5.21.2005
IT HAPPENED THIS DAY MAY 21 TO MAY 31

May 21
1863 The Siege of Port Hudson begins
Nathaniel Banks, commander of the Union Department of the Gulf, surrounds the Confederate stronghold at Port Hudson and attacks. Fortifications were built at Port Hudson in 1863 to protect New Orleans from a Union attack down the Mississippi River. On April 25, 1862, New Orleans had fallen into Union hands following an attack from the Gulf of Mexico by Admiral David Farragut. Still, Port Hudson was considered an important installation for the South since it was a significant threat to Federal ships on the Mississippi River.
In 1863, the Union command began to focus attention on clearing the Mississippi of all Rebels. The major thrust of this effort was taking Vicksburg, Mississippi, the Confederate stronghold to the north of Port Hudson. In April, Ulysses S. Grant summoned Nathaniel Banks to participate in the campaign against Vicksburg.
Banks wavered at first, preferring instead to wage an independent campaign against Confederates in Louisiana. But in May, he set out to take Port Hudson, then under the command of Franklin Gardner. Banks had some 30,000 troops under his command, while Gardner possessed a force of just 3,500. When Banks began to encircle Port Hudson, Gardner made some feeble attacks to drive him away.
On May 21, Gardner received orders from Joseph Johnston, operating in Mississippi, to abandon the fort. But Gardner refused, and asked for reinforcements. This was a fatal mistake, and Banks soon had Gardner surrounded. For the next three weeks, Banks attempted to capture Port Hudson but failed each time. It was not until Vicksburg surrendered on July 4 that Gardner also surrendered.
May 22
1455 The War of the Roses Begins
In the opening battle of the England’s thirty-year War of the Roses, the Yorkists defeated King Henry VI’s Lancastrian forces at the Battle of St. Albans. Many Lancastrian nobles perished, including the duke of Somerset and Thomas de Clifford, and the king was forced to submit to the rule of Richard of York, the former protector of England. In the 1450s, English failures in the Hundred Years War with France, coupled with periodic fits of insanity suffered by King Henry VI, led to a power struggle between the houses of York, whose badge was a red rose, and Lancaster, later associated with a white rose. Richard, the leader of the Yorkist opposition, was appointed protector in 1453, but in the next year the king regained his sanity and York was excluded from the Royal Council. In 1455, Richard raised an army of 3,000 men, and in May, the Yorkists marched to London. On May 22, a smaller Lancastrian force met them at St. Albans, twenty miles northwest of London, and three hundred nobles perished before the Lancastrians fled the field. After the battle, Richard again was made English protector. Five years later, he was killed, but his son was crowned as King Edward IV in 1461. The War of Roses left little mark on the common English people but severely thinned the ranks of the English nobility. Among the royalty who perished were Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick, and kings Henry VI and Richard III. In 1486, King Henry VII’s marriage to Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV, united the houses of Lancaster and York and effectively ended the bloody War of the Roses.
May 23
1900 Forgotten Civil War Hero Honored
Sergeant William Harvey Carney was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery on July 18, 1863, while fighting for the Union cause as a member of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Colored Infantry. He was the first African-American to receive the award, which is the nation’s highest military honor. The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, formed in early 1863, served as the prototype for African-American regiments in the Union army. On July 16, 1863, the regiment saw its first action at James Island, South Carolina, performing admirably in a confrontation with experienced Confederate troops. Three days later, the Fifty-fourth volunteered to lead the assault on Fort Wagner, a highly fortified outpost on Morris Island that was part of the Confederate defense of Charleston Harbor. Struggling against a lethal barrage of cannon and rifle fire, the regiment fought their way to the top of the fort’s parapet over several hours, and Sergeant William Harvey Carney was wounded there while planting the U.S. flag. The regiment’s white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, perished nearby and his soldiers were soon overwhelmed by the fort’s defenders and had to fall back. Despite his wound, Carney refused to retreat until he removed the flag, and though successful, he was shot again in the process. The Fifty-fourth lost 281 of its 600 men in its heroic attempt to take Fort Wagner, which throughout the war never fell by force of arms. The Fifty-fourth went on to perform honorably in expeditions in Georgia and Florida, most notably at the Battle of Olustee. Carney eventually recovered and was discharged with disability on June 30, 1864. Thirty-six years later, he was awarded the Medal of Honor.
