February 18 in History

British troops suffered their heaviest single-day casualties of the Second Boer War on Bloody Sunday, February 18, 1900, the opening day of the Battle of Paardeberg. The engagement was part of Lord Roberts's reorganized campaign to relieve Ladysmith and capture the Boer capitals. General Piet Cronje's Boer force of roughly four thousand men with their families and wagons had been cornered at the Modder River after a forced march from Magersfontein. Lord Kitchener, commanding in Roberts's temporary absence due to illness, ordered a series of frontal assaults against the entrenched Boer position that were repulsed with devastating losses. British casualties on that single day exceeded one thousand killed and wounded, making it the bloodiest day of the war. The attacks demonstrated the same tactical failures that had produced disasters at Colenso, Magersfontein, and Spion Kop in previous months: infantry advancing in close formation against entrenched riflemen using smokeless powder and modern bolt-action rifles. When Roberts recovered and resumed command, he replaced Kitchener's costly frontal assaults with a methodical siege that tightened the ring around Cronje's position over nine days. Cronje surrendered on February 27, 1900, the anniversary of the Boer victory at Majuba Hill in 1881, a date that the British considered symbolic vindication. The surrender of over four thousand troops was the first major British victory of the war and marked the turning point of the conventional campaign. The Boers subsequently shifted to guerrilla warfare, extending the conflict for two more years and forcing the British to adopt concentration camps and scorched-earth tactics that caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire recovered Jerusalem for Christendom through conversation rather than conquest, negotiating a ten-year truce with Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt in February 1229 that restored the holy city, along with Bethlehem and Nazareth, to Christian control without a single battle being fought. The achievement was remarkable and universally hated. Frederick had been excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX before the crusade even began, making him the only crusader leader to reclaim Jerusalem while formally expelled from the Church. He and al-Kamil conducted their negotiations in Arabic, which Frederick spoke fluently, exchanging philosophical texts and geometry problems between diplomatic sessions. They genuinely liked each other. The terms gave Christians control of Jerusalem and a corridor to the coast. Muslims retained the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque and were guaranteed freedom of worship. The arrangement was pragmatic, sophisticated, and intolerable to extremists on both sides. Pope Gregory denounced the treaty as blasphemy, arguing that Jerusalem could only be won through holy war. Islamic scholars called al-Kamil a traitor for surrendering the city that Saladin had fought to recover. Frederick crowned himself King of Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, since no patriarch would perform the ceremony for an excommunicated emperor. The truce held for exactly ten years, expiring in 1239, after which Jerusalem returned to Muslim control. The bloodless recovery of the holiest city in Christendom earned its architect less gratitude than any crusading failure.

George, Duke of Clarence, was executed in the Tower of London on February 18, 1478, reportedly drowned in a barrel of malmsey wine on his own request. His older brother, King Edward IV, had convicted him of treason after George's third betrayal in the Wars of the Roses, England's decades-long civil war between the houses of York and Lancaster. George had switched sides multiple times, first supporting Edward, then joining the Earl of Warwick's rebellion against him, then returning to Edward's fold after Warwick's defeat at the Battle of Barnet. His final offense was attempting to arrange marriages and alliances that could challenge Edward's authority. Edward had tolerated the first two defections. The third was too much. The execution was conducted privately inside the Tower, away from public view, and George was reportedly given the choice of method. He chose malmsey, a sweet fortified wine imported from the Mediterranean. The story was widely circulated at the time and later immortalized by Shakespeare in Richard III, where Clarence is drowned by assassins in the infamous "butt of malmsey" scene. Whether the wine barrel story is literally true or a rumor that crystallized around a private execution has been debated for five centuries. George's body was displayed afterward but showed no visible marks of violence, which is consistent with drowning but also with several other methods. What is certain is that medieval England found the manner of his death bizarre enough to remember it, making George's execution one of the most distinctively strange deaths in the history of the English monarchy.

The Spanish fleet caught them off Cornwall in 1637. Twenty ships gone — half the convoy. England and Spain weren't even at war. The Dutch were fighting Spain, England was neutral, but Spanish commanders didn't care. They needed the cargo and the statement. England's navy, supposedly protecting these waters, did nothing. Parliament exploded. Charles I had been cutting naval funding for years. This raid, more than any policy debate, convinced England it needed a real fleet again.

Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, missed the Mississippi River by approximately 400 miles when he attempted to establish a colony at its mouth in 1685, landing instead at Matagorda Bay on the Texas Gulf Coast. The error was partly navigational and partly the result of faulty maps that placed the Mississippi further west than it actually was. La Salle had successfully navigated the Mississippi from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682 and claimed the entire watershed for France, naming it Louisiana after King Louis XIV. He returned to France, secured funding and colonists, and sailed back with four ships and 300 people to build a permanent settlement at the river's mouth. He never found it from the sea. The expedition landed at Matagorda Bay, and La Salle built Fort St. Louis there, establishing France's first territorial claim in Texas. The colony was doomed from the start. Disease killed colonists within weeks. The Karankawa people, initially wary, became openly hostile. Supply ships were lost. La Salle made multiple overland expeditions to locate the Mississippi, each one reducing his dwindling company further. His men mutinied in March 1687 and killed him somewhere in East Texas. The exact location of his death has never been determined. Spain learned of Fort St. Louis and sent expeditions to find and destroy it, discovering the ruins in 1689. The Spanish, alarmed by French encroachment, accelerated their own colonization of Texas.

