April 15 in History

Lincoln's proclamation on April 15, 1861, calling for 75,000 state militia volunteers to serve for ninety days, transformed a political crisis into a shooting war. Issued the day after Fort Sumter's surrender, the call to arms assumed the rebellion would be brief, a short, sharp correction that would restore the Union before summer ended. The response in the North was overwhelming. Governors wired back offering more troops than Lincoln had requested. Massachusetts had a regiment on a train to Washington within four days. But the proclamation had a devastating secondary effect that Lincoln either underestimated or accepted as unavoidable. Four slave states that had remained in the Union, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina, saw the call for troops as an act of coercion against their Southern neighbors. Virginia seceded within two days, taking with it the largest industrial base in the South, including the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, and Robert E. Lee, the officer Lincoln had wanted to command the Union army. Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina followed within weeks. The addition of these four states roughly doubled the Confederacy's white population, industrial output, and military potential. Virginia's secession alone forced a complete rethinking of Union strategy, moving the front line from the Deep South to just across the Potomac River from Washington. Richmond became the Confederate capital, and the war's eastern theater became a struggle for the hundred miles of territory between the two capitals. Lincoln's ninety-day timeline revealed how profoundly both sides misjudged the war's duration and cost. The volunteers who enlisted in April 1861 expected a quick adventure. Four years later, 750,000 Americans were dead. The militia system Lincoln invoked proved completely inadequate for a sustained conflict, and Congress authorized a national draft in 1863. The April proclamation remains the moment when political secession became military conflict, when the question of whether states could leave the Union shifted from the Senate floor to the battlefield.

Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 AM on April 15, 1865, in a narrow bed in the back room of William Petersen's boarding house across the street from Ford's Theatre. He had been unconscious since John Wilkes Booth's bullet entered his skull nine hours earlier. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had directed the manhunt for Booth from the same house through the night, reportedly declared, "Now he belongs to the ages." Lincoln was 56 years old and had been president for four years and 42 days. The death sent the nation into mourning on a scale unprecedented in American history. Within hours, buildings in Washington, New York, and Philadelphia were draped in black crepe. Church bells tolled continuously. Vice President Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president at the Kirkwood House hotel at 10:00 AM, with Chief Justice Salmon Chase administering the oath. Johnson, a Tennessee War Democrat whom Lincoln had chosen as a unity ticket running mate, now inherited the staggering task of Reconstruction without Lincoln's political skill or moral authority. Lincoln's funeral procession through Washington on April 19 drew tens of thousands of mourners. His body was then placed aboard a special nine-car funeral train that retraced, in reverse, the route Lincoln had traveled from Springfield to Washington in 1861. Over thirteen days, the train stopped in twelve cities, where an estimated one million Americans viewed his open casket and seven million more lined the railroad tracks. It was the largest public mourning event in American history to that date. The assassination transformed Lincoln's legacy overnight. A president who had been bitterly opposed by Copperhead Democrats, criticized by Radical Republicans, and caricatured in newspapers as an uncouth backwoodsman became a national saint. His death on Good Friday encouraged comparisons to Christ. The martyr's crown made it almost impossible to challenge the mythology that quickly grew around him, binding Lincoln's name permanently to the causes of Union and emancipation in ways that even his most loyal supporters had not fully embraced during his lifetime.

The Titanic's bow plunged beneath the North Atlantic at 2:20 AM on April 15, 1912, pulling the stern vertical before the ship snapped in two and descended to the ocean floor 12,500 feet below. The 710 survivors, crowded into twenty lifeboats scattered across a calm, freezing sea, listened to the cries of 1,514 people dying in 28-degree water. Most were dead within fifteen to thirty minutes from cardiac arrest brought on by hypothermia, not drowning. Only one lifeboat returned to pull survivors from the water, rescuing just six people. The Carpathia, commanded by Captain Arthur Rostron, arrived at 4:00 AM after a 58-mile dash through ice-filled waters. Rostron had roused his entire crew, prepared every public room as a hospital ward, and stationed lookouts at every vantage point. The rescue took four hours as survivors climbed rope ladders and were hoisted aboard in slings. Many were barely conscious, soaked and half-frozen. When the last lifeboat was emptied, Rostron sailed through the field of debris and bodies, held a brief service for the dead, and set course for New York. The Carpathia docked in New York on April 18 to a scene of organized chaos. Forty thousand people crowded the Cunard pier. Reporters mobbed the gangways. The first-class passengers, many of them among the wealthiest people in the world, were quickly whisked away. The third-class survivors, predominantly immigrants from Ireland, Scandinavia, and southern Europe, were processed through immigration stations. The class divide that had shaped who lived and who died aboard the ship continued on shore. Senator William Alden Smith launched a congressional inquiry before the Carpathia had even docked, subpoenaing White Star Line chairman J. Bruce Ismay as he stepped ashore. The American and subsequent British investigations resulted in sweeping maritime reforms: the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea mandated lifeboats for every person aboard, 24-hour wireless operation, regular lifeboat drills, and the International Ice Patrol to monitor North Atlantic icebergs. Every cruise ship safety regulation traces its lineage to the 1,514 people the Titanic could not save.

