This Week in American History: August 23–29

North Carolina had ceded its western counties to the federal government to help pay down war debt, then thought better of it and took them back. The settlers living out there — in what is now eastern Tennessee — declined to be handed around. On August 23 they declared themselves the independent State of Franklin, named in the hope that Benjamin Franklin might be flattered into advocating for them.

He was not, particularly. Franklin's petition for statehood fell short of the two-thirds majority it needed in Congress. For four years it operated as a functioning government anyway, with John Sevier as governor, its own courts, and a barter economy that accepted tobacco and animal pelts as legal tender. By 1788 it had collapsed back into North Carolina. Sevier went on to become Tennessee's first governor.

The rebellion had begun two days earlier in Southampton County, Virginia. Within roughly forty-eight hours the militia had put it down. Turner himself evaded capture until October 30 and was executed on November 11.

The reprisals were far deadlier than the uprising. Militias and mobs killed scores of Black Virginians, many with no connection to the revolt at all. The Virginia legislature responded by tightening the slave codes across the state — banning education for enslaved and free Black people alike, restricting assembly, and curtailing the movements of free Black residents. The rebellion is often described as a turning point, and it was, though not in the direction Turner intended.

Admiral Farragut had run his fleet past the guns and mines of Mobile Bay on August 5. Fort Morgan, guarding the eastern side of the bay's entrance, held out for another eighteen days under bombardment before surrendering on August 23.

With it went the Confederacy's last major Gulf port east of Texas. After Mobile, only Galveston remained.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and self-described anarchists, were convicted of a payroll robbery and double murder in Braintree, Massachusetts. The crime occurred in April 1920; the trial ran in 1921; the appeals ran for six more years while the case became an international cause.

They were executed at Charlestown State Prison just after midnight on August 23, 1927. There were demonstrations in Paris, London, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo. Fifty years later, in 1977, Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation stating that the trial had been conducted unfairly and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names."

The Duke of York transferred the Three Lower Counties on the Delaware to Penn, who folded them into his Pennsylvania colony. The arrangement was always uneasy — the Lower Counties had their own assembly by 1704 and functioned as a separate colony under a shared governor until independence.

She was forty-four. Born into a prominent Philadelphia family, she married Benedict Arnold in 1779 and, historians now largely agree, was an active participant in his treason rather than a bystander to it — she knew John André, corresponded in the network that carried the West Point plot, and was paid a British pension in her own name afterward. She spent her last years in London, largely alone, paying off her husband's debts.

The treaty confirmed an earlier and deeply contested 1804 agreement, transferring a vast tract between the Mississippi and Illinois rivers from the Sauk and Meskwaki to the United States.

The dispute never really settled. Black Hawk, a Sauk leader, maintained that the men who signed in 1804 had no authority to cede anything — they had come to St. Louis on an unrelated errand. That grievance runs directly to the Black Hawk War, which ends later in this same week, sixteen years on.

Los Angeles to Newark, roughly nineteen hours, the first woman to cross the United States nonstop. She had crossed the Atlantic solo three months earlier. She was thirty-five.

British troops had entered the capital the evening before and set fire to the Capitol — with the Library of Congress inside it — and the President's House. On the 25th they continued: the Treasury, the Department of War, and other public buildings.

That afternoon a storm rolled in, possibly a tornado, and did what the American militia had not — drove the British out of the city. Thomas Jefferson sold his personal library to Congress the following year to replace what had burned. It became the nucleus of the modern Library of Congress.

Four-term governor of Alabama, four-time presidential candidate, and the figure who stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama in 1963. He was shot and paralyzed while campaigning in 1972, and in his final decades publicly renounced his segregationist positions and apologized to civil rights leaders — a reversal that has been read, variously, as sincere conversion and as political arithmetic.

The first Lutheran denomination in North America, organized in Philadelphia under Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, who had arrived from Germany six years earlier to find scattered congregations with no common structure and, in several cases, no ordained minister.

Fitch had a working steamboat on the Delaware River in 1787 — four years before the patent and twenty years before Robert Fulton's Clermont. He ran a scheduled passenger service between Philadelphia and Burlington in 1790. It covered thousands of miles and lost money on nearly all of them, because the stagecoach was cheaper and people trusted horses.

He received his patent on August 26, 1791. So, the same day, did his rival James Rumsey — the commissioners couldn't decide between them. Fitch died broke in Kentucky in 1798. Fulton got the credit.

Second baseman for the Cubs, Pirates, Cardinals, and Reds across thirteen seasons, and a farmer in the off-season and after. He led the National League in doubles in 1931 and played in two World Series.

Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed the certification at eight in the morning, at his home, with no ceremony and no photographers — a decision that annoyed the suffrage organizations considerably. Tennessee had ratified eight days earlier, by a single vote, cast by a twenty-four-year-old legislator named Harry Burn after his mother wrote to tell him to.

