May 5 in History

The French army had not lost a battle in nearly fifty years. On May 5, 1862, outside the city of Puebla in central Mexico, a force of 4,500 Mexican soldiers under General Ignacio Zaragoza shattered that record, repelling three French assaults and inflicting over 450 casualties on a professional European army that had expected to march to Mexico City without serious resistance. France's intervention in Mexico was the brainchild of Emperor Napoleon III, who saw an opportunity to establish a French client state in the Americas while the United States was consumed by its own civil war. Mexico had suspended foreign debt payments in 1861, giving Napoleon a pretext to send troops. Spain and Britain, the other creditors, withdrew after recognizing France's imperial ambitions, but Napoleon pressed forward with 6,000 soldiers under General Charles de Lorencez. Lorencez approached Puebla on May 5 with supreme confidence. His troops were veterans of campaigns in Crimea, Italy, and Algeria. Zaragoza's defenders were a mix of regular army units and indigenous militias, many armed with outdated weapons. Zaragoza positioned his forces on the fortified hills of Loreto and Guadalupe above the city and waited. The French launched three frontal assaults uphill through muddy terrain under fire. Each attack broke against the Mexican fortifications. A cavalry charge by Mexican lancers drove back the final French advance, and by evening Lorencez ordered a retreat, having lost 462 men to Mexico's 83. The defeat was tactical rather than strategic, as France returned the following year with 30,000 troops and installed Archduke Maximilian of Austria as Emperor of Mexico. The battle's military significance was limited, but its symbolic power was enormous. Zaragoza's victory proved that a Latin American nation could defeat a European imperial power in open combat. Cinco de Mayo became a celebration of Mexican resilience, observed more widely in Mexican-American communities in the United States than in Mexico itself, where September 16 (Independence Day) holds greater national significance.

Sitting Bull crossed the international boundary into Saskatchewan with roughly 5,000 Lakota people in May 1877, and the greatest military leader the Plains nations had produced became a refugee. The man whose coalition had destroyed Custer's command at Little Bighorn less than a year earlier chose exile over surrender, leading his followers north into the land they called "Grandmother's Country" after Queen Victoria. The flight followed months of relentless pursuit by Colonel Nelson Miles and the U.S. Army's winter campaign across Montana Territory. After Little Bighorn, the army adopted a strategy of attrition, attacking Lakota and Cheyenne camps in freezing weather, destroying food stores and horse herds, and forcing band after band to surrender. Crazy Horse gave up in May 1877. Sitting Bull, unwilling to accept reservation life, gathered those who refused to submit and moved north. The Canadian government, through the North-West Mounted Police, assigned Major James Moresby Walsh to manage the situation. Walsh developed an unlikely respect for Sitting Bull and advocated for the Lakota's right to remain. The Canadian position was legally precarious: Britain's territory had no obligation to shelter American fugitives, but the Lakota had committed no crime under Canadian law and had historical ties to the northern plains. Life in exile was brutal. The buffalo herds that the Lakota depended on were rapidly disappearing on both sides of the border. Canadian authorities refused to provide rations or grant reservation land, viewing the American refugees as a temporary problem. Starvation became chronic. Smaller groups peeled away and returned south to surrender throughout 1878 and 1879. Sitting Bull held out longer than anyone. He finally crossed back into the United States and surrendered at Fort Buford, Dakota Territory, on July 19, 1881, with 186 followers, the last significant band of free Lakota. He told the commanding officer he wished to be remembered as "the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle." The government sent him to the Standing Rock Reservation, where he was killed by Indian police in December 1890.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky stood at the podium and raised his baton before an audience that had spent weeks debating whether the new concert hall on Seventh Avenue and 57th Street would have acceptable acoustics. The inaugural concert at the Music Hall, later renamed Carnegie Hall, on May 5, 1891, answered the question within the first measures. The room's warm, resonant sound would make it one of the most celebrated performance spaces in the world. The hall existed because Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born steel magnate, married a woman who loved music. Louise Whitfield Carnegie introduced her husband to Walter Damrosch, the conductor of the New York Symphony Society, during their honeymoon voyage to Scotland in 1887. Damrosch convinced Carnegie that New York lacked a concert hall worthy of the city's cultural ambitions, and Carnegie agreed to fund its construction at a cost of roughly $1.1 million. Architect William Burnet Tuthill, an amateur cellist, designed the building with acoustic performance as the primary consideration. The main auditorium seated 2,800 in a shoe-box shape with an arched ceiling that distributed sound evenly throughout the space. The stage had no proscenium arch, placing performers in closer acoustic contact with the audience. Tuthill used layers of plaster and concrete with airspaces between them to create natural reverberation. Tchaikovsky conducted his Marche Solennelle during the five-night opening festival, sharing the program with Damrosch and other performers. The Russian composer, already the most famous musician in the world, had been persuaded to make the transatlantic journey with a fee of $2,500 and first-class accommodations. He found New York overwhelming but the audience enthusiastic. Carnegie Hall became the premier concert venue in the United States and arguably the world. Virtually every major classical musician, jazz artist, and popular performer of the twentieth century played there. The building narrowly escaped demolition in 1960, when the opening of Lincoln Center threatened to make it redundant. Violinist Isaac Stern led a public campaign that saved the hall, and the city purchased it in 1962.

