April 12 in History

Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter at 4:30 in the morning on April 12, 1861, and the shells arcing across Charleston Harbor lit up decades of political compromise gone to ash. Edmund Ruffin, a 67-year-old Virginia secessionist, reportedly fired one of the first shots. Major Robert Anderson and his garrison of 85 Union soldiers held the fort for 34 hours under a bombardment of over 4,000 shells before surrendering. Remarkably, no one on either side was killed during the battle itself. The confrontation had been building since South Carolina seceded in December 1860 following Abraham Lincoln's election. Anderson had moved his small garrison from the indefensible Fort Moultrie to the more formidable Sumter in late December, infuriating Charleston authorities. Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his military commander P.G.T. Beauregard demanded the fort's evacuation. Lincoln chose to resupply rather than reinforce, a calculated move that forced the Confederacy to either accept federal authority or fire the first shot. The bombardment unified the North in a way that months of secession debate had failed to do. Newspapers that had urged compromise suddenly demanded war. Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers, issued three days later, was oversubscribed within weeks. But the attack also pushed four additional Southern states, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina, into the Confederacy, nearly doubling its white population and industrial capacity. Fort Sumter became the opening act of a war that lasted four years and killed an estimated 750,000 Americans, more than all other American wars combined up to that point. The conflict transformed the nation from a loose federation debating slavery's expansion into a centralized state that had abolished it. Anderson returned to Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865, to raise the same flag he had lowered in surrender, the same day Lincoln was shot.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sitting for a portrait when he pressed his hand to his temple and said, "I have a terrific headache." Minutes later, at 3:35 PM on April 12, 1945, the thirty-second president of the United States was dead of a massive cerebral hemorrhage at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. He was 63 years old and had served as president for twelve years and 39 days, longer than any person before or since. Roosevelt's health had been deteriorating visibly for months. At the Yalta Conference in February, Churchill and Stalin both noticed his gaunt appearance and wandering attention. His blood pressure readings, which his physician Howard Bruenn kept largely secret, had reached dangerously high levels. Yet Roosevelt ran for and won an unprecedented fourth term in November 1944, concealing the severity of his condition from the American public and even from his vice president, Harry Truman. Truman was summoned to the White House and told by Eleanor Roosevelt, "Harry, the President is dead." When Truman asked if there was anything he could do for her, she replied, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now." Truman, who had been vice president for just 82 days and had been excluded from nearly all wartime decision-making, did not even know about the Manhattan Project or the atomic bomb until after being sworn in. Roosevelt's death came less than a month before Germany's surrender and four months before Japan's. He had led the country through the Great Depression and most of World War II but did not live to see either the victory in Europe he had engineered or the postwar order he had helped design at Yalta. Twenty-five thousand people lined the railroad tracks as his funeral train traveled from Warm Springs to Washington. He was buried at his family estate in Hyde Park, New York.

Yuri Gagarin launched into orbit aboard Vostok 1 at 9:07 AM Moscow time on April 12, 1961, and 108 minutes later humanity was no longer bound to a single planet. The 27-year-old Soviet Air Force pilot completed one full orbit of Earth, reaching an altitude of 203 miles and a speed of 17,500 miles per hour. He ejected from the capsule at 23,000 feet and parachuted to a farm field near the Volga River, where a startled woman and her granddaughter were the first to meet the world's first spaceman. The flight was far more dangerous than Soviet propaganda admitted. Gagarin had no control over the spacecraft; the entire mission was automated because engineers were unsure whether a human could function in weightlessness. A sealed envelope containing the manual override code was stowed aboard in case the automatic systems failed. The reentry sequence malfunctioned when the service module failed to separate cleanly from the capsule, causing violent tumbling for ten minutes before the straps connecting the two modules burned through. The Soviet space program had rushed to beat the Americans, who were preparing Alan Shepard's suborbital flight for early May. Soviet chief designer Sergei Korolev pushed the schedule despite two unmanned test flights that had experienced problems. Gagarin was selected from a pool of twenty cosmonauts partly for his compact five-foot-two frame, which fit the cramped Vostok capsule, and partly for his humble peasant background, which Soviet leaders considered ideal for propaganda purposes. Gagarin's flight electrified the world and humiliated the United States, which responded with President Kennedy's pledge to land a man on the Moon by decade's end. Gagarin became an international celebrity, touring dozens of countries as a goodwill ambassador. He never flew in space again. He died in a routine jet training flight crash in March 1968, at age 34, never seeing the Moon landing his flight had provoked.

Church bells rang across the United States on April 12, 1955, the day Americans learned they would never again have to fear polio. Dr. Thomas Francis Jr. of the University of Michigan announced the results of the largest medical field trial in history: Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was safe, effective, and potent. The announcement, made to 500 scientists and reporters at the University of Michigan's Rackham Auditorium, was simultaneously broadcast to 54,000 physicians watching on closed-circuit television. Polio had terrorized American families for decades. The disease struck without warning, primarily in summer, paralyzing thousands of children each year. The epidemic of 1952 was the worst in American history, with nearly 58,000 cases, 3,145 deaths, and 21,269 left with some degree of paralysis. Public swimming pools closed, movie theaters emptied, and parents kept children indoors through the warmest months. President Roosevelt himself had been paralyzed by the disease in 1921. The field trial that validated Salk's vaccine was massive in scale. Beginning in April 1954, nearly 1.8 million children in 44 states participated, making it the largest peacetime mobilization of volunteers in American history. Some children received the vaccine; others received a placebo. Hundreds of thousands of parents, teachers, and healthcare workers volunteered to administer the injections and track results. The trial proved the vaccine was 80 to 90 percent effective against paralytic polio. Within hours of the announcement, the federal government licensed the vaccine for public use. Salk became a national hero overnight. When asked who owned the patent, he replied, "The people. Could you patent the sun?" Mandatory vaccination campaigns in subsequent years drove polio cases in the United States from tens of thousands annually to fewer than a hundred by the early 1960s. A disease that had shaped American childhood for half a century was effectively eradicated within a decade.