May 24
1856 John Brown and the Pottawatomie Massacre
In retaliation for the sacking of the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, by pro-slavery forces, militant abolitionist John Brown led a raid against a pro-slavery settlement along Pottawatomie Creek. Brown’s small force, which included four of his sons, fell on the settlement at night and massacred five men, including two teenage boys. Although they owned no slaves, Brown deemed the Pottawatomie settlers deserving of capital punishment because they had supported the Missouri faction in the dispute over the Kansas territorial government. Trouble in the territory began with the signing of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act by President Franklin Pierce. The act stipulated that settlers in the newly created territories of Nebraska and Kansas would decide by popular vote whether their territory would be free or slave. In early 1855, Kansas’ first election proved a violent affair as over 5,000 so-called "Border Ruffians" invaded the territory from western Missouri and forced the election of a pro-slavery legislature. To prevent further bloodshed, Andrew H. Reeder, appointed territorial governor by President Pierce, reluctantly approved the election. A few months later, the Kansas Free State forces were formed, armed by supporters in the North and featuring the leadership of John Brown. In 1859, Brown left "Bleeding Kansas," as it had become popularly known, and settled on a more ambitious plan. With a group of racially mixed followers, Brown set out to Harpers Ferry in present-day West Virginia, intending to seize the arsenal of weapons and retreat to the Appalachian Mountains of Maryland and Virginia, where they would establish an abolitionist republic of liberated slaves and abolitionist whites. Their republic would form a guerilla army to fight slaveholders and ignite slave insurrections, and its population would grow exponentially with the influx of liberated and fugitive slaves. At Harpers Ferry, Brown’s well-trained unit was initially successful, capturing key points in the town, but Brown’s plans began to deteriorate after his raiders stopped a Baltimore-bound train, and then allowed it to pass through. News of the raid spread quickly and militia companies from Maryland and Virginia arrived the next day, killing or capturing several raiders. On October 18, U.S. Marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, both of whom were destined to become famous Confederate generals, recaptured the Federal arsenal, taking John Brown and several other raiders alive. On November 2, Brown was sentenced to death by hanging, and on the day of his execution, ten months before the outbreak of the Civil War, he prophetically wrote, "The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."
May 25
1862 First Battle of Winchester, Virginia
Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson notches a victory on his brilliant campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson, with 17,000 troops under his command, was sent to the Shenandoah to relieve pressure on the Confederate troops near Richmond, who were facing the growing force of George McClellan on the James Peninsula.
In early May, Jackson struck John C. Fremont's force at McDowell, in western Virginia. After driving Fremont out of the area, Jackson turned his attention to an army under the command of Nathaniel Banks, situated at the north end of the Shenandoah Valley. With only 10,000 troops, Banks had the unenviable task of holding off the fast-moving Jackson.
On May 25, Jackson found Banks outside of Winchester. He attacked the Union force but was initially repulsed. The Confederates then struck each Union flank, and this time the Yankee line broke. A confused retreat ensued through the town of Winchester, and even some residents fired on the departing Yankees. Banks fled the Shenandoah into Maryland, and Jackson continued his rampage. The Union lost 62 killed, 243 wounded, and over 1,700 captured or missing, while Jackson's men lost 68 killed and 329 wounded.
The numbers from Jackson's 1862 valley campaign are stunning. His men marched 350 miles in a month; occupied 60,000 Yankee troops, preventing them from applying pressure on Richmond; won four battles against three armies; and inflicted twice as many casualties as they suffered. Jackson's record cemented his reputation as one of the greatest generals of all time.
