May 10 in History

Ethan Allen pounded on the door of the officers' quarters at Fort Ticonderoga before dawn on May 10, 1775, and demanded the garrison's surrender "in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." The British commander, Captain William Delaplace, stumbled out in his nightclothes to find 83 armed colonists already inside the walls. The fort fell without a shot fired, giving the American rebels their first offensive victory and a critical stockpile of artillery that would help win the siege of Boston. Fort Ticonderoga controlled the southern end of Lake Champlain, the water highway connecting New York to Canada. The French had built it as Fort Carillon in 1755 during the Seven Years' War, and the British captured it in 1759. By 1775, the garrison had dwindled to fewer than 50 soldiers, and the fortifications had deteriorated badly. The British considered it a minor frontier post, not a strategic position. The attack was organized independently by two groups who converged awkwardly. Allen led the Green Mountain Boys, a militia from the New Hampshire Grants (later Vermont) that had been fighting New York's land claims for years. Benedict Arnold arrived from Massachusetts carrying a commission from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety to capture the fort. Both men claimed command. Allen's men, who knew and trusted him, refused to serve under Arnold. The two leaders crossed Lake Champlain together in the predawn assault, arguing about authority. The capture was bloodless. A single British sentry fired his musket, which misfired, before the colonists overwhelmed the sleeping garrison. Allen's men also seized the nearby fort at Crown Point the following day. The combined haul included 78 serviceable cannons, six mortars, three howitzers, and large stores of ammunition. Those cannons changed the war. Henry Knox, a 25-year-old Boston bookseller turned artillery officer, transported 60 tons of captured ordnance on ox-drawn sleds across 300 miles of frozen terrain during the winter of 1775-76. When the guns appeared on Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston Harbor in March 1776, the British evacuated the city. The cannon that forced the British out of Boston had been captured by a militia leader in his nightshirt demanding surrender before breakfast.

Leland Stanford raised a silver-headed maul and swung at the ceremonial golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869. He missed. Thomas Durant, representing the Union Pacific, also missed. A railroad worker drove the spike home while the telegraph operator, who had wired the hammer to send an electrical signal, tapped out a single word to waiting cities across the nation: "DONE." The transcontinental railroad connected 1,776 miles of track between Omaha, Nebraska, and Sacramento, California, joining the Union Pacific building west and the Central Pacific building east. The project had been debated for decades but became possible only after the secession of Southern states removed congressional opposition to a northern route. Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act in 1862, offering land grants and government bonds to the two companies. The construction was an epic of human labor and corporate corruption in roughly equal measure. The Central Pacific employed roughly 12,000 Chinese workers who blasted tunnels through the Sierra Nevada's granite using nitroglycerin, working through winters where snow buried entire camps. Hundreds died in avalanches, explosions, and accidents that the company's records largely ignored. The Union Pacific employed thousands of Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans, laying track across the plains while fending off occasional raids by Indigenous nations whose lands the railroad crossed without treaty or compensation. Both companies were paid by the mile, creating perverse incentives to lay track as quickly as possible regardless of terrain or engineering quality. The Credit Mobilier scandal, in which Union Pacific insiders created a shell construction company to siphon profits, would eventually implicate a vice president and multiple congressmen. The Central Pacific's Big Four investors became the wealthiest men in California. The railroad transformed the United States from a continental abstraction into a functional economic unit. A journey that had taken six months by wagon or four weeks by ship around Cape Horn now took six days by rail. Freight costs plummeted. Settlement of the western territories accelerated dramatically, with devastating consequences for Indigenous nations and the bison herds they depended on. The transcontinental railroad was simultaneously one of the greatest engineering achievements and one of the most destructive forces in nineteenth-century American history.

