October 16 in History

The Long March that began on October 16, 1934, was a military disaster by every conventional measure — more than 90 percent of the original force was lost — yet it became the founding myth of Communist China and the crucible that forged Mao Zedong's absolute authority over the party. When the battered survivors reached Shaanxi Province a year later, Mao had transformed himself from one leader among several into the indispensable figure of the Chinese revolution. The march covered approximately 6,000 miles through some of the most punishing terrain on Earth. The Red Army crossed raging rivers, sometimes under enemy fire — the crossing of the Luding Bridge over the Dadu River, where soldiers crawled hand-over-hand across iron chains while Nationalist troops fired from the opposite bank, became one of the Communist Party's most celebrated heroic narratives. They climbed snow-covered mountain passes above 16,000 feet where soldiers died of exposure and oxygen deprivation. They trudged through the vast grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau, where men disappeared into bottomless bogs and survivors ate their leather belts and boots to stave off starvation. Mao consolidated power during the march through a combination of military pragmatism and political maneuvering. At the Zunyi Conference in January 1935, he outmaneuvered the Soviet-backed faction that had led the party into its Jiangxi debacle, emerging as the dominant military strategist. His guerrilla tactics — constant movement, deception, and avoidance of pitched battles — proved far more effective than the positional warfare favored by his rivals. Of the roughly 86,000 who departed Jiangxi, about 8,000 completed the full march to Yan'an. The survivors formed an almost mystical brotherhood that dominated Chinese politics for the next half-century. Mao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and virtually every senior leader of the People's Republic had endured the march together, and shared suffering became the party's most powerful claim to legitimacy. The Long March remains central to the Communist Party's narrative of itself — the story of a movement that survived the impossible and emerged stronger.

Marie Antoinette rode to the guillotine in an open cart on October 16, 1793, her hair shorn white, her hands bound behind her back, staring straight ahead as Parisian crowds lined the route to jeer. She was 37 years old, and the French Revolution had already killed her husband Louis XVI nine months earlier. Her execution was both the climax of popular fury against the monarchy and one of the most controversial acts of revolutionary justice. Born an Austrian archduchess in 1755, Marie Antoinette arrived in France at age 14 to marry the future Louis XVI, a match designed to cement the alliance between the Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties. She was deeply unpopular from the start. The French public resented the Austrian alliance and viewed the young queen's extravagant spending and love of fashion as evidence of aristocratic contempt for ordinary suffering. The famous quote "Let them eat cake" was almost certainly never spoken by her, but it captured the public perception perfectly. The Revolution that began in 1789 trapped the royal family in an increasingly dangerous spiral. Louis and Marie Antoinette were forced from Versailles to Paris, placed under effective house arrest in the Tuileries Palace, and caught attempting to flee France in the disastrous Flight to Varennes in June 1791. That failed escape destroyed whatever sympathy remained for the monarchy and convinced many revolutionaries that the king was conspiring with foreign powers against his own people. Louis was executed in January 1793, and Marie Antoinette was transferred to the Conciergerie prison. Her trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal was a grotesque affair that included baseless accusations of sexual abuse of her own son — charges so outrageous that they generated momentary sympathy even among her enemies. Found guilty of treason, she was executed the same day. On the scaffold, she accidentally stepped on the executioner's foot and reportedly said, "Pardon me, sir. I did not mean to do it." Her body was thrown into an unmarked grave. Marie Antoinette remains a polarizing figure — tragic victim or symbol of royal excess, depending on who tells the story.

John Brown led twenty-one men — sixteen white and five Black — in an armed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on the night of October 16, 1859, intending to seize weapons and ignite a slave rebellion across the South. The raid failed catastrophically within 36 hours, but Brown's trial and execution turned him into either a martyr or a madman, depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you stood, and pushed the nation measurably closer to civil war. Brown was a 59-year-old abolitionist from Connecticut who had spent years fighting pro-slavery forces in the Kansas Territory, earning the nickname "Old Brown of Osawatomie" after leading guerrilla attacks that killed several pro-slavery settlers. He was deeply religious, believing himself an instrument of God's will to destroy slavery. His plan for Harpers Ferry was ambitious to the point of fantasy: seize the arsenal, arm enslaved people in the surrounding countryside, and establish a free state in the Appalachian Mountains that would serve as a refuge and base for further insurrection. The raid went wrong almost immediately. Brown's men captured the arsenal and took several hostages, including Colonel Lewis Washington, a great-grandnephew of George Washington. But the local militia pinned them down, and no slave uprising materialized. The enslaved people of the region, lacking advance knowledge of the plan and understandably cautious, did not join. A company of U.S. Marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee stormed the engine house where Brown's men had barricaded themselves, killing ten of the raiders and capturing Brown, who was wounded by saber cuts. Brown's trial was swift. He was convicted of murder, conspiracy, and treason against Virginia and hanged on December 2, 1859. His composure and eloquence during the trial electrified the North. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Christ, and Henry David Thoreau called him "a crucified hero." The South was terrified, seeing confirmation that abolitionists would use violence to destroy their way of life. Brown's raid did not start the Civil War, but it hardened positions on both sides and demonstrated that the slavery question would ultimately be settled not by compromise but by blood.

Margaret Sanger opened America's first birth control clinic at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn on October 16, 1916, and within nine days police shut it down and arrested her. The clinic's brief existence and Sanger's subsequent trial launched the reproductive rights movement in the United States and began a legal and social transformation that would take decades to complete. Sanger was a trained nurse who had worked among impoverished immigrant families on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where she witnessed women suffering from repeated unwanted pregnancies, botched self-induced abortions, and the poverty that came from having more children than a family could support. The experience radicalized her. She began publishing information about contraception in her newspaper, The Woman Rebel, and fled to Europe in 1914 to avoid prosecution under the Comstock laws, which classified birth control information as obscene material. The Brownsville clinic served nearly 500 women in its nine days of operation. Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne, also a nurse, provided contraceptive advice and devices to women who lined up around the block. Many were immigrant mothers with multiple children who had no access to family planning information. When police raided the clinic, Sanger was charged with violating New York's obscenity laws. Her trial generated enormous publicity and public sympathy. Sanger's conviction was upheld, but the appeals court ruling contained a crucial exception: doctors could prescribe contraception for medical reasons. This loophole became the legal foundation for the birth control movement. Sanger went on to found the American Birth Control League in 1921, which later became Planned Parenthood. She championed research that led to the development of the oral contraceptive pill, approved by the FDA in 1960. Her legacy is complicated by her association with the eugenics movement and controversial statements about race and immigration, but her role in making contraception legally available and socially acceptable in the United States is beyond dispute.