September 17 in History

More Americans died on September 17, 1862, than on any other single day in the nation’s history. The Battle of Antietam, fought along a meandering creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland, produced roughly 22,700 casualties in twelve hours of combat so intense that individual fields and terrain features earned names like Bloody Lane, the Cornfield, and Burnside’s Bridge. The tactical result was a draw, but the strategic consequences altered the trajectory of the Civil War and American history. Robert E. Lee had invaded Maryland with roughly 40,000 troops, seeking a victory on Northern soil that would demoralize the Union, encourage antiwar Democrats, and potentially win diplomatic recognition from Britain and France. His army was ragged, undersupplied, and weakened by straggling, but it had spent the summer demolishing Union forces in Virginia. George McClellan, commanding the Army of the Potomac with roughly 87,000 men, had the added advantage of having intercepted Lee’s battle plans, yet he advanced with his characteristic caution. The battle unfolded in three distinct phases across the Union left, center, and right, each a maelstrom of close-range violence. At dawn, Joseph Hooker’s corps attacked through a cornfield that changed hands fifteen times. By midmorning, the fighting shifted to a sunken road where Confederate defenders were eventually overrun, leaving bodies stacked so thick in the lane that the dead served as a parapet. In the afternoon, Ambrose Burnside’s corps spent hours trying to cross a narrow stone bridge under fire, finally breaking through only to be checked by A.P. Hill’s division arriving from Harpers Ferry. McClellan held 20,000 men in reserve and never committed them, allowing Lee to retreat across the Potomac on September 18. The failure to destroy Lee’s army remains one of the war’s great missed opportunities. But the Confederate retreat gave Lincoln enough of a victory to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, declaring that all enslaved people in rebel states would be free as of January 1, 1863. The proclamation transformed the war from a fight to preserve the Union into a crusade against slavery, ensuring that Britain and France would never intervene on behalf of the Confederacy.

Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge became the first person to die in a powered airplane crash on September 17, 1908, when the Wright Flyer piloted by Orville Wright plummeted seventy-five feet into the parade ground at Fort Myer, Virginia. Selfridge, a twenty-six-year-old Army Signal Corps officer who was among the military’s most enthusiastic advocates of aviation, died of a fractured skull hours after the crash. Wright survived with a broken leg and cracked ribs, and the accident grounded the brothers’ military demonstration flights for nearly a year. The Wright brothers had come to Fort Myer to demonstrate their airplane to the U.S. Army, which had issued a specification for a heavier-than-air flying machine capable of carrying two people at forty miles per hour. Orville had been conducting increasingly ambitious flights over the preceding days, circling the parade ground for over an hour on September 12 and impressing the military observers with the machine’s stability and endurance. Selfridge, who had worked with Alexander Graham Bell’s Aerial Experiment Association and had designed his own aircraft, asked to fly as a passenger. On the fourth circuit of the field at an altitude of approximately 150 feet, a crack split the air. One of the wooden propeller blades had fractured, striking a wire brace that controlled the rear rudder. The rudder jammed, and the Flyer went into a nose-down spiral from which Wright could not recover. The aircraft hit the ground with tremendous force, collapsing around both occupants. Soldiers and spectators rushed to the wreckage to pull the men free. Selfridge’s death cast a shadow over the birth of military aviation, but it did not derail it. The Army renewed the Wright brothers’ contract, and Orville returned to Fort Myer the following summer to complete the demonstration trials successfully. Selfridge was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. The crash led to engineering improvements in propeller design and structural bracing, and it established the sobering precedent that aviation, for all its promise, would exact a human cost. Fort Myer’s airfield was later named Selfridge Field in his honor.

Thirty-nine delegates signed their names to a four-page document in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House on September 17, 1787, completing a task that had consumed four months of secret deliberation during the hottest summer anyone in Philadelphia could remember. The United States Constitution replaced the failing Articles of Confederation with a framework of government so durable that it remains the oldest written national constitution still in force, amended only twenty-seven times in nearly two and a half centuries. The delegates who gathered in May 1787 had been authorized only to revise the Articles, not to draft an entirely new system of government. Within days, Virginia’s delegation presented a plan for a bicameral legislature, a national executive, and an independent judiciary that amounted to a complete replacement. The ensuing debates were fierce. Large states wanted representation proportional to population; small states demanded equal representation. Slave states insisted that enslaved people be counted for apportionment purposes; Northern delegates objected. The Connecticut Compromise produced a Senate with equal state representation and a House based on population, while the Three-Fifths Compromise counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a free person for census purposes. The framers, led by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris, built a system of separated powers and overlapping checks designed to prevent any single faction from dominating the government. The presidency was a novel invention, an elected executive powerful enough to govern but constrained by congressional oversight and judicial review. The amendment process was deliberately difficult, requiring supermajorities in Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states. Benjamin Franklin, eighty-one years old and too frail to stand for long, offered the closing remarks. He confessed that the document was imperfect but urged every member to "doubt a little of his own infallibility" and sign. Three delegates, Edmund Randolph, George Mason, and Elbridge Gerry, refused. The ratification battle that followed was bitter, producing the Federalist Papers and the promise of a Bill of Rights that secured the necessary nine-state majority. The Constitution took effect on March 4, 1789, and the experiment in self-governance that skeptics across Europe predicted would fail has outlasted every monarchy and empire that doubted it.

Fourteen men gathered in Ralph Hay’s Hupmobile automobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, on September 17, 1920, and created the American Professional Football Association, the organization that would be renamed the National Football League two years later. Some of the representatives reportedly sat on the running boards of the cars in the showroom because there were not enough chairs. The entry fee was one hundred dollars, though there is no evidence any team actually paid it. Professional football, which had been a loosely organized and faintly disreputable regional pastime, now had a formal structure, however threadbare. The meeting was driven by a practical problem: player poaching. Teams had been raiding each other’s rosters with impunity, bidding up salaries and luring players to jump contracts mid-season. The chaos was destroying what little financial stability the teams possessed. Jim Thorpe, the legendary Olympic athlete who played for the Canton Bulldogs, was named president, though the title was largely honorary and the real organizational work fell to others. The original roster of teams reads like a directory of midwestern industrial towns: the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Dayton Triangles, Rock Island Independents, and Muncie Flyers among them. Most played in baseball parks or public fields, charged modest admission, and operated on budgets that would not cover a modern player’s meal allowance. The Akron Pros won the first championship with an 8-0-3 record, earning their players approximately $1,500 for the season. The league nearly died multiple times in its first decade. Franchises folded constantly, attendance was sparse, and college football was considered the superior product by fans and sportswriters alike. The turning point came in 1925 when Red Grange, the most famous college player in America, signed with the Chicago Bears and drew massive crowds on a barnstorming tour. The 1958 NFL Championship Game, televised nationally and decided in overtime, cemented football as America’s premier spectator sport. The league that started on the running boards of Hupmobiles now generates over $18 billion in annual revenue.