J. Edgar Hoover was 29 years old when Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone appointed him director of the Bureau of Investigation on May 10, 1924. He would hold the position for 48 years, serving under eight presidents, transforming a corrupt and ineffective agency into the most powerful domestic law enforcement organization in the world, and wielding secret files against political enemies with an impunity that no other unelected official in American history has matched. Hoover inherited an agency in crisis. The Bureau of Investigation under his predecessor, William Burns, had been used as a political weapon during the Palmer Raids of 1919-20, conducting mass arrests of suspected radicals with no regard for civil liberties. Burns was forced out after the Teapot Dome scandal revealed corruption throughout the Justice Department. Stone gave Hoover the job with explicit instructions to professionalize the bureau and remove it from politics. Hoover fulfilled the first mandate brilliantly. He imposed strict hiring standards, requiring agents to hold law or accounting degrees. He centralized fingerprint records, created a national crime laboratory, and established the FBI National Academy to train local police. The bureau's pursuit of Depression-era outlaws like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Machine Gun Kelly turned Hoover into a national celebrity and the FBI into a symbol of incorruptible federal authority. The second mandate, to stay out of politics, Hoover violated comprehensively. He compiled secret dossiers on politicians, journalists, activists, and anyone he considered a threat to national security or his own position. His COINTELPRO operations infiltrated and disrupted civil rights organizations, antiwar groups, and the Communist Party through surveillance, disinformation, and provocation. He bugged Martin Luther King Jr.'s hotel rooms and sent an anonymous letter suggesting King should commit suicide. No president dared fire him. The files were too dangerous, and Hoover's public reputation too strong. He died in office on May 2, 1972, and Congress subsequently passed legislation limiting FBI directors to a single ten-year term. The agency Hoover built remains one of his legacies; the surveillance state he pioneered is the other.

Winston Churchill became Prime Minister on the worst possible day. On May 10, 1940, as he accepted King George VI's invitation to form a government, German forces launched their invasion of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The man who had spent a decade warning about Hitler from the political wilderness assumed power at the precise moment his warnings came true. Neville Chamberlain resigned after a disastrous parliamentary debate on the failed British campaign in Norway. The Norway Debate, held May 7-8, saw Chamberlain's majority collapse from over 200 to just 81 as Conservative backbenchers revolted. Leo Amery hurled Cromwell's words at the prime minister: "In the name of God, go!" Chamberlain tried to retain power by forming a national coalition, but the Labour Party refused to serve under him. The choice came down to Churchill or Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary favored by the Conservative establishment. Halifax, recognizing that a prime minister in the House of Lords would be ineffective during wartime, withdrew his candidacy in a meeting at 10 Downing Street on May 9. Churchill later described the long silence that followed Chamberlain's question about who should succeed him. Halifax spoke first, ruling himself out. Churchill, for once, said nothing. The next morning, the king summoned him. Churchill was 65 years old and had been excluded from government for most of the 1930s, considered a brilliant but erratic figure whose judgment could not be trusted. His warnings about German rearmament had been dismissed as warmongering. His record included the Gallipoli disaster of 1915, an authoritarian response to the General Strike of 1926, and fierce opposition to Indian self-governance. Three days after taking office, Churchill delivered his first speech as prime minister to the House of Commons: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat." Within six weeks, France had fallen, the British army had been evacuated from Dunkirk, and Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. Churchill's refusal to consider a negotiated peace, overruling Halifax and others in the War Cabinet, was the single most consequential decision of the Second World War.

Union cavalry found Jefferson Davis hiding in his wife's shawl and waterproof cloak near a pine grove outside Irwinville, Georgia, on the morning of May 10, 1865. The Confederate president had been fleeing south for over a month since evacuating Richmond, hoping to reach Texas and continue the war from a government-in-exile. His capture ended the last serious possibility that the Confederacy might survive in any form. Davis had left Richmond by train on April 2, 1865, as Union forces broke through the city's defenses. He moved south through Danville, Virginia, then into North Carolina, holding cabinet meetings and issuing orders to armies that had largely ceased to exist. Lee's surrender at Appomattox on April 9 did not immediately end the war; Confederate forces under Joseph Johnston surrendered on April 26, but Davis refused to concede defeat. The Confederate cabinet dissolved in stages as Davis moved south. Treasury gold, roughly $500,000 in coin, traveled with the presidential party and was disbursed in shrinking amounts to pay escorts and buy supplies. Davis's entourage shrank from a column of officials and cavalry to a small band of family members and loyal officers riding mules through the Georgia pine forests. The 1st Wisconsin and 4th Michigan Cavalry closed in on Davis's camp near Irwinville before dawn. In the confusion, the two Union units briefly fired on each other, killing two soldiers. Davis attempted to escape on foot but was detained by a trooper who threatened to shoot. Northern newspapers gleefully reported that Davis had been disguised in women's clothing, a story that was exaggerated but rooted in the cloak and shawl his wife had thrown over his shoulders in the predawn chill. Davis was imprisoned at Fort Monroe, Virginia, for two years, initially shackled in a stone casemate. He was indicted for treason but never tried, as the Johnson administration feared a trial might generate sympathy or raise constitutional questions about secession that the government preferred to leave unresolved. Davis was released on bail in May 1867 and spent his remaining years writing a lengthy defense of the Confederate cause. He died in 1889, never having sought or received a pardon.