Jackie Robinson trotted onto the grass at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn on April 15, 1947, wearing number 42, and the color line that had divided American baseball since the 1880s ceased to exist. He went 0-for-3 at the plate against the Boston Braves' Johnny Sain, reaching base once on a fielder's choice, but the box score was irrelevant. The 26,623 fans in attendance, more than half of them Black, were watching something larger than a ballgame. They were watching American apartheid crack. Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers' general manager, had been planning this moment for years. A devout Methodist who had witnessed the humiliation of a Black player on his college team, Rickey scouted Robinson not just for his athletic ability but for his temperament. Robinson had been a four-sport star at UCLA, a lieutenant in the Army who had faced a court-martial for refusing to sit at the back of a military bus, and a star in the Negro Leagues. Rickey told Robinson he needed a player "with guts enough not to fight back," and Robinson, seething internally, agreed. The abuse Robinson endured during that 1947 season tested the limits of human restraint. Opposing players spiked him on the basepaths and threw at his head. The Philadelphia Phillies' manager Ben Chapman led his team in racial slurs so vicious that it appalled even some segregationist sportswriters. Robinson received death threats. Hotels refused him rooms. Several Dodgers teammates initially petitioned against playing with him, though Rickey and team captain Pee Wee Reese shut down the revolt. Robinson responded by hitting .297 with 12 home runs, leading the league in stolen bases, and winning the inaugural Rookie of the Year award. By season's end, he had drawn over a million fans to Dodgers games. Other teams, seeing the competitive advantage and the box office revenue, began signing Black players. Larry Doby integrated the American League three months after Robinson's debut. The barrier fell faster than anyone had predicted, though full integration of all teams took until the Boston Red Sox added Pumpsie Green in 1959, twelve years after Robinson's first game.

French cavalry and cannon shattered the English army at Formigny on April 15, 1450, killing or capturing nearly the entire 4,000-man force and shattering England's century-long grip on Normandy. The battle marked the first major engagement where gunpowder artillery decisively defeated the English longbow formations that had dominated European warfare since Crecy in 1346. Two small French culverins, positioned beyond bowshot, raked the English lines with fire the archers could not answer. The English commander, Sir Thomas Kyriel, had landed at Cherbourg with 3,000 men and picked up reinforcements while marching toward Bayeux. His longbowmen had won every major battle of the Hundred Years' War, from Crecy to Poitiers to Agincourt, by planting stakes and destroying French cavalry charges with volleys of arrows. At Formigny, Kyriel deployed this proven formation along a stream, confident that French knights would break themselves against it as they always had. The French commander, the Comte de Clermont, refused to cooperate. Instead of charging, he brought up two small cannon and bombarded the English positions from a distance the longbows could not reach. The English broke formation to charge the guns, sacrificing their defensive advantage. At that moment, a second French force under Arthur de Richemont, the Constable of France, arrived from the south and struck the English flank. Caught between two armies in open ground, the English formation collapsed. Formigny effectively ended English control of northern France. Normandy, held by England since Henry V's conquest in 1417-1419, fell within months as French forces swept through one garrison town after another. By August 1450, Cherbourg, the last English stronghold in Normandy, surrendered. Only Calais and a strip of Gascony remained of England's once-vast French territories. The Hundred Years' War, which had begun in 1337, would formally end in 1453 with the English expulsion from Bordeaux, but Formigny was the battle that made that conclusion inevitable.

Samuel Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language on April 15, 1755, a work of such ambition and personality that it dominated English lexicography for 173 years until the Oxford English Dictionary superseded it. Johnson completed the dictionary in nine years with the help of just six assistants, all of them copyists rather than scholars. The French Academy had taken 55 scholars forty years to produce a comparable work, and Johnson reportedly enjoyed pointing this out. The dictionary contained approximately 42,773 entries with 114,000 illustrative quotations drawn from English literature spanning two centuries. Johnson read widely and selected quotations personally, favoring Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and the King James Bible. Each word received a definition written in Johnson's characteristically precise and occasionally opinionated prose. His definition of "lexicographer" as "a harmless drudge" and "oats" as "a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people" became famous examples of his wit infiltrating the work. Johnson had proposed the project to a consortium of London booksellers in 1746, promising to complete it in three years. Robert Dodsley and his partners advanced him 1,575 pounds, a substantial sum that nevertheless barely covered the costs of assistants, reference books, and nine years of living expenses. Johnson worked in the garret of his house at 17 Gough Square, standing at a desk surrounded by books propped open to pages he was mining for quotations. His method was to read widely and underline words and passages for his copyists to transcribe. The dictionary standardized English spelling and usage at a critical moment in the language's global expansion. British colonialism was spreading English across India, North America, and the Caribbean, and Johnson's dictionary became the reference standard for educated usage throughout the English-speaking world. His approach of defining words through literary quotation rather than abstract description established a methodology that lexicographers still follow. The garret on Gough Square is now a museum, the only surviving house Johnson occupied during his forty years in London.