Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesFriday, September 25
From the desk
Start with 1789: Congress sent twelve amendments to the states that day, ten of which became the Bill of Rights, a concession forced by Anti-Federalists who wouldn't ratify without one. The twelfth, on House apportionment, never got enough votes and quietly died. Worth a longer look: 1981, when Sandra Day O'Connor took the judicial oath after 192 years of an all-male Court, confirmed unanimously and sworn in with her husband watching. Ethan Allen's botched Montreal raid rounds out the day, proof that Ticonderoga's easy win taught him the wrong lesson.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1789Featured · This day in history
Congress sends twelve amendments to the states, ten of them the Bill of Rights
Anti-Federalists had warned the new Constitution left liberty unguarded, and several states had ratified it only on a promise that amendments would come. On September 25, 1789, Congress passed twelve constitutional amendments and sent them to the states. Ten would become the Bill of Rights. A twelfth, governing how House seats grow with population, never got the votes it needed. (A separate amendment on congressional pay, not mentioned here, would wait two centuries to be ratified.)
The Bill of Rights gave Americans the specific language, free speech, due process, and jury trial, that every later civil liberties fight has argued from. The forgotten second amendment in the package, on congressional pay, sat idle for two centuries before Americans ratified it anyway in 1992, showing that the amendment process the founders designed could still be completed, even two centuries late.
Did you know
QWhat grade did Gregory Watson get on the term paper that eventually became the Twenty-seventh Amendment?
Watson's professor gave the paper a C, unconvinced that a 1789 amendment could still be ratified two centuries later. Undeterred, Watson turned the argument into a personal crusade, running his letter-writing campaign out of a $6,000 budget starting in 1982. He mailed state legislators, tracked down obscure ratification records, and pushed the long-dormant Congressional Compensation Amendment state by state until it cleared the three-fourths threshold in 1992. He later asked the university to reconsider the grade. A low mark on a term paper ended up driving one of the strangest constitutional victories in American history.
QHow narrowly did the Senate rewrite Madison's original amendment language before sending it to the states?
The Senate did not merely trim Madison's list. It altered it 26 times, reshaping wording the House had already approved. A conference committee then had to sit down on September 21, 1789, to hammer out a compromise between the House and Senate versions before either chamber would sign off. That negotiation squeezed the final twelve articles into shape just four days before Congress formally passed them on September 25. The number 26 rarely shows up in textbook accounts of the amendment process.
QWhy did a sitting U.S. senator publicly scold the National Archivist in 1992?
When Michigan and Alabama both ratified the pay amendment within two days of each other in May 1992, the Archivist certified it as the Twenty-seventh Amendment without waiting for Congress to weigh in. Senator Robert Byrd objected on the floor, calling the move a break from "historic tradition" since Congress had never gotten to formally review or accept the two-century-old ratification. Alabama's May 5 vote, not Michigan's more publicized May 7 vote, turned out to be the one that actually pushed the amendment over the line. Byrd's complaint went nowhere, and the amendment stood.
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1775military
Ethan Allen surrenders outside Montreal after his flanks bolt and his backup never comes
Four months after seizing Fort Ticonderoga without firing a shot, Ethan Allen tried the same audacity on a much bigger target. On the night of September 24, 1775, he crossed the St. Lawrence River with about 110 men and landed at Longue-Pointe, expecting Major John Brown to arrive with reinforcements. Brown never showed. British General Guy Carleton's Quebec militia surrounded Allen's isolated force, and after a 90-minute exchange of fire, his line broke and Allen surrendered.
Allen's capture became early Revolutionary propaganda: his months in a ship's hold and irons, then transport to England, gave the colonies one of their first prisoner-of-war narratives, one that colonial newspapers repeated for years. Montreal itself fell without a fight to Montgomery's better-organized force on November 13, 1775.
Did you know
QWho exactly made up the British force that trapped Allen outside Montreal?
Captain John Campbell's defense was a patchwork, not a garrison. His roster held just 34 regulars from the 26th Regiment of Foot, backed by 120 Canadien militia and 80 English militia recruited from the city, plus 20 British Indian agents and a handful of Indians. That mix outnumbered Allen's landing party more than two to one before a shot was fired. The composition also shows how thin Britain's regular presence in Quebec was in 1775: Carleton had only 34 regulars to work with, and filled the rest of his force with militia and Indian agents.
