February 8 in History

Three blows of the axe were needed to kill Mary Queen of Scots on February 8, 1587, in the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. The first struck the back of her head. The second severed most of her neck. When the executioner held up what he believed was her head, it dropped to the floor, revealing that the auburn hair was a wig. Mary’s real hair was grey and cropped close. Her lips continued moving for several minutes. Her small dog, hidden beneath her skirts, crept out and lay beside the body. Mary had been a prisoner in England for nineteen years. She fled Scotland in 1568 after a series of disastrous political and personal decisions, including her probable complicity in the murder of her second husband Lord Darnley and her hasty marriage to the chief suspect, the Earl of Bothwell. She crossed the border expecting her cousin Elizabeth I to help restore her to the Scottish throne. Instead, Elizabeth kept her confined in a succession of English castles, unable to release a Catholic queen with a legitimate claim to the English throne but unwilling to execute an anointed monarch. The crisis came to a head with the Babington Plot of 1586, a conspiracy by Catholic supporters to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary on the throne. Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, had been intercepting Mary’s coded correspondence for months. He allowed the conspiracy to develop until he had enough evidence to implicate Mary directly. Whether Walsingham fabricated or embellished some of the evidence remains debated, but the letters showed Mary had approved the plan to "dispatch" Elizabeth. Elizabeth signed the death warrant but agonized over the decision for weeks, reportedly throwing the signed document at her secretary and later claiming she never intended it to be delivered. The execution shocked Catholic Europe. Pope Sixtus V praised Mary as a martyr. Philip II of Spain accelerated plans for the Armada. Elizabeth maintained the fiction that the execution had been carried out without her final consent. The killing of a queen by a queen shattered the principle that crowned heads were inviolable.

Japan attacked Russia’s Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur on the night of February 8, 1904, two hours before its declaration of war reached St. Petersburg. Admiral Togo Heihachiro sent torpedo boats to strike the Russian warships at anchor under cover of darkness, damaging the battleships Retvizan and Tsesarevich and the cruiser Pallada. The surprise assault opened the Russo-Japanese War and announced to the world that an Asian power could challenge a European empire on equal military terms. The roots of the conflict lay in competing imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. Russia had extended the Trans-Siberian Railway to Port Arthur, its only warm-water Pacific port, and was expanding its influence in northern China. Japan, which had defeated China in 1895 and been forced by Russia, France, and Germany to return territory it had won, viewed Russian expansion as a direct threat to its security and its own designs on Korea. Negotiations broke down in early February 1904 when Russia refused to recognize Japan’s interests in Manchuria. Togo’s attack plan was modeled on surprise as a strategic principle. He divided his destroyer force into two squadrons, one targeting Port Arthur and the other hitting the Russian base at the nearby port of Dalny. The Russian fleet was poorly prepared. Most of the officer corps was attending a party hosted by Admiral Stark when the torpedo boats struck. Shore batteries were not fully operational. Funds allocated for harbor defenses had been diverted to the commercial port at Dalny. The attack damaged but did not destroy the Russian fleet, and a prolonged siege of Port Arthur followed. Japan’s decisive naval victory came later, at the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, where Togo annihilated the Russian Baltic Fleet after it sailed 18,000 miles to reach the Pacific. The Treaty of Portsmouth ended the war with Japan gaining control of Korea and southern Manchuria. The conflict was the first modern war in which an Asian nation defeated a European power, reshaping global assumptions about race, military capability, and the balance of imperial strength.

Nevada executed Gee Jon on February 8, 1924, using lethal gas for the first time in American history. The original plan was to pump cyanide gas into Jon’s prison cell while he slept, avoiding the spectacle of a visible execution. When tests showed the gas leaked through the cell walls and endangered guards, the state hastily constructed a small airtight chamber in the prison butcher shop at Carson City. Jon was strapped into a chair, and hydrocyanic acid gas was pumped in through a pipe. He lost consciousness in approximately six minutes. Jon, a Chinese immigrant, had been convicted of killing a rival tong member named Tom Quong Kee in a gang dispute in Mingo, Nevada. His trial and sentencing attracted minimal attention. Nevada had adopted lethal gas as an execution method in 1921, the first state to do so, after lobbying by a military toxicologist named Allen McLean Hamilton who argued it was more humane than hanging, electrocution, or firing squads. The legislation framed the gas chamber as a progressive reform. The chamber itself was crude by later standards. It measured roughly eight by ten feet, with a metal chair bolted to the floor and a window for witnesses. A mixture of sulfuric acid and water sat in a container beneath the chair. Sodium cyanide pellets were dropped into the solution by a lever operated from outside, releasing hydrogen cyanide gas. The process was supposed to cause rapid unconsciousness followed by death within minutes. In practice, witnesses to early gas chamber executions reported prolonged convulsions, gasping, and visible distress lasting up to fifteen minutes. Ten other states eventually adopted the gas chamber, and it became one of the standard methods of execution in America through the mid-twentieth century. California used it extensively, executing 196 people at San Quentin between 1938 and 1996. The method fell out of favor as lethal injection gained acceptance in the 1980s, and multiple courts ruled that the prolonged suffering caused by gas inhalation constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The technology that Nevada introduced as humane modernization became an enduring symbol of the opposite.