Delegates from twelve colonies gathered at the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, three weeks after British soldiers and colonial militiamen had exchanged fire at Lexington and Concord. The Second Continental Congress convened without a clear mandate, without legal authority, and without consensus on whether to seek reconciliation with Britain or prepare for independence. Over the next sixteen months, it became the government of a revolution. The First Continental Congress had met the previous fall and adopted a boycott of British goods. Most delegates expected the boycott to produce negotiations. The bloodshed in Massachusetts changed everything. By May, colonial militias were besieging British troops in Boston, and the delegates arriving in Philadelphia faced a war that had started without their authorization. The Congress included some of the most talented political minds in the colonies. John and Samuel Adams came from Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania, George Washington from Virginia. New members included Thomas Jefferson, who arrived in June, and John Hancock, who was elected president of the Congress after Peyton Randolph returned to Virginia. The body had no constitutional basis, no power to tax, and no ability to enforce its resolutions. Nevertheless, the Congress began acting as a national government almost immediately. On June 14, it created the Continental Army. On June 15, it appointed George Washington as commander-in-chief, choosing a Virginia planter to lead what was still largely a New England army, a political calculation designed to ensure Southern support for the war. Washington departed for Boston within days. The Congress also issued paper money, established a postal system, created a committee to negotiate with foreign powers, and sent the Olive Branch Petition to King George III as a last attempt at reconciliation. The king refused to receive it and declared the colonies in open rebellion. By July 1776, the Congress had moved from reluctant war management to declaring independence, creating a new nation through an act of collective political will that had no precedent in the modern world.

Four Roman legions and 80,000 soldiers arrived at the walls of Jerusalem in the spring of 70 AD, and Titus, the emperor's son and field commander, launched his first full assault against the city's Third Wall on May 10. The siege that followed lasted five months, destroyed the Second Temple, and ended Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel for nearly two thousand years. Jerusalem in 70 AD was tearing itself apart before the Romans arrived. Three rival Jewish factions fought for control of the city during the Great Revolt against Rome. Simon bar Giora held the upper city, John of Giscala controlled the Temple Mount, and a smaller Zealot faction held the inner Temple courts. The factions burned each other's grain stores in acts of internecine warfare that would prove catastrophic during the siege. Titus's army breached the Third Wall, the city's outermost fortification, within fifteen days. The Second Wall fell shortly after. But the Antonia Fortress and the Temple Mount, connected by massive Herodian stonework, proved far more difficult. The defenders fought with the desperation of people who believed they were defending God's house. Roman siege engines were burned. Tunnels were dug and collapsed. Titus reportedly wanted to preserve the Temple, but the fanaticism of the defense made conventional assault unavoidable. The Temple was destroyed on the ninth of Av (approximately August 4) when Roman soldiers set fire to the complex during a final assault. The historian Josephus, a Jewish commander who had defected to the Romans, described gold melting from the Temple's decorations and flowing between the stones, which soldiers later pried apart to recover it. The destruction of the Temple eliminated the center of Jewish religious practice and transformed Judaism from a temple-based sacrificial religion into one organized around synagogue worship, prayer, and textual study. An estimated 1.1 million people died during the siege, according to Josephus, though modern historians consider this figure exaggerated. Tens of thousands were enslaved. The Arch of Titus in Rome, erected to celebrate the victory, depicts soldiers carrying the Temple's menorah and sacred vessels in triumphal procession. The Ninth of Av remains a day of mourning in Judaism, and the Western Wall, the last remnant of the Temple Mount's retaining walls, remains the holiest site where Jews can pray.