one of the most photographed shipwrecks on the Oregon coast.
