March 2 in History

The United States banned the importation of enslaved people on the earliest date the Constitution allowed, and then spent the next fifty years barely enforcing the law. Congress passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves on March 2, 1807, effective January 1, 1808, closing the legal international slave trade while leaving the institution of slavery itself — and a booming domestic trade — completely intact. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution had included a compromise with Southern slaveholders: Congress could not prohibit the importation of enslaved persons before 1808. President Thomas Jefferson, himself an enslaver, called for the ban in his December 1806 annual message to Congress, and both chambers acted quickly. The bill passed with broad support, including from some Southern representatives who recognized that ending imports would increase the value of enslaved people they already held. The law imposed penalties of forfeiture of the ship and cargo, with fines ranging from $800 to $20,000 depending on the offense. Enforcement fell to the small US Navy, which lacked the ships to patrol the vast Atlantic coastline effectively. Smuggling continued for decades, particularly through Spanish Florida and later Texas. An estimated 50,000 enslaved Africans were illegally imported after the ban took effect. Congress strengthened the law in 1819, declaring the slave trade piracy punishable by death and authorizing Navy patrols off Cuba and South America. Even so, no American was ever executed under the piracy provision. The domestic slave trade exploded in the absence of imports: more than one million enslaved people were forcibly relocated from the Upper South to the Deep South between 1810 and 1860, transported by ship, riverboat, and overland coffles. Britain had abolished its own slave trade the same year, creating a transatlantic moment of legislative action whose moral promise would take another six decades — and a civil war — to fulfill.

Twenty-three million Russian serfs learned they were legally free on March 3, 1861 — two days before Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office across the Atlantic — making Russia and America's parallel emancipations one of the nineteenth century's most remarkable coincidences. Tsar Alexander II signed the Emancipation Edict that fundamentally restructured Russian society, though the fine print ensured that freedom came with crippling financial strings attached. Russian serfdom had bound peasants to the land and their landlords for centuries, creating a feudal system that persisted long after Western Europe had abandoned it. Alexander II recognized that serfdom was economically inefficient and militarily dangerous — Russia's humiliating defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-1856 had exposed the weakness of a conscript army drawn from an illiterate, unfree population. "It is better to abolish serfdom from above," he told the Moscow nobility in 1856, "than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below." The edict freed serfs from personal bondage to their landlords and granted them the right to own property, marry without permission, and engage in trade. However, the land distribution mechanism was designed to protect noble interests. Former serfs received allotments of land but were required to pay redemption fees to the government over 49 years, effectively transferring the debt from landlord to state. The allotments were often smaller than what serfs had previously worked, and the redemption payments frequently exceeded the land's actual value. Village communes, not individual peasants, held the land and bore collective responsibility for payments. This system trapped millions in poverty and restricted mobility for decades. Peasant unrest actually increased after emancipation as communities struggled under impossible debt burdens. The emancipation freed a larger population than any single act in history to that point, yet its economic compromises planted seeds of discontent that would fuel revolution fifty-six years later.

No official film footage exists of the greatest individual performance in basketball history. Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors against the New York Knicks on March 2, 1962, in a half-empty arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and the only visual record is a single photograph of him holding a piece of paper with "100" scrawled on it in the locker room afterward. The game was played at the Hershey Sports Arena, 90 miles from Philadelphia, as part of a series of "neutral site" games the Warriors scheduled to boost ticket sales in smaller markets. Only 4,124 fans attended. The Knicks were missing their starting center, Phil Jordan, and his backup was ineffective against the 7-foot-1 Chamberlain, who had been on a historic scoring tear all season. He was averaging 50.4 points per game entering the night. Chamberlain scored 23 points in the first quarter and 41 by halftime. The third quarter pushed him to 69, and the crowd began counting each basket aloud. Warriors teammates abandoned their normal offense and fed Chamberlain relentlessly, while the Knicks resorted to fouling other players to keep the ball away from him. Chamberlain, a notoriously poor free throw shooter who made only 51 percent that season, went 28-for-32 from the line. He hit the century mark with 46 seconds remaining on a short shot from close range. Fans swarmed the court, and officials needed several minutes to clear the floor for the final seconds. The Warriors won 169-147, a combined score that also set a record. Chamberlain finished with 36 field goals on 63 attempts. No NBA player has come within 19 points of the record since. Kobe Bryant's 81 in 2006 is the closest anyone has reached, and the consensus among basketball analysts is that 100 will never be matched.