Pakubuwono II moved his royal court fifteen kilometers east along the Bengawan Solo River in 1745, founding the city of Surakarta on its banks after his previous capital at Kartasura had been sacked and burned by Chinese rebels and Madurese mercenaries. The palace had been destroyed. The sacred regalia of the Mataram Sultanate, symbols of divine authority that legitimized Javanese kingship, had been stolen during the attack. Pakubuwono needed a new capital, and more importantly, he needed to rebuild the spiritual authority that the destruction of Kartasura had damaged. He chose the site based on both strategic and cosmological considerations, positioning the new kraton palace along the river and orienting it according to Javanese principles of sacred geography. He named it Surakarta, "the brave city." The kingdom split seventeen years later when a succession dispute produced a rival court at Yogyakarta, dividing Java's cultural heartland into two competing sultanates that would coexist uneasily for centuries. Surakarta survived the split, the Dutch colonial period, the Japanese occupation during World War II, and Indonesian independence. Today it remains Java's cultural center, home to the Mangkunegaran and Kasunanan palaces, both still inhabited by descendants of the original royal families. Traditional court dances, batik textile traditions, and gamelan music performances continue in forms that trace directly to the cultural institutions Pakubuwono II established when he rebuilt his court on the riverbank. The city born from a catastrophe outlasted the kingdom it was built to save.

Captain Thomas Shirley sailed for West Africa's Gold Coast in 1781 with orders to seize Dutch forts while the Netherlands was distracted by war in Europe. The Dutch had thirteen trading posts there. Shirley took them in six weeks. The forts controlled access to gold and enslaved people — Britain wanted both. The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War gets forgotten because it happened during the American Revolution. But it permanently shifted who controlled African trade routes. The Dutch never got their forts back.

Vermont governed itself for 14 years before Congress let it join. It had its own constitution, its own currency, its own postal service. It negotiated with Britain and France. New York claimed Vermont's land and blocked its admission — Vermont had been carved from New York's territory without permission. The dispute ended when Vermont paid New York $30,000. On March 4, 1791, it became the fourteenth state. First new state after the original thirteen. Also the first state to ban slavery in its constitution and allow men without property to vote. The republic that paid its way in.

The Know-Nothing Party nominated former President Millard Fillmore as their presidential candidate at a convention in Philadelphia in February 1856, an unlikely pairing that captured the contradictions of one of America's strangest political movements. The party's formal name was the American Party. Its members were called Know-Nothings because when asked about their semi-secret organization, they were instructed to respond "I know nothing." The party's platform was built on anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment, demanding that Catholics and foreign-born citizens be barred from holding public office and that the naturalization period be extended from five to twenty-one years. They had won fifty-two congressional seats in 1854 without anyone seeing it coming, riding a wave of nativist anxiety triggered by mass immigration from Ireland and Germany. Fillmore himself was not particularly anti-Catholic, but he was a former president without a party after the Whigs collapsed, and the Know-Nothings needed a candidate with national name recognition. He won a single state in the general election: Maryland. The party collapsed within four years, destroyed by the slavery question that its nativist platform had tried to avoid. The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the escalating sectional crisis made immigration and Catholicism seem trivial compared to the question of whether human beings could be owned. The Know-Nothings' congressional caucus splintered along North-South lines, and their voters migrated to the new Republican Party or back to the Democrats.

Union forces under Major General William T. Sherman set fire to much of Columbia, South Carolina, on February 17, 1865, though responsibility for the burning has been debated for over a century and a half. Confederate troops evacuating the city had set fire to cotton bales in the streets to prevent them from falling into Union hands. High winds spread those flames into adjacent buildings. Sherman's soldiers, many of them drunk on liquor found in abandoned warehouses, fanned through the city looting and setting additional fires. By morning, roughly one-third of Columbia was destroyed. The State House itself caught fire, and the bronze stars marking where shells struck the building remain embedded in its walls today as monuments. South Carolina held particular symbolic significance for both sides. It was the first state to secede from the Union. Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, was where the war began. Sherman's men understood this history. Whether the destruction of Columbia was deliberate retribution for starting the war, collateral damage from the cotton fires, or the inevitable result of an army passing through a hostile city remains contested. Sherman blamed the Confederates for the cotton fires. Columbians blamed Sherman for everything. The truth likely involves both. What is certain is that the burning of Columbia, intentional or not, left scars on the city's physical landscape and collective memory that outlasted Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. The shell marks in the State House walls are still there because South Carolina chose to preserve them.