May 26
1940 Allies Initiate Operation Dynamo
Two weeks after German forces invaded France, the British initiated Operation Dynamo--the total evacuation of Allied forces from the beach at Dunkirk on the Belgian coast. On May 10, the German Wehrmacht stormed into Belgium, Holland, and the Netherlands, and, two days later, descended on France. In a lightning strike, German forces simply out-flanked the northwest corners of the Maginot Line, previously alleged by the French military command to be an impregnable defense of their eastern border. Within a week, Dutch and Belgian resistance had ended, making the Allied defense of France untenable. On May 26, with German tanks racing across Western Europe, the British began what would be the largest evacuation of military forces in history. The ten-day evacuation, during which 340,000 British, French, and Belgian troops were brought to the safety of the British isle, was constantly inflicted by attacks from the German air force. All British citizens in possession of sea-worthy vessels were asked to lend their ships to the effort, and all but 40,000 of the Allied troops who massed at Dunkirk escaped capture. With Western Europe abandoned by its defenders, the German army swept through the rest of France, and on June 14, Paris fell to the Nazis. Eight days later, Henri Petain and other French leaders signed an armistice with the Nazis at Compiegne and Germany annexed half the country, leaving the other half in the hands of their puppet French rulers. On June 6, 1944, liberation of Western Europe finally began with the successful Allied landed at Normandy.
May 27
1905 The Battle of Tsushima Strait
During the Russian-Japanese War, the Russian Baltic Fleet was nearly destroyed at the Battle of Tsushima Strait, convincing Russia that further resistance against Japan’s imperial designs for East Asia was hopeless. On February 8, 1904, following the Russian rejection of a Japanese plan to divide Manchuria and Korea into spheres of influence, Japan launched a surprise naval attack against Port Arthur, a Russian naval base in China. It was the first major battle of the twentieth century, and Russian forces there were decimated. During the subsequent war, Japan won a series of decisive victories over the Russians, who underestimated the military potential of its non-Western opponent. In January 1905, the strategic naval base of Port Arthur fell to Japanese naval and ground forces under Admiral Heihachiro Togo, and, in March, Russian troops were defeated at Shenyang, China, by Japanese Field Marshal Iwao Oyama. Russian Czar Nicholas II hoped that the Russian Baltic fleet under Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski would be able to challenge Admiral Togo’s supremacy at sea, but during a two-day battle in the Tsushima Strait beginning on May 27, thirty-three Russian ships were lost. The Japanese suffered only minor losses. In August, the stunning string of Japanese victories convinced Russia to accept the peace treaty mediated by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Japan emerged from the conflict as the first modern non-Western world power, and set its sight on greater imperial expansion. However, for Russia, the disastrous outcome of the war was one of the immediate causes of the Russian Revolution of 1905.
May 28
1756 First Blood of the French and Indian War
In the first engagement of the French and Indian War, a Virginia militia under Lieutenant Colonel George Washington defeated a French reconnaissance party in southwestern Pennsylvania. The French and Indian War was the last and most important of a series of colonial conflicts between the British and the American colonists on one side, and the French and their broad network of Native-American allies on the other. Actually part of a larger global conflict known as the Seven Years’ War, the French and Indian War officially began on May 15, 1756, when Britain declared war on France. Thirteen days later, the twenty-two-year-old George Washington struck the first blow of the war in North America, defeating a French force en route from Fort Duqesne. The French commander, Lieutenant Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, was slain, along with nine of his men. The rest of his force was captured. Over the next seven years of the war, Washington continued to lead the Virginia militia in the defense of their colony’s western frontier colonies. On February 10, 1763, the French and Indian War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris by France, Great Britain, and Spain. In the treaty, France lost all claims to Canada and gave Louisiana to Spain, while Britain received Spanish Florida, Upper Canada, and various French holdings overseas. The treaty ensured the colonial and maritime supremacy of Britain, and strengthened the thirteen American colonies by removing their European rivals to the north and the south. Fifteen years later, French bitterness over the loss of most of their colonial empire to Britain contributed to their intervention in the American Revolution on the side of the Patriots, even though the Americans were led by France’s old enemy George Washington.