Fifty-nine delegates gathered in an unfinished building at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836, and declared Texas independent from Mexico while the Alamo was under active siege 150 miles to the southwest. They could hear no cannon fire from that distance, but they knew time was running out. The declaration launched a republic that would last nine years before joining the United States. Tensions between Anglo-American settlers in Texas and the Mexican government had been escalating since the early 1830s. Mexico had invited American colonists to settle the sparsely populated province of Tejas, but by 1835, those settlers outnumbered Mexican citizens several times over. When President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna abolished the 1824 Mexican Constitution and centralized power, Texans — along with several other Mexican states — revolted. The delegates at Washington-on-the-Brazos modeled their declaration closely on Thomas Jefferson's 1776 original, listing grievances against the Mexican government including the dissolution of state legislatures, military occupation, and the imprisonment of Stephen F. Austin. George Childress, who had arrived in Texas only weeks earlier, is believed to have drafted most of the document. The convention signed it on March 2 and immediately began drafting a constitution for the new Republic of Texas. Four days later, the Alamo fell. Santa Anna's army killed all the defenders, and the news reached the convention as it was still deliberating. Sam Houston, appointed commander-in-chief of the Texan army, began a strategic retreat eastward that ended with his decisive victory at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, where his forces captured Santa Anna himself. Texas existed as an independent republic from 1836 to 1845, recognized by the United States, Britain, and France, before annexation reignited the territorial disputes that led directly to the Mexican-American War.

A fifty-foot ape climbed the Empire State Building on screen for the first time on March 2, 1933, and audiences in the depths of the Great Depression lined up around the block to watch. King Kong opened simultaneously at Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy Theatre in New York, earning $89,931 in its first weekend — a record at the time — and proving that spectacle could pull Americans away from their economic misery. The film was the brainchild of Merian C. Cooper, an adventurer and filmmaker who had been obsessed with gorillas since reading explorer Paul Du Chaillu's accounts as a boy. Cooper conceived of a giant ape battling modern civilization, and he found the perfect collaborator in Ernest B. Schoedsack, with whom he had already made the adventure documentaries Grass and Chang. RKO Radio Pictures gave them a budget of roughly $670,000, significant for the era. The technical achievement was Willis O'Brien's stop-motion animation, which brought Kong to life through hundreds of thousands of individually posed frames. O'Brien used an 18-inch articulated model covered in rabbit fur, animated against miniature sets and combined with live-action footage through rear projection and glass paintings. Each second of Kong's movement required 24 individual adjustments of the model. The process was so labor-intensive that the animation sequences took over a year to complete. The film's plot — a film crew captures a giant ape on a remote island and brings it to New York, where it escapes and is killed atop the Empire State Building — drew criticism for its racial subtexts even in 1933. Fay Wray's performance as the screaming captive Ann Darrow became an archetype that would endure for decades. King Kong earned approximately $2 million in its initial run, saved RKO from bankruptcy, and created the template for every monster movie that followed, from Godzilla to Jurassic Park.

Spanish naval vessels had been hunting Roberto Cofresí for five years when a joint Spanish-American operation finally cornered him off the coast of Puerto Rico on March 2, 1825. His capture ended the career of one of the Caribbean's last successful pirates and closed a chapter of maritime lawlessness that had persisted since the sixteenth century. Cofresí was born around 1791 in Cabo Rojo, a port town on Puerto Rico's southwestern coast. His family claimed descent from Italian and Austrian nobility, though by Cofresí's generation they had fallen into poverty. He turned to piracy around 1818, operating from the rugged coastline between Cabo Rojo and the small island of Mona in the Mona Passage, a heavily trafficked shipping lane between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. His operation was small but effective: a fast schooner and a crew of roughly twenty men who targeted merchant vessels carrying goods between Caribbean ports. Cofresí developed a Robin Hood reputation among poor coastal communities where he distributed portions of his plunder, and local fishermen provided intelligence on naval patrols. This network of sympathizers made him nearly impossible to catch despite repeated attempts by Spanish colonial authorities. The situation changed when Cofresí's raids began targeting American merchant ships. The US Navy assigned the schooner USS Grampus to the pursuit, and a combined Spanish-American naval force engaged Cofresí's vessel in a battle lasting approximately forty minutes. Outgunned and outnumbered, Cofresí was wounded and captured along with several crew members. Spanish authorities moved quickly. Cofresí and his men were tried by a military tribunal in San Juan, convicted of piracy, and executed by firing squad on March 29, 1825, just weeks after his capture. Cofresí's brief career was among the last gasps of Caribbean piracy, as expanded naval patrols by the United States, Britain, and Spain made the region's waters increasingly inhospitable to independent raiders.