March 14 in History

The night before they killed Julius Caesar, the conspirators nearly decided to kill Mark Antony too. On the evening of March 14, 44 BC, Gaius Cassius Longinus and Publius Servilius Casca argued that Antony, Caesar's most loyal and powerful ally, should die alongside the dictator. Leaving him alive, they warned, was leaving the revolution incomplete. Marcus Junius Brutus overruled them. Brutus insisted the assassination must appear as a principled act of tyrannicide, not a political massacre. Killing Caesar could be justified as defending the Republic from a would-be king. Killing his lieutenant would look like a coup. The conspirators needed the Senate and the Roman public on their side, and a bloodbath would turn sympathy against them. The debate exposed the fundamental tension within the conspiracy. Cassius, a hardened military commander, understood that political survival required eliminating all potential enemies. Brutus, a philosopher and idealist, believed that the righteousness of their cause would speak for itself. Decimus Junius Brutus, the third key conspirator, who was close enough to Caesar to convince him to attend the Senate the next day, appears to have sided with Marcus Brutus on the question. The decision proved catastrophic. After Caesar's assassination on the Ides of March, Antony seized control of Caesar's papers, fortune, and political legacy. He delivered a funeral oration that turned the Roman mob against the conspirators, forcing Brutus and Cassius to flee Rome within weeks. Antony formed the Second Triumvirate with Octavian and Lepidus, and their combined forces destroyed the Republican armies at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, where both Brutus and Cassius died. Every strategic disaster that followed for the conspirators traced back to this single decision made the night before the assassination. Cassius understood his enemy better than Brutus understood his own idealism.

Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin on March 14, 1794, a deceptively simple machine that separated cotton fibers from their seeds fifty times faster than human hands could manage. The invention solved a bottleneck that had limited cotton production to a minor Southern crop. Within a decade, it had transformed cotton into America's most valuable export and revived a system of slavery that had been slowly declining. The problem Whitney solved was specific to short-staple cotton, the variety that grew across most of the American South. Long-staple cotton, grown in coastal areas, had smooth seeds that separated easily, but short-staple cotton had sticky green seeds that clung to the fibers and required hours of tedious hand labor to remove. Whitney's gin used rotating wire teeth to pull cotton fibers through a mesh screen while brushes swept the cleaned cotton off the teeth. Whitney built his first prototype in 1793 on a Georgia plantation belonging to Catherine Greene, the widow of Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. He traveled to Philadelphia to secure a patent and returned to Georgia to begin manufacturing, but the machine was so simple that plantation owners could easily copy it. Whitney spent years in patent litigation that consumed most of his profits. He eventually abandoned the cotton gin business and turned to manufacturing muskets for the U.S. government, where he pioneered the use of interchangeable parts. The gin's economic impact was staggering. American cotton production exploded from roughly 3,000 bales in 1790 to 73,000 bales in 1800 and over 4 million bales by 1860. Cotton became the foundation of the Southern economy, accounting for over half of all U.S. exports by the 1850s. British textile mills depended on it, giving the South leverage that slaveholders believed would protect their political interests. The machine that made cotton profitable made slavery profitable, and the wealth it generated made the Civil War inevitable.

The Soviet Congress of People's Deputies elected Mikhail Gorbachev as the first executive president of the Soviet Union on March 14, 1990, creating a powerful new office that was supposed to stabilize the reforming communist state. The position gave Gorbachev authority independent of the Communist Party for the first time, but the country he now led was already fracturing along national, economic, and ideological lines that no amount of presidential power could hold together. Gorbachev had introduced glasnost and perestroika beginning in 1985, policies intended to modernize the Soviet system through transparency and economic restructuring while preserving the Communist Party's leading role. By 1990, those reforms had unleashed forces he could not control. Lithuania had declared independence on March 11, just three days before Gorbachev's election as president. Nationalist movements were surging in the Baltic states, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and Central Asia. The new presidential office was designed to give Gorbachev a power base outside the party apparatus, which was increasingly divided between hardline conservatives who wanted to reverse reforms and radical reformers who wanted to accelerate them. The Congress voted 1,329 to 495 to create the presidency, but Gorbachev was the only candidate, and the absence of a popular mandate weakened his legitimacy from the start. Gorbachev used his presidential powers to pursue the New Union Treaty, an attempt to renegotiate the relationship between Moscow and the Soviet republics on a voluntary federal basis. The negotiations dragged through 1990 and into 1991 as republic after republic declared sovereignty. Boris Yeltsin's election as president of the Russian republic in June 1991 created a rival power center that further eroded Gorbachev's authority. The August 1991 coup attempt by hardliners, intended to reverse the dissolution, instead accelerated it. Gorbachev resigned as president on December 25, 1991, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist the following day. The presidency Gorbachev created outlived the country it was designed to save by exactly twenty-one months.