May 29
1864 Union troops reach Totopotomoy Creek, Virginia
Union troops lose another foot race with the Confederates in a minor stop on the long and terrible campaign between Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac and Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. During the entire month of May 1864, Grant and Lee had pounded each other along an arc swinging from the Wilderness forest south to the James River. After fighting in the Wilderness, Grant moved south to Spotsylvania Court House to place his army between Lee and Richmond. Predicting his move, Lee marched James Longstreet's corps through the night and beat the Federals to the strategic crossroads.
For 12 days the two armies fought in some of the bloodiest combat of the war. Finally, Grant pulled out and again moved south, this time to the North Anna River, where he probed the Rebel lines on the high banks of the river, but found no weakness. He moved south again, this time to Totopotomoy Creek. Once again, Lee and his men beat him there and stood ready to defend Richmond from the Union army.
Grant was getting frustrated. After the Totopotomoy, Grant slid south to Cold Harbor, just 10 miles from Richmond. His impatience may have gotten the best of him. At Cold Harbor, Grant would commit the foolish mistake of hurling his troops at well-fortified Confederates, creating a slaughter nearly unmatched during the war.
May 30
1868 Civil War Dead Honored on Decoration Day
By proclamation of General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, the first major Memorial Day observance was held to honor those who died "in defense of their country during the late rebellion." Known to some as "Decoration Day," mourners were to honor the Civil War dead by decorating their graves with flowers. During the first observance of Memorial Day, General James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, after which 5,000 participants helped to decorate the graves of the more than 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery. The 1868 celebration was inspired by local observances that had taken place in various locations in the three years since the end of the Civil War. In fact, several Northern and Southern cities claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day, including Columbus, Mississippi; Macon, Georgia; Richmond, Virginia; Boalsburg, Pennsylvania; and Carbondale, Illinois. In 1966, the federal government, under the direction of President Lyndon B. Johnson, declared Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace of Memorial Day. They chose Waterloo--which had first celebrated the day on May 5, 1866--because the town had made Memorial Day an annual, community-wide event during which businesses closed and residents decorated the graves of soldiers with flowers and flags. By the late 1800s, many communities across the country had begun to celebrate Memorial Day and, after World War I, observers began to honor the dead of all of America's wars. In 1971, Congress declared Memorial Day a national holiday to be celebrated the last Monday in May. Today, Memorial Day is celebrated at Arlington National Cemetery with a ceremony in which a small American flag is placed on each grave. Also, it is customary for the president or vice-president to give a speech honoring the contributions of the dead and lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. About 5,000 people attend the ceremony annually. Several Southern states continue to set aside a special day for honoring the Confederate dead, which is usually called Confederate Memorial Day.

May 31
1902 The Boer War Ends
In Pretoria, representatives of Great Britain and the Boers states signed the Treaty of Vereeniging, officially ending the three-year-and-a-half South African Boer War. The Boers, also known as Afrikaners, were the descendants of the original Dutch settlers of southern Africa. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, Britain took possession of the Dutch Cape colony, sparking resistance from the independence-minded Boers, who resented the Anglicization of South Africa and Britain's anti-slavery policies. In 1833, the Boers began an exodus into African tribal territory, where they founded the republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The two new republics lived peaceably with their British neighbors until 1867, when the discovery of diamonds and gold in the region made conflict between the Boer states and Britain inevitable. Following declarations of independence from the Boer states during the 1880s, minor fighting with Britain ensued before the outbreak of full-scale war in 1899. By mid-June of 1900, British forces had captured most major Boers cities and formally annexed their territories, but the Boers launched a guerrilla war that frustrated the British occupiers. Beginning in 1901, the British began a strategy of systematically searching out and destroying these guerilla units, while herding the families of the Boer soldiers into concentration camps. By 1902, the British had crushed the Boer resistance and on May 31, the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed, ending hostilities.