IT HAPPENED THIS DAY SEPT 19 TO SEPT30

September 19
1777 Continental Congress Flees Philadelphia
With the approach of British forces led by Sir William Howe, the Continental Congress fled their capital in Philadelphia for the more secure site of York, Pennsylvania. Howe's victories at the Battle of Brandywine and the Battle of the Clouds cleared his invasion route to Philadelphia, which he captured one week after the evacuation of the Continental Congress. Howe had made Philadelphia, the seat of the Continental Congress, the focus of his campaign, but the Patriot government had deprived him of the decisive victory he hoped for by escaping to York. On June 18 of the next year, the fifteen thousand British troops occupying Philadelphia departed. Their position had become untenable after France's entrance into the war on the side of the Americans. In order to avoid the French fleet, General Clinton was forced to lead his British-Hessian force to New York City by land. Other loyalists in the city sailed down the Delaware River to escape the Patriots, who returned to Philadelphia the day after the British departure. U.S. General Benedict Arnold, who led the force that reclaimed the city without bloodshed, was appointed military governor. On June 24, the Continental Congress returned from York.
September 20
1565 First European Battle on American Soil
Without losing a single soldier, Spanish forces under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés captured the French Huguenot settlement at Fort Caroline, near present-day Jacksonville, Florida. The French, commanded by Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere, lost over one hundred men in the first instance of colonial warfare between European powers in America. Only twelve days before de Avilés had founded San Augustin, which would later grow into Saint Augustine--the oldest city in North America.
September 21
1989 Powell Becomes Joint Chiefs' Chairman
The Senate Armed Forces Committee unanimously confirmed President George Bush's nomination of Army General Colin Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With the confirmation, Powell became the first African American to achieve the United States' highest military post. Powell was born in 1937 in Harlem, New York, to hard working Jamaican immigrant parents. Joining the U.S. Army after college, he served two tours in Vietnam before holding several high-level military posts during the 1970s and 1980s. From 1987 to 1989, he was national security advisor to President Ronald Reagan, and in 1989, reached the pinnacle of his profession when he was appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by President George Bush. As chairman, General Powell's greatest achievement was planning and executing the swift U.S. victory over Iraq in 1991's Persian Gulf War. In 1993, he retired as chairman. Two years later, he embarked on a national tour to promote his autobiography, My American Journey, fueling speculation that he was testing the waters for a possible presidential campaign. By the fall of 1995, public enthusiasm over the possibility of his running for president had reached a feverish pitch. Regarded as a moderate Republican, opinion polls showed Powell trailing close behind Republican favorite Bob Dole and favored over Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton. However, on November 8, 1995, he announced that he would not run for president in the next election, citing concerns for his family's well being and a lack of passion for the rigors of political life.
September 22
1862 Lincoln Issues Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation
In the aftermath of the costly Battle of Antietam, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, threatening to free all slaves in the rebelling states if those states did not return to the Union by the beginning of the following year. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued as threatened on January 1, 1963, transformed the Civil War from a war against Southern secession to a war against slavery. This proclamation called on the Union army to liberate all slaves in states still in rebellion as "an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity." Border slave states that remained in the Union at the start of the Civil War were exempted, as were all of the three Confederate states controlled by the Union army. When the war began, Lincoln, who privately detested slavery, was politically unable to call for the abolishment of slavery: Constitutional amendments protected the right of states to choose whether they would be slave or free and Northern Democrats and Union slave states would have fervently opposed such a radical act. As a Republican politician, Lincoln had fought to isolate slavery from the new territories, and as president he initiated the Civil War as a war against Southern secession, not against slavery. However, in 1862, the U.S. government began to realize the military advantages of emancipation: the liberation of slaves in rebel states would weaken the Confederacy by depriving it of a major portion of its labor force, and this would in turn strengthen the Union by producing an influx of manpower. In July of 1862, Congress passed a law permitting Lincoln to employ freed slaves in the army in any capacity he saw fit, and in September, following the bloody Union victory at Antietam, Lincoln issued a formal warning of his intent to issue an Emancipation Proclamation on New Year's Day. The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the Civil War into a war for "a new birth of freedom," as Lincoln stated in the Gettysburg Address in November of 1863. This ideological change thwarted the intervention of France or England on the Confederacy's behalf, and enabled the Union to enlist the tens of thousands of African-American soldiers who volunteered to fight between January 1, 1863, and the conclusion of the war.
September 23
1779 John Paul Jones Victorious
During the American Revolution, U.S. Commodore John Paul Jones, aboard the Bonhomme Richard, began a hard-fought engagement against the British man-of-war Serapis off Flamborough Head in the North Sea. After inflicting considerable damage to the American vessel, British Captain Richard Pearson asked Jones if he had struck his colors, the naval sign indicating surrender. From his disabled ship, Jones replied "I have not yet begun to fight," and after three more hours of furious fighting, Pearson surrendered to him. After the victory, the Americans transferred to the Serapis from the Bonhomme Richard, which sunk the following day.
September 24


