Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesTuesday, August 4
From the desk
Start with 1964: the Turner Joy spent two and a half hours firing roughly 220 shells at radar ghosts in the Gulf of Tonkin, and within days Lyndon Johnson used that phantom battle to push a war resolution through Congress. Worth a longer look is 1814, when Drummond's night assault on Fort Erie ended not in British victory but in a magazine explosion that killed some 250 of his own men. Also on the docket: Kissinger's secret 1969 Paris channel, running quietly beside the talks everyone could see. One date, three different ways a plan met reality and lost.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1814Featured · This day in history
British storm Fort Erie in the dark; a bastion explodes and the attack collapses
By August 1814, American troops under Jacob Brown held Fort Erie on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, and Lieutenant General Gordon Drummond wanted them gone. British forces reached the fort on August 4 and settled in to besiege it. On the night of August 15-16, Drummond sent three columns forward in a coordinated assault. American gunners held their ground in the rain. An explosion in the fort's northeast bastion killed about 250 attackers and ended the attempt; British losses came to 57 killed, 309 wounded, and 537 missing.
Fort Erie was the last serious British attempt to push American forces off Canadian soil, and its failure closed out major British offensive operations on the Niagara frontier. The defense, built on earthworks Brown and Gaines had ordered strengthened rather than superior numbers, stood out as one of the few clear American successes in a war otherwise marked by burned capitals and stalemate.
Did you know
QWhat did Gordon Drummond give away to a battlefield surgeon after the assault?
Drummond handed over his own sword, a presentation piece he had received as a gift from Lloyd's of London, to Surgeon William "Tiger" Dunlop of the 89th Regiment. Dunlop had spent nearly three days without stopping treating the wounded from the failed assault, working through a casualty list that ran past 800 British killed, wounded, captured, and missing. Drummond had just watched roughly a third of his division fall in a single night, much of it in the seconds the northeast bastion took to go up. No account explains exactly what Drummond said when he passed the blade over, only that he did it in the aftermath among the wounded and dying under Dunlop's care.
QWhat happened to Sergeant Richard Smith after he lost his arm at Fort Erie?
Smith, a sergeant in the 104th Foot, took five separate wounds during the assault before surgeons amputated his right arm. His commanding officers recommended him for a commission on the strength of his conduct under fire, an honor that would have lifted him from the enlisted ranks into the officer corps. The commission never came through, and no surviving record explains why the recommendation stalled. The recommendation went forward but never resulted in a commission, and no record explains where it stalled.
QWhat happened to the American schooners Ohio and Somers in the days before the assault?
On August 12, 1814, three nights before Drummond's columns went forward, British naval forces seized the American schooners Ohio and Somers on the Niagara River. British commanders read the capture as a sign that American resolve at Fort Erie was cracking. The garrison's actual strength and fighting condition were badly underestimated as a result. Three days later, Fischer's, Scott's, and Drummond's columns walked into defenses manned by roughly 2,200 Americans who had spent weeks digging in rather than the shaken force British intelligence expected to find.
The Daily Record · free by email
Tomorrow's edition in your inbox — one story, one quote, the flag.
1790government
Washington signs duties on rum, molasses and tea to pay the nation's debts
In 1790, the United States owed money it had no reliable way to raise. Congress had already rejected sales taxes as unenforceable and an income tax as impractical, so Alexander Hamilton proposed tariffs collected at the docks. On August 10, President Washington signed the Tariff of 1790, placing duties on imported spirits, molasses, wine, sugar, coffee, and tea. Four days earlier, Congress had authorized a fleet of armed cutters to make sure smugglers didn't slip past the customs houses with the money uncollected.
This was the Constitution's revenue power made concrete: a tax collected quietly at a handful of ports rather than visibly at every farmhouse door, sidestepping the kind of anger that would later fuel the Whiskey Rebellion. The cutters built to enforce it became the Revenue-Marine, the nation's only armed sea service for eight years, and eventually the Coast Guard.
Did you know
QWhat did a British captain say after capturing an American cutter in the War of 1812?
When HMS Barbadoes, commanded by Captain Thomas Huskisson, captured the revenue cutter James Madison off Savannah in 1812 after a seven-hour chase, Huskisson sized up his prize with a professional's eye: she was "coppered and copper-fastened, is two years old, and sails remarkably fast." It sounds more like a compliment than a combat report. The Revenue-Marine's small, fast-built cutters were good enough that the enemy wanted to keep them rather than sink them, and several captured cutters ended up serving in British hands for the rest of the war.
QWhat instructions did Hamilton personally give the first cutter captains?
Hamilton wrote the captains a letter of instruction warning them against heavy-handedness on the water: "They will always keep in mind that their countrymen are freemen, and, as such, are impatient of everything that bears the least mark of a domineering spirit." He told them to rely on "a cool and temperate perseverance in their duty" rather than "vehemence or violence." It was a notably gentle rulebook for a service built to seize goods and arrest smugglers.
QHow did a British officer honor an American captain he had just defeated?
In 1813, after a brutal hand-to-hand boarding fight left the cutter Surveyor in British hands, Lieutenant John Crerie of HMS Narcissus handed Captain William S. Travis back his own sword. It was a formal gesture of respect for what Crerie called Travis's "gallant defense," made with only six 12-pounder carronades against a much larger force. The sword's return was recorded as one of the few courtly moments in an otherwise lopsided fight.
1977government
Carter signs the Department of Energy into law
Four years after Arab oil producers embargoed the United States and gas lines stretched around city blocks, Washington still had no single agency in charge of energy policy. On August 4, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Energy Organization Act, merging the Federal Energy Administration, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Federal Power Commission, and pieces of other agencies into one cabinet department. The new department opened its doors on October 1, 1977, with James Schlesinger as its first Secretary of Energy.
The oil crisis had exposed a problem: no single office owned energy policy, whether it touched nuclear weapons, conservation, or alternative fuels. Carter's department filled that hole, and its mission, cutting dependence on foreign oil while funding physical science research, still shapes energy policy debates today.
Did you know
QWhat was Jimmy Carter's actual campaign announcement in December 1974?
Carter introduced himself to the country with a line so plain it became famous for its lack of pretense: "My name is Jimmy Carter, and I'm running for president." He said it on December 12, 1974, more than two years before he would sign the Department of Energy Organization Act, at a time when he was still a little-known former Georgia governor with no national profile. The announcement doubled as an early signal of his broader pitch to voters: a government reorganizer who would streamline sprawling federal bureaucracy. That same reorganizing pitch carried through to 1977, when he pulled four separate energy agencies under one roof.
QWhich president signed the law that first split up federal atomic energy authority before Carter consolidated it again?
Gerald Ford was in the Oval Office when the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 broke the old Atomic Energy Commission into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Research and Development Administration. Ford preceded Carter in office and left him the fragmented agency structure that the Department of Energy Organization Act would later merge back together. Ford's administration fixed the regulatory conflict of interest at the old AEC, but the split scattered energy functions across separate agencies with no shared boss. Carter inherited that scattered arrangement and spent his first year in office reassembling it into a single cabinet department.
QWhat did Carter say about racial discrimination years before he became president?
In a January 12, 1971 speech, Carter declared "the time for racial discrimination is over," a statement he made as Georgia's governor, more than six years before he signed the Department of Energy Organization Act. The line had nothing to do with energy policy, but it shows the same blunt reforming style he later brought to reorganizing federal energy policy. Carter built a national reputation as a Southern governor willing to say things bluntly that his predecessors avoided. That reputation for direct, plainspoken reform followed him into the presidency, where in 1977 he signed the DOE into existence.