Franklin Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, while sitting for a portrait by Elizabeth Shoumatoff. He was talking with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the woman with whom he'd had an affair in 1918. Eleanor was not present. He said "I have a terrific pain in the back of my head" and collapsed. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage at 3:35 p.m. He was 63. Germany surrendered 26 days later, on May 7. He never knew the war he'd led America through for four years would be won within weeks of his death. He'd been visibly failing for months. Photographs from the Yalta Conference in February 1945 show a gaunt, hollowed man bearing little resemblance to the robust figure who had rallied the nation through the Depression and Pearl Harbor. His cardiologist, Dr. Howard Bruenn, had diagnosed him with congestive heart failure, severe hypertension, and acute bronchitis in March 1944. None of this was disclosed to the public, the press, or most of his own Cabinet. Harry Truman, who had been Vice President for 82 days, had met privately with Roosevelt only twice during that period. He had not been briefed on the Manhattan Project, the status of military operations, or the secret agreements made at Yalta. When Eleanor told him the President was dead, Truman asked if there was anything he could do for her. She replied: "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now." Truman learned about the atomic bomb from Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the day he was sworn in. He authorized its use four months later. Roosevelt's death was met with an outpouring of grief that surprised even those who had supported him. Over a million people lined the railroad tracks as his funeral train traveled from Warm Springs to Washington to Hyde Park, where he was buried in his mother's rose garden. He had served as president for twelve years and thirty-nine days, longer than any other person in American history. The portrait that Shoumatoff was painting when he collapsed was never finished. It is known as the Unfinished Portrait and hangs in the Little White House museum at Warm Springs.

Galileo Galilei stood before the Roman Inquisition on April 12, 1633, charged with heresy for arguing that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The 69-year-old astronomer, already frail and partially blind, had been summoned to Rome from Florence after publishing his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a book that transparently mocked the geocentric model endorsed by the Catholic Church. Pope Urban VIII, who had once been Galileo's friend and patron, took the mockery personally. The scientific case was already settled among informed astronomers. Galileo's telescopic observations, published in 1610, had revealed Jupiter's moons, the phases of Venus, and the craters of the Moon, all evidence that contradicted the Aristotelian model of a perfect, Earth-centered cosmos. But the Church had declared heliocentrism heretical in 1616 and had personally warned Galileo not to advocate it. His Dialogue, structured as a debate between a heliocentrist and a geocentrist named Simplicio, barely disguised which side Galileo favored. The trial lasted from April through June. The Inquisition's case rested not on science but on obedience. They produced a document, possibly forged, claiming Galileo had been explicitly ordered in 1616 never to teach or discuss heliocentrism. Galileo's defense was that his book presented heliocentrism hypothetically, not as established fact. Under threat of torture, he recanted, reportedly muttering "Eppur si muove" ("And yet it moves"), though this famous line is almost certainly apocryphal. Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life, which he spent at his villa near Florence continuing his research in mechanics. His Dialogue was banned, remaining on the Index of Prohibited Books until 1835. The trial became the defining symbol of the conflict between scientific inquiry and religious authority. The Catholic Church did not formally acknowledge its error until 1992, when Pope John Paul II declared that Galileo's judges had made a mistake.

North Carolina became the first colony to officially authorize its delegates to vote for independence from Britain when the Fourth Provincial Congress passed the Halifax Resolves on April 12, 1776. The resolution, adopted unanimously in the town of Halifax, empowered North Carolina's delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to "concur with the delegates of the other Colonies in declaring Independency." No colonial government had previously taken this explicit step. The move came after months of escalating conflict. British Royal Governor Josiah Martin had fled the colony in July 1775, and North Carolina militia had defeated a force of Loyalists at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge in February 1776. Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published in January, had shifted public opinion dramatically toward independence. The Provincial Congress, meeting in Halifax, sensed that the political moment had arrived. The Halifax Resolves did not themselves declare independence. They authorized North Carolina's Continental Congress delegates, including Joseph Hewes and William Hooper, to join with other colonies in making such a declaration. This distinction mattered because it preserved the appearance of collective action rather than unilateral secession. Other colonies quickly followed, with Virginia passing similar resolves in May and the Continental Congress adopting Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independence in July. The date of the Halifax Resolves, April 12, appears on the North Carolina state flag and seal, reflecting the state's pride in leading the independence movement. The document demonstrated that by spring 1776, the question was no longer whether the colonies would separate from Britain but when and how. Three months later, the Declaration of Independence formalized what North Carolina had already authorized, and the delegates who signed it in Philadelphia included the men Halifax had empowered to do so.