Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesWednesday, September 9
From the desk
Start with 1776. Two months after independence, the country still had no name on paper: "United Colonies" in the official records. On September 9, Charles Thomson sat down and wrote "United States" into the Congressional journal instead, and the name never changed again. Worth a longer look: 1942, when a Japanese floatplane dropped two bombs on an Oregon forest, the only aerial attack on the U.S. mainland in the war, stopped by rain and a sharp-eyed lookout named Razz Gardner. California's 1850 statehood, wedged into the Compromise that was supposed to buy the Union more time, rounds out the day.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1776Featured · This day in history
Congress makes it official: the union is now called the United States
Two months after declaring independence, the states still lacked a settled name for what they had become. On September 9, 1776, the Continental Congress, meeting at Pennsylvania's State House (now known as Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, formally replaced "United Colonies" with "United States" across its official records. Charles Thomson, the Congress's secretary, entered the change into the journal he kept for the body. The new name stuck. It survived the war, the Articles of Confederation, and every government that followed.
The name change was a small act with an enormous implication: colonies answer to a mother country, states do not. Congress was telling Britain, and itself, that there was no going back to the old relationship. The phrase carried forward into the Constitution's preamble, onto currency, and into the treaties that followed.
Did you know
QWhy did the engrossed Declaration of Independence get signed nearly a month after its stated date?
The parchment copy of the Declaration bears the date July 4, 1776, but Congress did not order it engrossed until July 19, and most delegates did not actually sign it until August 2. The gap existed because the July 4 vote approved the text itself, while the formal, calligraphed version for signatures took weeks to prepare. Some members present in Philadelphia that August had not even been delegates back in July. The parchment implies a single ceremonial moment that never actually happened that way.
QWhat structural rule kept any one state from dominating a vote in Congress?
Congress required each state delegation to caucus internally first, then cast a single bloc vote, regardless of how many delegates that state sent. If a delegation split evenly, its vote counted as divided and was tossed out entirely rather than counted either way. This one-state-one-vote system meant a small colony like Delaware carried the same weight as populous Virginia. The design borrowed directly from the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, where nine future delegates to the First Continental Congress had already practiced this exact method of building consensus among colonies with wildly different populations and interests.
QHow did France's navy tip the balance in the war Congress was fighting when it renamed itself?
Benjamin Franklin, serving as ambassador to France, secured not just a loan but a commitment of roughly 6,000 French soldiers and a squadron of warships under the Comte de Grasse. Those ships sailed to the Virginia and North Carolina coast and blocked the James River and Hampton Roads, cutting off Lord Cornwallis's route to supplies, reinforcements, or escape. That naval blockade proved decisive at Yorktown in October 1781, forcing Cornwallis to surrender his entire army to Washington. Five years after that journal entry, French sailors recruited through Franklin's diplomacy helped force Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown.
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1850government
California enters the Union, skipping territorial status altogether
By 1849, two years after gold was discovered in a sparsely settled Mexican territory, roughly 100,000 fortune-seekers had arrived, and California had already written its own constitution and asked Washington for statehood outright. On September 9, 1850, President Millard Fillmore signed the Admission Act, making California the thirty-first state, only two days after the House had passed it. The admission came bundled into the Compromise of 1850, a set of measures built to hold the Union together as free and slave states balanced each other's votes in Congress. California entered as a free state.
California's admission as a free state was paired with concessions elsewhere in the Compromise of 1850, including a stronger fugitive slave law. It set the pattern for how the Union would keep adding states for the next decade, negotiated pair by pair to keep the sectional balance in Congress from tipping.
Did you know
QWhy did California's capital bounce between five different towns before landing in Sacramento?
California's constitutional convention met in Monterey in 1849, but once statehood arrived, lawmakers couldn't settle on a permanent seat of government. The first full legislative sessions convened in San Jose from 1850 to 1851, then moved to Vallejo for 1852-1853, then to nearby Benicia for 1853-1854. Each site lacked buildings large enough for a growing government. Sacramento finally became the capital in 1854, and it has held that role ever since, with one brief exception in 1862 when flooding forced legislators to meet in San Francisco. Monterey, the old Spanish and Mexican capital since 1777, never got another turn once statehood began.