South Carolina Highway Patrol officers opened fire on a group of unarmed Black students at South Carolina State College on the night of February 8, 1968, killing three young men and wounding twenty-seven others. Most were shot in the back as they fled. The victims, Samuel Hammond Jr. (eighteen), Delano Middleton (seventeen), and Henry Smith (eighteen), had been part of a multi-day protest against racial segregation at the only bowling alley in Orangeburg. The massacre received a fraction of the national attention given to similar incidents, overshadowed by the escalating Vietnam War and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy later that year. The protests began on February 5, when students attempted to integrate the All Star Bowling Lanes, owned by Harry Floyd, who refused to serve Black customers despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Police arrested fifteen students and beat several others, including a female student struck in the face. The following nights saw escalating confrontations between students and law enforcement. On February 7, students built a bonfire on the edge of campus. Firefighters arrived and were pelted with debris. An officer was injured. Governor Robert McNair ordered the Highway Patrol and National Guard to the campus. On the night of February 8, approximately 200 students had gathered on a grass embankment near the front of campus. A patrolman was struck by a piece of heavy lumber. Moments later, officers opened fire without warning, discharging carbines, shotguns, and pistols into the crowd for roughly ten seconds. The students scattered. Officers later claimed they believed they were under sniper fire, a claim contradicted by FBI investigators who found no evidence of student gunfire. Nine highway patrolmen were charged with excessive use of force. All were acquitted by an all-white federal jury in 1969. Cleveland Sellers, a civil rights organizer and the only person ultimately convicted in connection with the events, was found guilty of inciting a riot and served seven months in prison. He was pardoned by the state of South Carolina in 1993. The Orangeburg Massacre remains one of the deadliest attacks on student protesters in American history, largely forgotten outside the community it devastated.

Dr. William Griggs could not explain what was wrong with the two girls. Betty Parris, nine, and her cousin Abigail Williams, eleven, had been screaming, contorting their bodies into impossible positions, throwing objects, and complaining of being pricked by invisible pins. After exhausting his medical knowledge, Griggs offered his diagnosis on February 8, 1692: the girls were bewitched. His declaration set in motion the Salem witch trials, the deadliest witch hunt in American history. The afflictions had started weeks earlier in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony. Parris was an unpopular figure who had inflamed tensions between Salem Village, a farming community, and the wealthier Salem Town. The village was riven by property disputes, boundary conflicts, and religious disagreements. Accusations of witchcraft provided a framework for settling old scores. Under pressure to name their tormentors, the girls accused three women: Tituba, an enslaved woman in the Parris household; Sarah Good, a homeless beggar; and Sarah Osborne, an elderly woman who rarely attended church. Tituba, under interrogation, confessed to practicing witchcraft and claimed there were other witches in Salem, transforming an isolated accusation into a conspiracy. Her confession electrified the community. More girls and young women began exhibiting symptoms and naming accused witches. The accusations spread outward from society’s margins to its center, eventually targeting a former minister, a wealthy shipowner’s wife, and other respectable citizens. A special court, the Court of Oyer and Terminer, was established in May 1692 to hear the cases. By the time Governor William Phips dissolved the court in October 1692, twenty people had been executed, fourteen of them women. Nineteen were hanged; one man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea. At least five others died in jail. The trials collapsed when the accusers began naming the governor’s wife and other prominent figures, and when Increase Mather argued that spectral evidence, testimony that the accused’s spirit had appeared to the witness, was unreliable. Salem became America’s enduring parable about what happens when fear, religious certainty, and unchecked judicial power converge.