June 7 in History

Richard Henry Lee stood before the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on June 7, 1776, and said what many delegates had been thinking but few were prepared to declare publicly. "Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States," Lee announced, reading from a resolution authorized by the Virginia Convention. The motion called for independence from Britain, foreign alliances, and a plan of confederation. Twelve words in the first clause changed the course of the war and the meaning of the rebellion. The resolution forced a choice that moderates in Congress had been delaying for months. John Adams of Massachusetts immediately seconded the motion, but delegates from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina either opposed independence or lacked instructions from their colonial assemblies to vote for it. Congress postponed the decision for three weeks to allow wavering colonies to receive new instructions and to appoint a committee to draft a formal declaration in case the vote succeeded. Thomas Jefferson, at thirty-three the youngest member of the drafting committee, wrote most of the Declaration of Independence during those three weeks in a rented room on Market Street. Adams and Benjamin Franklin made revisions. The document transformed Lee’s dry legal resolution into a philosophical statement that grounded American independence in universal principles of human equality and natural rights, language that would echo through every subsequent liberation movement on Earth. Congress voted on Lee’s resolution on July 2, 1776, approving it with twelve colonies in favor and New York abstaining. The formal Declaration was adopted two days later, on July 4. John Adams predicted that July 2 would be celebrated as the great anniversary festival, with "pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations." He was off by two days. Lee’s resolution provided the legal act of separation; Jefferson’s Declaration provided the words that made the act immortal.

A 23-year-old Indian lawyer was thrown off a first-class train car in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, on June 7, 1893, because a white passenger objected to sharing the compartment with a non-white person. Mohandas Gandhi had a valid first-class ticket. The conductor told him to move to the van compartment. Gandhi refused. A constable pushed him off the train at the next station, and he spent the night shivering on a bench in the waiting room, too proud to retrieve his luggage from the baggage claim. Gandhi had arrived in South Africa weeks earlier to handle a civil lawsuit for a Muslim Indian trading firm. He planned to stay for a year. The Pietermaritzburg incident, and the systematic racial discrimination he encountered throughout Natal and the Transvaal, transformed a shy, unsuccessful barrister into a political activist. Gandhi spent the next twenty-one years in South Africa, developing the philosophy of satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, through campaigns against discriminatory laws targeting the Indian community. Satyagraha was not passivity. Gandhi organized strikes, marches, and mass civil disobedience that deliberately provoked arrest and imprisonment. The strategy depended on the willingness of protesters to accept suffering without retaliation, exposing the moral bankruptcy of the oppressor to public scrutiny. The method required extraordinary discipline and produced results that were neither quick nor guaranteed. Gandhi’s South African campaigns won modest legal reforms, but the racial structures of the colony remained intact. Gandhi returned to India in 1915 and applied satyagraha on a national scale against British colonial rule. The Salt March of 1930, the Quit India movement of 1942, and decades of organized noncooperation eventually made British India ungovernable. Indian independence came in 1947, though accompanied by the partition violence Gandhi had spent his life trying to prevent. The train platform in Pietermaritzburg, where a young man decided that injustice must be confronted rather than endured, became the origin point for a method of resistance adopted by Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and liberation movements across the world.

American codebreakers won the Battle of Midway before the first torpedo was launched. Lieutenant Commander Joseph Rochefort and his team at Station Hypo in Hawaii cracked enough of the Japanese JN-25 naval cipher to determine that Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku planned to attack Midway Atoll in early June 1942. Rochefort even identified the date and the direction of the Japanese approach. Armed with this intelligence, Admiral Chester Nimitz positioned three aircraft carriers northeast of Midway and waited. The Japanese fleet that sortied toward Midway was the most powerful naval force ever assembled in the Pacific: four fleet carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and dozens of support ships under Vice Admiral Nagumo Chuichi. Yamamoto’s plan called for a diversionary attack on the Aleutian Islands, followed by an invasion of Midway that would draw the U.S. Pacific Fleet into a decisive engagement. The plan assumed surprise. Thanks to Rochefort, the Americans had it instead. The battle unfolded on June 4-7, 1942, and its turning point lasted five minutes. Three waves of American torpedo bombers attacked the Japanese carriers and were virtually annihilated, with Torpedo Squadron 8 losing all fifteen aircraft and all but one of its thirty pilots. But the doomed torpedo runs pulled Japanese fighter cover down to sea level and disorganized the carriers’ flight decks, which were loaded with armed and fueled aircraft. At 10:22 AM, dive bombers from the USS Enterprise and Yorktown arrived overhead virtually unopposed. In five minutes, they put fatal hits on three of the four Japanese carriers: Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu. The fourth, Hiryu, launched a counterstrike that crippled the Yorktown before it too was sunk that afternoon. Japan lost four fleet carriers, a heavy cruiser, 248 aircraft, and over 3,000 men. The United States lost one carrier, a destroyer, 150 aircraft, and 307 men. The Japanese carrier fleet never recovered. Midway did not end the Pacific War, which would grind on for three more years through Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. But after June 7, 1942, the strategic initiative belonged to the United States, and Japan fought a defensive war it could not win.

Port Royal slid into the Caribbean Sea in three minutes. A massive earthquake struck the Jamaican city at 11:43 AM on June 7, 1692, liquefying the sand spit on which the wealthiest and most notorious settlement in the English-speaking Americas was built. Two-thirds of the town disappeared beneath the water. Buildings sank vertically into the ground, swallowing people alive. The harbor rose, then fell, then rose again, tossing ships into the streets. Approximately 2,000 people died in the earthquake itself, and another 3,000 perished in the disease and famine that followed. Port Royal had been called the "wickedest city on Earth," a reputation built on rum, prostitution, and piracy. Situated on the tip of a narrow sand spit at the entrance to Kingston Harbour, the city served as a haven for English buccaneers who raided Spanish shipping with tacit government approval. Henry Morgan had launched his attacks on Panama and Cuba from Port Royal’s docks. By the 1690s, the city had evolved from a pirate base into a thriving commercial port, with a population of roughly 6,500, brick warehouses, a church, four markets, and more bars per capita than any settlement in the hemisphere. The earthquake measured approximately 7.5 on the modern scale and produced a rare phenomenon called liquefaction, in which sandy soil saturated with water loses its structural integrity and behaves like a liquid. Entire blocks of buildings sank into the ground up to their rooflines. Eyewitness accounts describe people being swallowed by the earth, then crushed when the ground closed again. A tsunami followed, washing ships from the harbor across the submerged remains of the waterfront. Port Royal never recovered. A fire destroyed much of what remained in 1703, and the colonial government relocated to Kingston across the harbor. The sunken city lay preserved beneath the seafloor, and twentieth-century marine archaeologists have excavated it as one of the most complete snapshots of seventeenth-century Caribbean life, a Pompeii of the New World. Artifacts recovered from the ruins include intact buildings, personal belongings, and a pocket watch stopped at 11:43, the precise moment the ground gave way.