5 Dark Days in America

Times to mourn

Few days in American history have wounded the nation more deeply than September 11, 2001. Yet a handful of horrible days did open wounds just as grievous. Today, we remember 9/11 by remembering those dark days of the past–and the strength that emerged from their shadows.

Double Issue
5 Dark Days in America

Times to mourn

Few days in American history have wounded the nation more deeply than September 11, 2001. Yet a handful of horrible days did open wounds just as grievous. Today, we remember 9/11 by remembering those dark days of the past–and the strength that emerged from their shadows.

December 7, 1941

One sunny Sunday morning in the tropical paradise of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, more than 2,400 Americans died in a war they didn’t even know they were fighting. Tensions between the United States and Japan had run high all year, but the attack caught U.S. forces almost completely off-guard. No formal, unambiguous declaration of war ever came.

The two-hour attack was meticulously planned to cause maximum damage. Waves of Japanese planes conducted nearly simultaneous bombing runs. Some concentrated on strafing the Oahu airfields to destroy the aircraft parked there. Others bombed and torpedoed the 130 vessels moored in Pearl Harbor itself.

On the U.S.S. Arizona, which had arrived in Pearl Harbor just the day before, sailors were deep in battle when an armor-piercing bomb weighing nearly a ton smashed into the deck and ignited the forward magazine. The end came shockingly fast for 1,177 men. A huge explosion broke the ship in two, and the battleship sank in nine minutes. Full of fuel, the Arizona burned for three days.

The strike gave the Japanese a huge military advantage. Their attack had sunk five battleships and damaged three more. It also had destroyed a half-dozen light cruisers and destroyers and 188 aircraft. In a stroke of luck for Americans, however, the Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers were not in port and escaped the attack. Their survival would come to haunt Japanese military planners.

As the news spread across the United States, people were shocked at the sneak attack and horrified by the loss of life: 2,403 dead and 1,178 wounded. The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the declaration of war that Congress had passed, and men all over the country volunteered for duty. The United States then embarked on a four-year mission that would change the lives of every American and put the nation on the world stage.

October 29, 1929

When the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange rang on October 29, 1929–Black Tuesday–the market lay in ruins. And so did many an investor. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the day down almost 12 percent. The day before, it had bled nearly 13 percent. Wall Street has seen worse days. On October 19, 1987, the Dow shed nearly 23 percent. But before long, that market had rounded up the bulls and regained its lost ground.

Not so in 1929. The brief rally that followed the crash quickly proved to be what traders call a dead-cat bounce. The Dow sank to new lows in November. Then it sank some more. By the time it hit bottom–in 1932–the market had shed nearly 90 percent of its value. Not until 1954 would the Dow again touch its 1929 peak.

The crash poured kerosene onto an already flammable financial house. Just as investors lost their shirts, poorly regulated banks went bust, either in the crash or in the crush of jittery depositors demanding their cash. By 1933, 11,000 of the United States’ 25,000 banks had closed up shop. Consumers stopped spending, businesses stopped producing, and the economy slipped into a coma. By 1933, U.S. manufacturers produced half of what they had in 1929, and a quarter of American workers had no job.

Government only made the crisis worse. Standard policy then was to let the economy sweat out financial fever. Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon said, “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. . . . People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

Yet the depression that followed the crash of 1929 was an order of magnitude worse than any previous economic crisis, literally off the chart. The American economy eventually recovered–more than a decade later, spurred by massive wartime spending–but not before government completely changed its approach, shifting to hands-on economic policies and programs that persist even today.

September 17, 1862

In the early dawn of September 17, 1862, on a ridge near the small town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, Union artillery received orders to commence firing on Confederate infantry taking positions in the nearby cornfields. The shots started a one-day battle that would come to symbolize the fury of the American Civil War: Antietam.

The tide of the battle of Antietam (or Sharpsburg, as it was called in the South) shifted constantly. Confederate sharpshooters inflicted heavy casualties on the advancing Union army, which in turn pounded Confederate positions in the corn with artillery barrages that mowed entire fields to the ground. At times, the fighting was so intense that men had to stop shooting because they couldn’t see their targets through the heavy smoke of gunfire.

