During this week in 1791, George Washington begins a 3-month tour of the Southern states. As the first President, Washington considered it important to visit every part of the country. He wanted Americans to know and to form an attachment to their new government.
Remember how different things were back then. Today, we are proud of our status as Americans. But our forefathers weren’t there yet. Their first allegiance was to their localities or to their states.
Historian Joseph Ellis describes the task facing Washington during his tenure as President:
“[W]e must recognize that there was no such thing as a viable American nation when [Washington] took office as president, that the opening words of the Constitution (‘We the people of the United States’) expressed a fervent but fragile hope rather than a social reality . . . No republican government had ever before exercised control over a population this diffuse or a land mass this large, and the prevailing assumption . . . [was that] a nation so conceived and so dedicated could not endure. Washington’s core achievement as president, much as it had been as commander in chief of the Continental army, was to transform the improbable into the inevitable.”
Washington’s travels were a part of this effort to bring the nation together.
The story continues here:
https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-washington-southern-tour
#TDIH #OTD #AmericanHistory #USHistory #liberty #freedom #ShareTheHistory
On this day in 1748, Martha Wayles, future wife of Thomas Jefferson, is born.
Martha “Patty” Wayles Skelton Jefferson is a bit of a mystery! We don’t even have a portrait of her, although the attached silhouette is believed to be hers. Jefferson burned all of their correspondence after her death. By all accounts, though, the two were deeply in love.
Patty was a young and wealthy widow when the two married on New Year’s Day in 1772. Their first child was born 8 months and 26 days after their wedding. They named her Martha, and they called her “Patsy.” Mrs. Jefferson would have six total children over the course of her ten year marriage to Jefferson. Only two would live to adulthood.
The story continues here: http://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-martha-jefferson
On this day in 1960, a plane carrying the Cal Poly football team crashes in Ohio. The tragedy was the first airline crash involving a United States sports team.
Amazingly, 26 people survived.
The Cal Poly team had been in Ohio to play a football game, of course. That game against Bowling Green hadn’t gone very well. Afterwards, the players just wanted to get home. Surely no one was happy about the dense fog that descended upon the area. Would Cal Poly’s chartered plane be able to take off?
The pilot entrusted with the decision, it was later discovered, was flying with a suspended license.
The story continues here: http://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-cal-poly-1960
On this day in 1944, a hero engages in an action that would earn him the Medal of Honor. SSgt. Lucian Adams didn’t plan to serve in the military. He’d expected to be a professional baseball player.
“About the last thing I was planning on,” he later laughed, “was becoming a soldier and certainly it never occurred to me to be a hero. I was drafted, and once I got in the Army, I decided it was a job and I would do the best I could.”
Either way, his strong throwing arm would prove useful in France during World War II, as a local Texas journalist later observed, because Adams could forcefully hurl grenades at enemy machine gun nests.
The story continues here: https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-lucian-adams-moh