Napoleon Bonaparte spent his final years dictating his memoirs to a small circle of loyal companions on a windswept volcanic island in the South Atlantic, crafting the legend that would outlive him by centuries. He died at Longwood House on Saint Helena on May 5, 1821, at age 51, after months of severe abdominal pain, vomiting, and progressive weakness that his doctors could not explain or treat. The British had exiled Napoleon to Saint Helena after his defeat at Waterloo in June 1815 and his brief second abdication. The island, 1,200 miles from the nearest landmass, was chosen specifically because escape was impossible. Governor Sir Hudson Lowe, assigned to guard the former emperor, imposed restrictions that Napoleon and his entourage considered deliberately humiliating: armed sentries within sight of the house, limits on riding, and the requirement that Napoleon present himself to a British officer daily. Napoleon's health declined steadily from 1817 onward. He suffered from chronic stomach pain, and his physician, Francesco Antommarchi, diagnosed hepatitis. The autopsy performed the day after his death revealed a large cancerous tumor on the inner wall of his stomach, with extensive ulceration. His father, Carlo Bonaparte, had died of stomach cancer at a similar age, suggesting a hereditary predisposition. Theories of arsenic poisoning persisted for over a century after analyses of Napoleon's hair revealed elevated arsenic levels. Most modern historians and toxicologists attribute the arsenic to environmental exposure from wallpaper dyes, hair treatments, and wine preservatives common in the period rather than deliberate poisoning. Napoleon's body remained on Saint Helena until 1840, when King Louis-Philippe of France negotiated its return. The coffin was opened and, remarkably, the body was found well preserved. Napoleon was reinterred beneath the dome of Les Invalides in Paris, where over a million visitors pay their respects each year. His final request was granted: "I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that French people which I have loved so much."

John T. Scopes was not even sure he had taught evolution. The 24-year-old high school football coach and substitute biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, agreed to be arrested on May 5, 1925, after a group of local businessmen recruited him as a test case to challenge the Butler Act, a new state law prohibiting the teaching of human evolution in public schools. The ensuing trial became the most famous courtroom spectacle in American history. The American Civil Liberties Union, founded just five years earlier, had placed newspaper advertisements seeking a Tennessee teacher willing to challenge the law. George Rappleyea, a Dayton mining manager, saw an opportunity to generate publicity for the struggling town. He persuaded Scopes, who had used a chapter on evolution from the state-approved textbook while substituting for the regular biology teacher, to volunteer as the defendant. The trial attracted the two most famous lawyers in America. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and a leader of the fundamentalist movement, joined the prosecution. Clarence Darrow, the nation's most celebrated defense attorney and an outspoken agnostic, represented Scopes. Over 200 newspaper reporters descended on Dayton, and the trial became one of the first to be broadcast by radio, reaching millions of listeners. The legal proceedings lasted eight days in July 1925. The judge barred expert testimony on evolution, limiting the defense's strategy. Darrow's most dramatic move was calling Bryan himself as a witness on the Bible, cross-examining him on the literal truth of scripture in a session conducted outdoors because of the heat. Bryan's halting answers damaged the fundamentalist cause in the court of public opinion, though Scopes was convicted and fined $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned Scopes's conviction on a technicality the following year, and the Butler Act remained on the books until 1967. Bryan died five days after the trial ended. The case established the cultural battle lines between science education and religious conservatism that persist in American public schools a century later.