Eleven people attended the funeral. Karl Marx died in his armchair on March 14, 1883, at his home in London, a stateless exile who had been expelled from Germany, France, and Belgium. He was sixty-four, plagued by boils, liver disease, and chronic bronchitis. His life's work, Das Kapital, had sold poorly. His family had lived in grinding poverty for decades, surviving on loans from Friedrich Engels and occasional journalism. Marx had spent his intellectual life in the reading room of the British Museum, where he developed a theory of history and economics that would reshape the twentieth century more than any other body of thought. The Communist Manifesto, written with Engels in 1848, argued that all of human history was the story of class struggle and predicted that capitalism would inevitably destroy itself through its own internal contradictions. Das Kapital, published in three volumes between 1867 and 1894 (the final two volumes edited posthumously by Engels), provided the theoretical framework. Marx argued that capitalism extracted surplus value from workers, that the accumulation of capital concentrated wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and that periodic crises of overproduction would eventually radicalize the working class into revolutionary action. During his lifetime, Marx's ideas influenced European socialist movements but remained marginal in mainstream politics. He feuded bitterly with rival socialists, was expelled from the International Workingmen's Association he helped found, and spent his final years in declining health, unable to complete his planned additional volumes of Das Kapital. Within forty years of his death, a revolution fought in his name would topple the Russian Empire. Within seventy years, governments claiming to follow his theories controlled a third of the world's population. Marxism shaped the ideologies of China, Cuba, Vietnam, and dozens of liberation movements across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The obscure exile who died in a London armchair became the most consequential political philosopher since the Enlightenment.

Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado opened at the Savoy Theatre in London on March 14, 1885, and the audience loved it so thoroughly that the opera ran for 672 consecutive performances, the longest initial run of any work of musical theater up to that point. The show earned the modern equivalent of millions of pounds and cemented the partnership between librettist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan as the most successful creative collaboration in Victorian entertainment. The Mikado was set in Japan but satirized British society. Gilbert used the fictional town of Titipu and its absurd penal code as a vehicle for mocking Victorian bureaucracy, class pretension, and legal hypocrisy. The Lord High Executioner, Ko-Ko, has been condemned to death for flirting but promoted to executioner because, as the logic goes, he cannot execute himself until he has executed someone else. Every character operates within a system of rules that is simultaneously rigid and nonsensical. The opera arrived during a craze for Japanese art and culture that swept Britain in the 1880s, triggered by the opening of a Japanese exhibition in London. Gilbert seized on the aesthetic novelty while keeping the satire entirely British. Sullivan's score matched the wit of the libretto with music that ranged from mock-operatic grandeur to genuinely beautiful melodic writing. "Three Little Maids from School" and "A Wandering Minstrel I" became immediately popular. The Mikado has been performed more often than any other Gilbert and Sullivan work and ranks among the most frequently staged operatic works in the English language. It has been adapted for film, television, and stage in countless productions worldwide. The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which produced all the original Gilbert and Sullivan operas, performed The Mikado continuously for over a century. The work proved that satire, wrapped in enough charm and melody, can entertain audiences who would resist the same criticisms delivered as argument.

The crew of the German light cruiser SMS Dresden scuttled their ship at Cumberland Bay, Robinson Crusoe Island, off the Chilean coast on March 14, 1915, ending the last raider from Admiral Maximilian von Spee's Pacific Squadron and closing one of the most dramatic naval chases of the First World War. The Dresden had been the only German warship to escape the Battle of the Falkland Islands on December 8, 1914, when a British squadron under Vice Admiral Doveton Sturdee destroyed the bulk of von Spee's squadron, sinking the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Leipzig, and Nurnberg. Von Spee himself went down with the Scharnhorst. The Dresden survived because her superior speed allowed her to outrun the pursuing British cruisers in deteriorating weather. For three months after the Falklands, the Dresden evaded British patrols in the channels and fjords of southern Chile, resupplying from German merchant ships and sympathetic Chilean contacts. Her captain, Fritz Ludecke, hoped to resume commerce raiding in the Pacific, but the ship's engines were in poor condition, coal was increasingly difficult to obtain, and the British had dispatched multiple cruisers to hunt her down. On March 9, 1915, the cruisers HMS Kent and HMS Glasgow located the Dresden at anchor in Cumberland Bay, a sheltered inlet on Mas a Tierra (now Robinson Crusoe Island). The bay lay within Chilean territorial waters, and Ludecke attempted to invoke Chile's neutrality. The British ignored the protest and opened fire. After taking several hits, Ludecke ordered the sea cocks opened and the ship scuttled. The crew abandoned ship and were interned by Chilean authorities. The sinking generated a diplomatic incident between Britain and Chile over the violation of neutral waters, but the British calculated that eliminating the last German raider in the Pacific was worth the diplomatic cost. The destruction of the Dresden ended Germany's surface naval presence in the Pacific and South Atlantic for the remainder of the war.