May 18 in History

Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed Emperor of the French on May 18, 1804, completing a transformation from revolutionary general to hereditary monarch in less than five years. A carefully orchestrated plebiscite had approved the change from Consulate to Empire by 3.6 million votes to 2,569, numbers so lopsided they revealed the referendum's true nature as political theater. The man who had risen to power on the ideals of the French Revolution now wore an imperial crown. The path from First Consul to Emperor followed a deliberate escalation of personal authority. Napoleon had himself declared Consul for Life in 1802. The discovery of a royalist assassination plot in 1804 provided the pretext to establish hereditary rule, presented to the French public as a measure to ensure political stability. If Napoleon died without a successor, the argument went, France would descend back into the chaos of the 1790s. The coronation ceremony at Notre-Dame Cathedral on December 2, 1804, was staged to project legitimacy on multiple levels. Pope Pius VII traveled to Paris to officiate, lending religious sanction. But in the ceremony's most famous moment, Napoleon took the crown from the Pope's hands and placed it on his own head, signaling that his authority derived from his own achievements rather than divine appointment. Jacques-Louis David's massive painting of the event, commissioned by Napoleon, became one of the era's defining images. The Empire Napoleon created reshaped Europe's legal and administrative systems far beyond France's borders. The Napoleonic Code, standardizing civil law, was imposed across conquered territories and remains the foundation of legal systems in dozens of countries. But the imperial title also removed the last republican constraints on Napoleon's ambitions, enabling the military campaigns that would eventually destroy his empire. The man who crowned himself master of Europe would be a prisoner on St. Helena within eleven years.

Abraham Lincoln won the Republican presidential nomination on May 18, 1860, on the third ballot at the Wigwam convention hall in Chicago, defeating the heavily favored William Seward in one of American politics' greatest upsets. Lincoln entered the convention as a regional figure, a former one-term congressman from Illinois known mainly for his 1858 Senate debates with Stephen Douglas. Seward, the senator from New York and the party's most prominent figure, had arrived in Chicago expecting a first-ballot coronation. Lincoln's campaign team, led by his ruthless political operator David Davis, worked the delegates relentlessly in the days before the vote. They packed the Wigwam's galleries with Lincoln supporters who had been given counterfeit admission tickets. They made deals with delegates from Indiana, Pennsylvania, and other swing states, promising cabinet positions and patronage in exchange for support. Lincoln himself stayed in Springfield, following the convention's tradition that candidates did not attend. Seward's vulnerability was his reputation for radicalism on the slavery question. His speeches about an "irrepressible conflict" and a "higher law" than the Constitution alarmed moderates who feared he could not win the general election. Lincoln, by contrast, had staked out a position opposing the expansion of slavery into new territories while accepting its existence in current slave states. This made him acceptable to both the party's radical and moderate wings. The nomination set up the most consequential presidential election in American history. Lincoln's victory in November, achieved with less than 40 percent of the popular vote in a four-way race, triggered the secession of seven southern states before he even took office. The man the Republican convention chose as a compromise candidate became the president who preserved the Union, abolished slavery, and redefined the meaning of American democracy. Seward, offered the consolation prize of Secretary of State, became Lincoln's most trusted advisor.

Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing for the Supreme Court on May 18, 1896, declared that a Louisiana law requiring separate railway cars for Black and white passengers did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision in Plessy v. Ferguson established the "separate but equal" doctrine that provided constitutional cover for racial segregation across the American South for the next fifty-eight years. Only one justice dissented. Homer Plessy, a mixed-race shoemaker from New Orleans, had been recruited by a citizens' committee specifically to test the constitutionality of Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890. Plessy was seven-eighths white and could easily have passed as a white passenger, but he identified himself as "colored" to the conductor and was arrested when he refused to move. The deliberate nature of the challenge was no secret, and the railroad company, which opposed the law because separate cars were expensive, cooperated with the committee. Justice Brown's majority opinion rested on the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed legal equality but could not enforce social equality. Separate facilities, the court reasoned, did not stamp Black citizens with "a badge of inferiority" unless they chose to interpret them that way. Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter, wrote one of the most prescient dissents in American legal history, declaring that "the Constitution is color-blind" and predicting that the decision would prove as harmful as the Dred Scott ruling. Harlan's prediction proved accurate. Plessy v. Ferguson enabled the construction of an elaborate system of racial separation that extended far beyond railway cars to schools, restaurants, theaters, hospitals, cemeteries, and drinking fountains. Southern states passed hundreds of Jim Crow laws that were always separate and never equal. The facilities provided to Black citizens were systematically inferior, and the legal system provided no remedy. It took the NAACP's multi-decade litigation campaign, culminating in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, to begin dismantling what Plessy had authorized.