After repulsing several Union charges, the Confederate line finally broke in the middle. But Union general George McClellan cautiously kept his reserves in check, giving Confederate general Robert E. Lee a chance to gather his defeated army, withdraw from the field, and fight again another day.

After a truce, the battle’s enormous toll became clear–more than 23,000 men were dead, wounded, or missing. In fact, the battle of Antietam remains the bloodiest day in American history, bloodier than Iwo Jima, Pearl Harbor, or Normandy. By some estimates, more Americans died at Antietam than died in the entire Revolutionary War.

The bitter irony is that either side could have ended the war that day. Scholars say that if McClellan had sent his remaining forces into the fray, Lee might have been forced to surrender. A Confederate victory would have put Lee on Lincoln’s doorstep, and might have forced a truce. Instead, the Civil War dragged on for almost three more years and claimed hundreds of thousands of American lives.

August 24, 1814

On an otherwise ordinary summer night in 1814, residents of Leesburg, Virginia, west of Washington, DC, gazed up at an orange-colored sky. It would be hours or even days before the panicked locals learned that Washington had been burnt to the ground by British soldiers. Clearly, the War of 1812 wasn’t going well for the American side.

Disorganized U.S. forces had managed few victories in their attempt to invade Canada. And British generals, bolstered by reinforcements from home, saw an opportunity to score a decisive blow, even as they avenged the Americans’ torching of York (now Toronto). So, in August of 1814, British soldiers landed along the Patuxent River in Maryland, mopped up a local militia, and cleared the way to Washington.

By then, the city was a veritable ghost town. As British solders marched ever closer, a handful of thoughtful patriots scrambled to pack up national artifacts like the Declaration of Independence. First lady Dolley Madison was one of the last to flee, staying to preside over the selection of items that would be carried away from the White House.

Arriving in the deserted capital, the British were so impressed by the architecture that some had second thoughts about setting the city ablaze–but decided to burn it nonetheless. They torched most of the city’s important buildings, including the White House, the Capitol, and the Treasury. Then they turned toward Baltimore, one of America’s busiest ports.

The damage to Washington was so great that Congress considered leaving the ruins behind and starting over elsewhere. Ultimately, though, leaders decided to rebuild the city on the Potomac, reflecting a growing sense of pride that would shepherd the country through dark days yet to come.

A Late Summer Day, 1619

The year 1619 falls almost outside the scope of U.S. history. But the nation’s longest and darkest chapter arguably began one late summer day of that year, when a Dutch ship put in at Jamestown to replenish its supplies–and delivered the first African slaves to the American colonies.

America’s first slaves arrived less by design than by sad historical accident. The Dutch sailors had stolen some 20 captive Africans from a Spanish slave ship, and they traded their ill-gotten “goods” at Jamestown for food. Though the new arrivals certainly received no warm welcome–they were promptly sold at auction–documents from the time suggest that the settlers weren’t sure what to make of them.

Records from the 1620s list the first African-Americans as “servants,” suggesting that they may have been considered “indentured” rather than “enslaved.” Later records show an increasing number of free blacks in the colonies. Still, by 1640, a court had condemned at least one African slave to “serve his master . . . for the time of his natural life.”

Over the next two centuries, lifelong race-based slavery would become an evil American institution. By the 1660s, colonies in the South were writing slave codes into law and confiscating the lands of formerly free African-Americans–setting up inevitable conflict: race against race, state against state, the ideal of freedom as a founding principle against the harsh reality of slavery as a part of American life.
The founders saw the conflict of slavery, even if they did nothing. George Washington claimed that “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it” and entertained a proposal from his friend Lafayette to establish an estate where they would “free the negroes, and use them only as tenants.” The French general was aware many would think the idea crazy. But “if it be a wild scheme,” he wrote, “I had rather be mad in this way, than to be thought wise in the other task.”

–Michael Himick, Steve Sampson, Colleen Kelly,
Christopher Call, and Laura Kane