Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesSunday, September 13
From the desk
Start with 1814. British warships opened fire on Fort McHenry at 6 a.m., all through the night, at maximum range because a chain of sunken ships kept them from closing in. By morning four Americans were dead, twenty-four wounded, and the fort still stood, the moment that gave Francis Scott Key his flag still there. Worth a longer look: 1862, when Union soldiers in a Frederick field found Lee's marching orders wrapped around three cigars, a discovery that shaped Antietam days later. Mississippi tried to outrun a federal court order the same day it was issued in 1962.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1814Featured · This day in history
British warships open a 25-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry
Three weeks after burning Washington, British forces turned on Baltimore, a port they blamed for harboring privateers that had raided their shipping. At 6 a.m. on September 13, 1814, Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane's warships opened fire on Fort McHenry, commanded by Major George Armistead. A chain of 22 sunken ships kept the fleet from closing the distance, so British guns and rockets fired at their maximum, inaccurate range through the night. By morning the Americans had lost four dead and 24 wounded. The fort still stood.
Francis Scott Key watched the bombardment from a truce ship and turned the flag he saw at dawn into "Defence of Fort M'Henry," the poem that became the national anthem. A moment of harbor defense against a specific tactical threat became the country's most repeated piece of civic memory, sung before nearly every American sporting event since.
Did you know
QHow much did Mary Pickersgill charge to sew the flag that became the Star-Spangled Banner?
Major Armistead paid Mary Pickersgill 405 dollars and 90 cents to sew an oversized garrison flag measuring 30 by 42 feet, commissioned specifically in anticipation of the coming British attack. A smaller 17-by-25-foot storm flag flew during the actual bombardment, with the larger garrison flag raised only afterward. Pickersgill's garrison flag only went up at dawn on September 14, once the shelling stopped, which is the flag Francis Scott Key actually saw and wrote about. That commission produced the flag Key actually saw at dawn.
QWhy couldn't the British fleet just sail closer and finish the fort off?
Baltimore's defenders had sunk a chain of 22 ships across the harbor entrance, physically blocking Cochrane's fleet from closing the distance to Fort McHenry. That barrier forced British gunners to fire from the outer edge of their weapons' range, two miles for ship's guns and 1.75 miles for rockets, ranges at which neither weapon could be aimed with any precision. The result was 25 hours of bombardment that struck almost nothing of value. A line of deliberately scuttled vessels did more to blunt the attack than any cannon inside the fort.
QHow badly did the two sides' gunnery actually compare that night?
Fort McHenry's return fire managed only one confirmed hit on the entire British fleet, wounding a single sailor aboard one of Cochrane's bomb vessels. One wounded Briton against four dead and 24 wounded Americans shows how one-sided the range advantage was. The British could reach the fort; the fort's own guns could not reach the British ships. It was a bombardment survived through walls and distance, not won through gunnery on either side.
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1862military
In a Maryland field, Union troops find Lee's entire battle plan
By mid-September 1862, Robert E. Lee had pushed his army north of the Potomac, gambling that a Confederate victory on Union soil might bring foreign recognition. On September 13, soldiers of the 27th Indiana camped outside Frederick, Maryland, came across a copy of Lee's marching orders lying in a field, wrapped in three oilskin envelopes and addressed to General D.H. Hill. The papers laid out exactly where each piece of Lee's divided army was headed. Within days, that knowledge shaped the bloodiest single day of the war.
The find gave the Union command something rare for the time: a rival general's actual written battle plan. What Union troops did with that knowledge at Antietam gave Lincoln the battlefield opening he needed to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation days later, turning a war for the Union into a war against slavery as well.
Did you know
QWhat was actually inside the envelope besides the battle orders?
Accounts of the find describe the orders as having been wrapped around a bundle of cigars, which is part of why the story has stuck in Civil War lore for over a century. Soldiers of the 27th Indiana who found the papers reportedly grabbed the cigars first, not realizing what the documents wrapped around them actually were.
QWho was the order originally meant for, and why did it matter that it never reached him?
The envelope was addressed to Confederate General D.H. Hill, one of Lee's division commanders during the Maryland campaign. Hill maintained for years afterward that he had never received this particular copy of the orders at all, suggesting the courier lost it before delivery rather than Hill misplacing it himself. The mystery of exactly how it ended up abandoned in a field outside Frederick was never definitively solved.
QHow does the Civil War's opening shot connect to the stakes riding on Lee's lost orders seventeen months later?
The war began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and by September 1862 that conflict had escalated into full-scale warfare across two major theaters, East and West. In the year and a half since Sumter, the war had grown large enough that a single lost set of orders in a Maryland field carried real strategic weight. Fort Sumter started as a fight over federal property in a harbor. Seventeen months later, the stakes had grown large enough that Lincoln was prepared to use a battlefield outcome to justify striking directly at slavery itself.
1788government
Congress schedules the first presidential vote, and picks New York as the temporary capital
For most of a decade, Congress under the Articles of Confederation had struggled to muster a quorum for routine business, let alone hand power to a new form of government. On September 13, 1788, the Congress of the Confederation set the machinery in motion: electors would be chosen January 7, 1789, cast their votes February 4, and the new Congress under the ratified Constitution would convene March 4. The same resolution named New York City the temporary seat of government, the city where Congress already sat.
This single resolution set the first version of a calendar that would evolve into the modern election schedule.: electors chosen in January, votes counted in February, and a new government seated in March. It also made New York, not Philadelphia or a Southern capital, the first home of the presidency and Congress under the Constitution, a fact settled with little debate.
Did you know
QWhy did the Confederation Congress keep calling itself the Continental Congress right up to its final days?
The body that scheduled the first presidential election never adopted a new name for itself. Formed under the Articles of Confederation on March 1, 1781, it continued referring to itself as the Continental Congress throughout its entire run, the same label used by the earlier revolutionary congresses that had declared independence and run the war. Modern historians draw a firm line between the pre-1781 Continental Congresses and the post-1781 Confederation Congress, but the delegates sitting in New York in September 1788 drew no such distinction in their own records. The name stuck out of habit, not legal necessity, and it quietly disappeared only when the new Constitution's Congress convened in March 1789 with its own defined House and Senate.
QHow long had New York already been hosting Congress before it became the capital of the new constitutional government?
New York City had served as the seat of the Confederation Congress since January 1785, nearly four full years before the September 1788 resolution made it the temporary capital under the new Constitution. That earlier move had nothing to do with presidential elections or new charters; Congress simply relocated its ongoing, often poorly attended sessions there after leaving other host cities. So when delegates picked New York in 1788, they were not selecting a fresh site for a fresh government but simply keeping the government where it already happened to be sitting. The building and staff were already in place, which is part of why the choice drew so little debate.
QWhat specific power did the Articles of Confederation deny Congress that the new Constitution restored?
Beyond the well-known inability to tax, the Articles gave Congress no authority to regulate commerce between the states or with foreign nations, a gap the new Constitution was built specifically to close. The Confederation Congress could request money and goods from the states but could not compel payment, and it could not set uniform trade rules that bound all thirteen states together. This left the country vulnerable to trade disputes among the states themselves. The Constitution drafted in Philadelphia handed the new Congress explicit commerce power, a change that took effect the same day the new government convened, March 4, 1789.