Seventy-two years had passed since Seneca Falls.

It is worth being precise about what the amendment did and didn't do. It barred states from denying the vote on account of sex. It did not deliver the ballot to every American woman: Black women across the South still faced poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence for another forty-five years, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Native Americans were not made citizens until 1924, and several states blocked their voting well past that. Asian immigrants were barred from naturalization entirely until 1952.

The South Carolinian was twenty-seven, an aide-de-camp to Washington, a close friend of Alexander Hamilton, and the most persistent abolitionist voice in the Continental Army. He had spent years lobbying South Carolina to raise a regiment of enslaved men who would be freed for their service. The legislature refused him repeatedly.

He died in a minor skirmish near Beaufort — an inconsequential engagement in a war that was effectively already over. Washington wrote that he had "not a fault that I could discover, unless it were intrepidity bordering upon rashness."

The war that began with the 1804 treaty and its 1816 confirmation ended at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, when Black Hawk surrendered to U.S. authorities. He was taken east as a prisoner, paraded through cities as a curiosity, met President Andrew Jackson, and — improbably — dictated an autobiography that became a bestseller.

Landfall near Savannah, with an estimated 700 deaths — most of them among Black rice workers on the Sea Island plantations, where the storm surge swept across low ground with no warning and nowhere to go. It remains one of the deadliest hurricanes in American history and one of the least remembered.

Near Stonewall, Texas, in a farmhouse on the Pedernales River. Schoolteacher, congressman, Senate majority leader, vice president, and the president who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Medicare — and who escalated Vietnam to the point that it ended his political career.

He was ninety-five, and had renounced his American citizenship two years earlier for Ghanaian citizenship. He died in Accra on August 27.

The next morning, 250,000 people gathered on the National Mall. Roy Wilkins took the microphone and told the crowd that Du Bois had died — that the man whose voice had called them there sixty years before was gone the night before they arrived.

Also called Second Manassas. Three days of fighting on ground the armies had already fought over in 1861, ending August 30 in another Union defeat and opening the road for Lee's first invasion of the North — which would end at Antietam three weeks later.

He was eighty-one, and had spent his last five years as a patient at McLean Hospital outside Boston — on grounds he had designed himself, and reportedly did not recognize.

He co-designed Central Park, Prospect Park, the Biltmore Estate grounds, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, and the campuses and public parks of dozens of American cities. Before any of that he was a journalist, and his dispatches from the antebellum South are still cited as a primary source.

Eight years to the day after Till's murder, 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the last of ten speakers, scheduled for four minutes. Partway through the prepared text, Mahalia Jackson called out from behind him — "Tell them about the dream, Martin" — and he set the pages aside.

Chicago Seven defendant David Dellinger, antiwar organizer Bradford Lyttle, civil rights historian Randy Kryn, and eight others were arrested by the Federal Protective Service while demonstrating at the Kluczynski Federal Building during the Democratic National Convention — twenty-eight years after the convention that made Dellinger's name.

American forces withdrawing from Aquidneck Island fought a British and Hessian pursuit to a standstill near Portsmouth. The engagement is best known for the 1st Rhode Island Regiment — a unit that included Black and Narragansett soldiers, many of them formerly enslaved men who had enlisted in exchange for their freedom — which held its ground against three Hessian assaults.

Roughly 1,500 farmers in western Massachusetts, crushed by debt and a hard-currency tax burden they had no hard currency to pay, marched on the Northampton courthouse and shut it down. Without a sitting court, no foreclosure could proceed.

The rebellion spread through the winter and was put down by a privately financed militia in early 1787. Its real consequence was in Philadelphia: the uprising convinced a great many nervous delegates that the Articles of Confederation could not hold a country together, and the Constitutional Convention opened four months later.

A combined Army-Navy operation took the Confederate forts guarding Hatteras Inlet, giving Federal forces control of Pamlico Sound. It was the Union's first real victory of the war and the beginning of the blockade that would eventually strangle Southern trade.

Frank Seiberling bought a factory on the Little Cuyahoga River with $3,500 borrowed from his brother-in-law and named the company for Charles Goodyear, who had discovered vulcanized rubber decades earlier and died in debt without seeing a dollar from it. Akron became the rubber capital of the world.

He walked out of the foothills into a slaughterhouse corral outside Oroville, starving and alone — the last known member of the Yahi, a people who had been all but exterminated in the California genocide of the 1860s and '70s. The survivors, perhaps a few dozen, had spent forty years hiding in the Deer Creek canyons.

He spent his last five years living at the University of California's anthropology museum in San Francisco, where he worked as a research assistant and demonstrated Yahi toolmaking to visitors. He never told anyone his real name; ishi is simply the Yahi word for "man."