A magnitude 5.1 earthquake shook Mount St. Helens at 8:32 AM on May 18, 1980, and the entire north face of the mountain slid away in the largest landslide in recorded history. The collapse released a lateral blast of superheated gas and rock that traveled at 670 miles per hour, flattening 230 square miles of forest in minutes. Trees four feet in diameter were snapped like matchsticks and laid out in parallel rows pointing away from the crater. Fifty-seven people died, most of them outside the official danger zone that geologists had established. The mountain had been rumbling since March, when a series of earthquakes and small eruptions signaled that magma was rising inside the volcano. A massive bulge grew on the north face, expanding outward at five feet per day. Scientists warned that a major eruption was likely, and Governor Dixy Lee Ray established a restricted zone around the mountain. But the zone was not large enough, and several residents and loggers refused to leave. The lateral blast was followed by a vertical eruption column that rose 80,000 feet into the atmosphere, depositing ash across eleven states and several Canadian provinces. Mudflows of volcanic debris and melted snow roared down river valleys at sixty miles per hour, destroying bridges, highways, and homes. Spirit Lake, at the mountain's base, was completely buried under hundreds of feet of debris. The eruption reduced the mountain's elevation by 1,313 feet. The economic damage exceeded $1 billion in 1980 dollars. The timber industry lost an estimated four billion board feet of lumber. Agricultural damage from ash fall was extensive across eastern Washington. But the eruption also provided an unprecedented scientific laboratory. Researchers have studied the mountain's recovery for over four decades, documenting how ecosystems regenerate after catastrophic volcanic events. Life returned to the blast zone faster than anyone predicted, with lupines and gophers leading the recolonization.

Harry R. Truman, the eighty-three-year-old owner of Mount St. Helens Lodge on Spirit Lake, refused every plea to evacuate in the weeks before the eruption of May 18, 1980. The former bootlegger and Korean War veteran had lived on the mountain for fifty-four years with his sixteen cats and told reporters, scientists, and the Washington National Guard the same thing: he would not leave his home. "That mountain's part of Truman and Truman's part of that mountain," he told one interviewer. Truman became a folk hero as the eruption threat grew. Television crews hiked to his lodge for interviews. Children wrote him letters begging him to leave. He received fan mail and marriage proposals. He appeared on national news broadcasts, whiskey in hand, dismissing the geologists' warnings with the confidence of a man who had watched the mountain his entire adult life. He told one reporter the mountain might "blow her guts out" but that the lodge would be safe by the lake. When the north face collapsed at 8:32 AM on May 18, a wall of rock and debris traveling at 150 miles per hour buried Spirit Lake under 600 feet of volcanic material. The lodge, the lake, the surrounding forest, and Harry Truman were entombed in an instant. His body was never recovered. The debris deposit over Spirit Lake was so deep that the lake's surface elevation rose 200 feet. Truman's defiance resonated with a public that admired stubbornness in the face of authority, even when that authority was the force of geology. Country songs were written about him. His name appeared on memorabilia. The National Geographic documentary about the eruption devoted significant time to his story. For scientists, he represented the deadly consequences of underestimating volcanic hazards. For everyone else, he was an old man who loved his mountain and died with it.

Flemish rebels crept through the streets of Bruges before dawn on May 18, 1302, systematically killing every French soldier and sympathizer they could find. The attackers used a linguistic test to identify their targets: anyone who could not correctly pronounce the Flemish phrase "schild en vriend" (shield and friend) was cut down. The massacre, known as the Bruges Matins, killed between one and two thousand French troops and Flemish collaborators and ignited an uprising that challenged France's domination of Flanders. French King Philip IV had annexed Flanders in 1300, deposing Count Guy of Dampierre and installing a military governor. The occupation was deeply unpopular among Flemish craftsmen and merchants, who resented French taxation and the preferential treatment given to a small class of wealthy Flemish nobles who collaborated with the occupiers. Pieter de Coninck, a weaver, and Jan Breydel, a butcher, organized the resistance among the guilds. The linguistic shibboleth used during the massacre reflected the deep cultural divide between French-speaking elites and Flemish-speaking commoners. The French garrison and their allies, who spoke French or could not master the guttural Flemish pronunciation, were easily identified. The killing was targeted and efficient, clearing the city of French military presence in a single night. The Bruges Matins led directly to the Battle of the Golden Spurs on July 11, 1302, where Flemish militia, composed largely of guild members and craftsmen, defeated a French army of armored knights near Courtrai. The victors collected hundreds of golden spurs from fallen French nobles and hung them in the Church of Our Lady in Courtrai. The battle demonstrated that trained infantry could defeat mounted knights, a lesson that foreshadowed the end of feudal cavalry warfare. July 11 remains the official holiday of the Flemish community in Belgium.