1864 Battle of Pilot Knob (Fort Davidson), Missouri

September 25
1847 "Old Rough and Ready" Captures Monterrey
After a four-day engagement, Monterrey, Mexico, was captured by U.S. forces under General Zachary Taylor, the future U.S. president. Raised in Kentucky with little formal schooling, Taylor received a U.S. Army commission in 1808, became a captain in 1810, and was promoted major during the War of 1812 in recognition of his defense of Fort Harrison against attack by Shawnee chief Tecumseh. In 1832, he became a colonel and served in the Black Hawk War and in the campaigns against the Seminole Indians in Florida, winning the nickname of "Old Rough and Ready" for his informal attire and indifference to physical adversity. Sent to the Southwest to command the U.S. Army at the Texas border, Taylor crossed the Rio Grande with the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846. In May, Taylor defeated the Mexicans at the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, and in September captured the city of Monterrey. In February of 1847, he achieved his crowning military victory at the Battle of Buena Vista, where he was outnumbered three to one. This victory firmly established Taylor as a popular hero, and in 1848 he was nominated the Whig presidential candidate, despite his lack of a clear political platform. Elected in November, Taylor soon fell under the influence of William H. Seward, a powerful Whig senator, and in 1849 supported the Wilmot Proviso, which would exclude slavery from all the territory acquired as a result of the Mexican War. His inflexible responses to Southern criticisms of this policy aggravated the nation's sectional conflict, put him in opposition to the measures that were to become the Compromise of 1850, and revealed his political inexperience. Matters were at a stalemate when President Taylor died suddenly from cholera on July 9, 1850.
September 26
1918 Last Battle of the Great War Begins
The last major battle of World War I, the Meuse-Argonne offensive, began when a combined force of French and American troops attacked fortified German positions along a forty-mile front. The battle raged until the war's end at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of November, 1918.
September 27
1939 Poland Defeated by Soviet and Nazi Forces
Polish resistance against the invading forces of Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. effectively ended with the surrender of Warsaw, which had endured a brutal three-day bombing campaign by the German Luftwaffe. The next day, the division of Poland was agreed upon by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Nazi Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop. Five weeks earlier, on August 23, 1939, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and von Ribbentrop signed the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact in an unexpected reversal of their national policies. For Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the pact would neutralize the U.S.S.R. while he pursued military operations in the West, and for Stalin continued peace would allow his country time to better prepare for its inevitable war with Nazi Germany--its natural ideological enemy. Five days later, Stalin signed a second treaty with Ribbentrop, this one concerning national frontiers. The second agreement had a secret clause dividing Finland, Poland, the Baltic States, and the Balkans into German and Soviet spheres of influence. When World War II broke out over Hitler's invasion of Poland on September 1, the Soviets began moving against the territory allotted to them in the secret agreement. However, peace between Germany and the U.S.S.R., which according to the Nazi-Soviet pact would last at least ten years, was shattered with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Polish government then signed a peace agreement with Moscow, and Polish troops and resistance fighters began working with the Allies toward the defeat of Germany.

September 28
1066 William the Conqueror Invades England
William the Conqueror, duke of Normandy, invaded England with the support of the Papacy, and claimed his right to the throne. The previous king of England, Edward the Confessor, allegedly designated William his heir in 1051, but the powerful noble Harold Godwin proclaimed himself King Harold II, the true heir, after Edward's death in 1066. On October 14, 1066, William met Harold at the Battle of Hastings, and the king's short reign came to an end when he was killed on the battlefield, shot through the eye with an arrow. He was the last Anglo-Saxon king of England. In late December of the same year, William the Conqueror was crowned the first Norman king of England, and English language and culture were changed forever.
September 29
1789 Modern U.S. Army Established
Congress voted to create a unified United States Army, with a permanent strength of one thousand enlisted men and officers. The same day, Josiah Harmar was appointed the first commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army.
September 30
1938 CHAMBERLAIN APPEASES HITLER:
In the summer of 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made three trips to Germany in an effort to avert war with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. In the early morning hours of September 30, 1938, Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier signed the Munich Pact with Hitler, thus giving Czechoslovakia away to German conquest. Daladier abhorred this appeasement of the Nazis, but Chamberlain was elated. Later that day, the British prime minister flew home to Britain, where he declared before a jubilant crowd in London that the Munich Pact brought "peace in our time." The next day, Germany annexed Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, and by March of 1939, nearly all of Czechoslovakia was under German control. Eleven months later, Hitler invaded Poland, and Chamberlain solemnly called for a declaration of war.