QWhat percentage of San Francisco's growth happened in the two decades after admission?
San Francisco's population went from about 500 residents in 1847 to 150,000 by 1870, a 300-fold increase in just over two decades. That growth curve started before admission but accelerated hard afterward, as California's free-state status and the ongoing gold rush kept drawing arrivals from the eastern United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. By 1854, more than 300,000 settlers had come to California altogether, up from roughly 100,000 at the time of the 1850 statehood application. The transformation turned a small port settlement into one of the busiest cities on the Pacific coast within a single generation.
QWhy couldn't California send any full military regiments to fight for the Union despite backing it with gold?
During the Civil War, California shipped gold eastward to Washington to help fund the Union war effort, but the state never organized a complete regiment to send east. A sizable pro-South population within California made raising full units politically difficult. Smaller outfits like the so-called "California 100 Company" were recruited in California but organized and mustered by Massachusetts, since the state itself raised no formal regiment. This left California's Civil War contribution mostly financial rather than military, a contrast to the free-state status it had entered the Union with just a decade earlier.
1942military
A Japanese submarine surfaces off Cape Blanco and launches a floatplane over Oregon
By September 1942, nine months after Pearl Harbor, the West Coast had not yet seen a direct attack on American soil. On September 9, 1942, the submarine I-25 surfaced west of Cape Blanco and launched a small floatplane flown by Warrant Officer Nobuo Fujita. Fujita dropped two incendiary bombs over the Siskiyou National Forest, one landing on Wheeler Ridge near Mount Emily, sixteen kilometers east of Brookings. Fire lookout Howard "Razz" Gardner had already spotted the plane and called it in; a recent rainstorm and quick response kept the resulting fire small.
This was the first time an enemy aircraft dropped bombs on the continental United States during World War II, and it happened in an Oregon forest, spotted by a civilian fire lookout with a two-way radio. The episode fed wartime fears of West Coast vulnerability that shaped precautions like blackout drills. Decades later, Fujita made unlikely postwar visits to Brookings as a gesture of reconciliation.
Did you know
QHow deep was the crater left by the bomb that hit Wheeler Ridge?
The incendiary bomb that struck Wheeler Ridge gouged out a crater a full foot deep, a detail investigators noted when the FBI launched a full inquiry into the incident. Agents combed the site and recovered several bomb fragments, which along with the crater helped confirm the weapon's Japanese origin. The crater's modest size matched the bomb's relatively light 168-pound payload, built more for igniting timber than for blast damage. It stood as physical evidence of an attack that otherwise left almost no visible trace on the landscape: the only spot in the contiguous United States struck by an enemy bomb dropped from the air during the war.
QDid Fujita really come back to bomb Oregon a second time?
Yes. On September 29, 1942, three weeks after the Mount Emily raid, Fujita and Okuda Shoji flew the same Glen floatplane off the I-25 for a repeat run over the Oregon coast. Japanese records confirm both bombs were dropped again, but the second attack caused only negligible damage and drew even less notice than the first. American authorities never publicized it the way they'd quietly handled the September 9 incident. The mission changed nothing in Japan's war effort, and it marked the last time the submarine attempted an aerial bombing run against the mainland.
QWhat did Fujita actually hand over to Brookings when he returned two decades later?
Fujita presented the city with his family's samurai sword, an heirloom roughly 400 years old that had been passed down through generations of his family. He gave it during his visit as Grand Marshal of Brookings' Azalea Festival. Before his U.S. trip, the Japanese government had secured assurance that he would face no war crimes prosecution. The sword stayed on display at Brookings City Hall for years until 1995, when Fujita personally moved it into a new case at the city's library. It remains on display there today.
