September 10 in History

A sheriff's posse opened fire on a crowd of unarmed immigrant coal miners marching peacefully on a public road near Lattimer, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 1897, killing 19 men and wounding at least 36 others, most of them shot in the back as they tried to flee. The Lattimer Massacre was one of the bloodiest episodes in the history of American labor, and nearly all the victims were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, Slavic and Lithuanian miners who had walked off the job to protest wage discrimination and the practice of requiring miners to use company-owned stores. The miners, roughly 400 strong, were marching from the town of Harwood to the Lattimer mine to persuade workers there to join their strike. They carried no weapons and had an American flag at the head of their column. Luzerne County Sheriff James Martin, accompanied by a posse of about 150 deputies recruited from the local English-speaking population, confronted the marchers at the edge of Lattimer. Martin ordered the miners to disperse, and when they attempted to walk around the posse, the deputies began firing without warning. The shooting lasted less than two minutes. The miners had been striking against conditions that were brutally exploitative even by the standards of the Gilded Age. Mining companies paid immigrant workers significantly less than native-born Americans for the same work, deducted fees for tools, powder, and medical care, and required purchases at company stores where prices were inflated. The miners had no union representation and no legal recourse; the companies owned the houses they lived in and could evict striking workers and their families on a day's notice. Sheriff Martin and 73 deputies were charged with murder but acquitted by a jury of English and Irish Americans who shared the widespread prejudice against the newer immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The acquittal outraged immigrant communities across the coal regions and became a powerful recruiting tool for the United Mine Workers of America. The Lattimer Massacre is credited as the single event that most accelerated the unionization of the anthracite coal fields, transforming what had been a fragmented workforce of competing ethnic groups into a unified labor movement that would win major concessions in the great anthracite strikes of 1900 and 1902.

Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant convicted of the torture and murder of his former girlfriend, was executed by guillotine at Baumettes Prison in Marseille on September 10, 1977, becoming the last person in France and in all of Western Europe to die by this method. The execution was carried out before dawn, following the tradition of guillotine executions being performed in the early morning hours, and the blade that fell on Djandoubi closed a chapter in French justice that had lasted 188 years, from the Terror of the Revolution to the final drop in a Marseille prison yard. Djandoubi had kidnapped, tortured, and murdered Elisabeth Bousquet, a 21-year-old woman, in 1974. After a relationship that Bousquet had ended, Djandoubi abducted her and subjected her to prolonged physical abuse before strangling her and burning her body. His trial was straightforward, and the jury sentenced him to death after brief deliberation. President Valery Giscard d'Estaing declined to exercise his right of clemency, allowing the sentence to proceed. The guillotine had been introduced in 1792 as a humanitarian reform. Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a physician and member of the National Assembly, proposed the device to ensure that execution was instantaneous, painless, and identical for all citizens regardless of class, replacing the varied and often gruesome methods of the ancien regime. The blade became inseparable from the Terror that followed, executing an estimated 17,000 people between 1793 and 1794, including King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The machine remained France's sole legal method of execution for nearly two centuries. France abolished the death penalty entirely on October 9, 1981, under President Francois Mitterrand, who had campaigned explicitly on the issue. Justice Minister Robert Badinter presented the abolition bill to the National Assembly with an impassioned speech declaring that the death penalty was incompatible with the values of a civilized democracy. France became one of the last Western European nations to abolish capital punishment, joining a continental consensus against state killing that now extends across the entire European Union as a condition of membership.

Captain John Smith was elected president of the Jamestown council on September 10, 1608, taking command of a colony that had nearly destroyed itself through starvation, disease, infighting, and a persistent refusal among many of the colonists to perform the manual labor necessary for survival. Smith, a 28-year-old soldier of fortune who had fought in wars across Europe and once been enslaved by the Ottoman Turks, imposed martial discipline on the settlement with a dictum that became the colony's unofficial motto: "He who does not work shall not eat." Jamestown had been founded in May 1607 by the Virginia Company of London as a commercial venture, and the 104 original settlers were a disastrous mix for frontier survival. Roughly half were classified as "gentlemen," men of social standing who considered physical labor beneath their dignity, and the remainder included goldsmiths, jewelers, and other tradesmen more suited to a European city than a malarial swamp on the James River. Within seven months, more than half the colonists were dead from disease, starvation, and occasional attacks by the Powhatan Confederacy. Smith had already proven himself the most capable leader in the colony before his election. He organized trading expeditions with the Powhatan to obtain corn, explored the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, and compiled the maps and accounts that would inform English understanding of the region for decades. His relationship with the Powhatan paramount chief Wahunsenacawh, and the famous if debated story of his rescue by the chief's daughter Pocahontas, remained central to the mythology of Jamestown, though Smith's own accounts of the episode grew more dramatic with each retelling. Smith's presidency lasted only a year before a gunpowder accident forced his return to England in October 1609. Without his leadership, the colony collapsed into the "Starving Time" of the winter of 1609-1610, when roughly 440 of 500 colonists died and survivors resorted to eating horses, rats, shoe leather, and in at least one confirmed case, the corpse of a deceased colonist. Jamestown survived, barely, and became the first permanent English settlement in North America, but its early years demonstrated that colonizing the New World required practical skill and ruthless discipline far more than aristocratic ambition.

Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's squadron destroyed the British fleet on Lake Erie on September 10, 1813, winning the most decisive naval engagement of the War of 1812 and seizing control of the Great Lakes for the United States. Perry, just 28 years old, sent his famous dispatch to General William Henry Harrison after the battle: "We have met the enemy and they are ours: two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop." The victory forced the British to abandon Detroit and retreat into Upper Canada, opening the western theater of the war to American advance. Perry had built much of his fleet from scratch at Presque Isle, on the shores of Lake Erie near present-day Erie, Pennsylvania, using green timber cut from the surrounding forests. The shipbuilders, led by master carpenter Noah Brown, constructed two 20-gun brigs, the Lawrence and the Niagara, in roughly three months, an extraordinary feat of wartime construction. Perry manned his vessels with a mixed crew of sailors, soldiers, and frontier militia, many of whom had never served aboard a warship. The battle was fought near Put-in-Bay, off the Bass Islands in western Lake Erie. Perry's flagship, the Lawrence, bore the brunt of British fire and was reduced to a wreck, with 80 percent of her crew killed or wounded. In one of the most celebrated moments in American naval history, Perry transferred his command to the Niagara by rowing an open boat across the battle line under enemy fire, carrying his battle flag inscribed with the dying words of Captain James Lawrence: "Don't Give Up the Ship." Aboard the Niagara, Perry sailed directly through the British line and delivered broadsides that forced the remaining enemy vessels to surrender. The Battle of Lake Erie was the first time in history that an entire British naval squadron surrendered. Perry's victory severed the British supply line to their Native American allies, led by Tecumseh, and enabled Harrison to advance into Canada, where he won the Battle of the Thames a month later. Tecumseh was killed in that engagement, effectively ending the pan-Indian alliance that had threatened American expansion into the Northwest Territory. Control of the Great Lakes, secured at Perry's battle, remained with the United States permanently.

Qin Shi Huang was terrified of death. He sent maritime expeditions to find the legendary islands of the immortals in the eastern sea. He consumed mercury pills that his court alchemists claimed would grant eternal life. The mercury was almost certainly killing him. He died in 210 BC on an inspection tour of the eastern provinces, at approximately 49 years old. Born Ying Zheng in 259 BC, he became king of the state of Qin at thirteen after his father's death. By 221 BC, at 38, he had conquered the six rival kingdoms that had divided China for centuries and proclaimed himself Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor, adopting a title that no Chinese ruler had used before. His unification was not merely military. He standardized weights, measures, and coinage across the empire. He imposed a single writing system, replacing the diverse scripts used in the former kingdoms, a reform that enabled communication across vast distances and laid the foundation for a shared Chinese cultural identity. He standardized the width of cart axles so vehicles could use the same road ruts throughout the empire. He built a network of roads and canals connecting the regions. He connected and expanded existing defensive walls along the northern frontier into the precursor of the Great Wall, using forced labor on a massive scale. Hundreds of thousands of workers, many of them convicts and conscripted peasants, died during the construction. His court kept his death secret for months, transporting the body in a closed imperial carriage and continuing to deliver meals to the rotting corpse so the attendants wouldn't know. The prime minister Li Si and the eunuch Zhao Gao forged an edict naming a pliable younger son as successor and ordering the original heir to commit suicide. His tomb complex near Xi'an, discovered in 1974, contained an army of approximately 8,000 terracotta warriors, each with unique facial features, arranged in battle formation to guard the emperor in the afterlife. The main burial chamber has never been excavated. Ancient texts describe rivers of mercury within it. Soil testing has found elevated mercury levels, suggesting the accounts may be accurate. His empire lasted four years after his death. The administrative structures he built lasted two millennia.