QWhy did Thomas Walker never reach Ethan Allen with help?
Walker was a British-born Montreal merchant who had turned Patriot sympathizer, and Allen sent word asking him to rally support once the landing was underway. Walker was arrested before he could do anything, cutting off Allen's one contact inside the city who might have organized reinforcements or intelligence. Brown's force also never crossed the river at La Prairie, so Allen lost both potential sources of help that night. Walker's arrest meant Allen had no warning that Campbell's mixed force was already moving, and no local network left to fall back on once his flanks ran.
QWhat was Allen actually supposed to be doing on the St. Lawrence that week, if not attacking Montreal?
General Richard Montgomery had given Allen a narrower job: link up with James Livingston's Canadian militia and hold the south bank of the St. Lawrence to stop Carleton from marching relief to the besieged British garrison at Fort Saint-Jean. Allen and Major Brown were circulating General Schuyler's proclamation urging Quebec residents to side with the Americans, a recruitment and propaganda mission, not an assault. Fort Saint-Jean was still under siege and would hold out until November. Allen's decision to cross to Longue-Pointe and go for Montreal instead meant he abandoned the assignment Montgomery had actually given him.
1997exploration
Atlantis lifts off at night, headed for a wounded Russian station
Three months earlier, a runaway cargo ship had punched a hole in Mir's Spektr module, and NASA needed to know its astronauts could still safely live aboard the station. On September 25, 1997, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center at 10:34 p.m., commanded by James Wetherbee with pilot Michael Bloomfield and five mission specialists. The crew carried David Wolf, who was set to relieve Michael Foale after his 145 days in orbit, along with tons of supplies and repair gear. It was the seventh Shuttle-Mir docking of the joint American-Russian program.
STS-86 tested whether NASA would keep flying astronauts to a station that had nearly depressurized months earlier. Wolf's rotation onto Mir kept an unbroken American presence there, the whole point of Phase 1B. It proved Washington and Moscow could still run a joint human spaceflight program even after a near-disaster.
Did you know
QWhy was Wendy Lawrence pulled from the Mir crew swap at the last minute?
Wendy Lawrence had trained for months as Michael Foale's scheduled replacement, but NASA discovered she was too small to fit the Russian Orlan spacesuit required for the internal spacewalk needed to fix Spektr's severed power cables. On July 30, 1997, the agency announced David Wolf, her backup, would take her place on Mir instead, while Lawrence stayed aboard Atlantis for the round trip. NASA announced the swap on July 30, but Administrator Daniel Goldin reportedly did not make the final call on flying Wolf up, rather than pulling the plug on the astronaut rotation entirely, until the night before liftoff. Lawrence flew anyway, just without the station stay she had spent a year preparing for.
QWhat went wrong during the training exercise that knocked out Mir's power before the emergency repair spacewalk?
While Michael Foale was training for an internal spacewalk to reconnect Spektr's solar array cables, a power cable was accidentally disconnected during a routine exercise, cutting power to the entire station. The mishap came on the heels of commander Vasili Tsibliev being grounded from the repair walk himself after a July 13 medical exam turned up an irregular heartbeat. Between the commander's heart trouble and the accidental blackout, Mir 23's original repair plan collapsed entirely, and NASA announced on July 21 that the incoming Mir 24 crew would handle the internal spacewalk instead. The station's troubles compounded on each other for weeks before Atlantis ever left the pad.
QWhat specific hardware did the Mir 24 crew retrieve during Foale's external spacewalk to hunt for the hull breach?
During a six-hour spacewalk on September 5, Michael Foale and Anatoly Solovyev retrieved a radiation-monitoring device that cosmonaut Jerry Linenger had left mounted outside the station months earlier, and repositioned two undamaged solar arrays to catch more sunlight. The pair also scanned Spektr's exterior for the puncture point from the June Progress collision, though the survey never definitively located the breach. Foale's role during the earlier internal repair spacewalk had been different: he stayed inside a docked Soyuz capsule the whole time, relaying communications between the spacewalking cosmonauts and ground controllers rather than working the hull himself.
