1823 – Simon Bolivar Buckner (d.1914), Lt. Gen. (Confederate Army), was born.
1853 – Cincinnati became the first U.S. city to pay its firefighters a regular salary.
1826 – Samuel Morey patents the internal combustion engine.
1833 – The Convention of 1833, a political gathering of settlers in Mexican Texas to help draft a series of petitions to the Mexican government, begins in San Felipe de Austin
1863 – First wartime conscription law went into effect in the U.S.
1865 – Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s supply line into Petersburg, Virginia, is closed when Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant collapse the end of Lee’s lines around Petersburg. The Confederates suffer heavy casualties, and the battle triggered Lee’s retreat from Petersburg as the two armies began a race that would end a week later at Appomattox Court House. For nearly a year, Grant had laid siege to Lee’s army in an elaborate network of trenches that ran from Petersburg to the Confederate capital at Richmond, 25 miles north. Lee’s hungry army slowly dwindled through the winter of 1864-65 as Grant’s army swelled with well-fed reinforcements. On March 25, Lee attacked part of the Union trenches at Fort Stedman in a desperate attempt to break the siege and split Grant’s force. When that attack failed, Grant began mobilizing his forces along the entire 40-mile front. Southwest of Petersburg, Grant sent General Philip Sheridan against Lee’s right flank. Sheridan moved forward on March 31, but the tough Confederates halted his advance. Sheridan moved troops to cut the railroad that ran from the southwest into Petersburg, but the focus of the battle became Five Forks, a road intersection that provided the key to Lee’s supply line. Lee instructed his commander there, General George Pickett, to “Hold Five Forks at all hazards.” On April 1, Sheridan’s men slammed into Pickett’s troops. Pickett had his force poorly positioned, and he was taking a long lunch with his staff when the attack occurred. General Gouverneur K. Warren’s V Corps supported Sheridan, and the 27,000 Yankee troops soon crushed Pickett’s command of 10,000. The Union lost 1,000 casualties, but nearly 5,000 of Pickett’s men were killed, wounded, or captured. During the battle, Sheridan, with the approval of Grant, removed Warren from command despite Warren’s effective deployment of his troops. It appears that a long-simmering feud between the two was the cause, but Warren was not officially cleared of any wrongdoing by a court of inquiry until 1882. The vital intersection was in Union hands, and Lee’s supply line was cut. Grant now attacked all along the Petersburg-Richmond front and Lee evacuated the cities. The two armies began a race west, but Lee could not outrun Grant. The Confederate leader surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9.
1865 – Worn down by the stresses of his office, Florida Governor John Milton commits suicide at his plantation, Sylvania. Milton was a capable governor who valiantly defended his state and supplied provisions to the Confederacy, but by the end of the war much of Florida was occupied by Union forces and the state’s finances were depleted. Just before his death, Milton addressed the Florida legislature and said that Yankees “have developed a character so odious that death would be preferable to reunion with them.” Milton was 57 when he put a pistol to his head.
1884 – Florence Blanchfield, an American nurse who was the first woman to become a fully ranked officer of the U.S. Army, was born. She was the first woman to receive a commission in the Regular Army. In making the presentation of her commission in a ceremony in 1947, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower paid tribute to the heroism of the Army nurses. The War Department credited Colonel Blanchfield, who at the time had spent 30 years in the Army Nurse Corps, with being “largely instrumental in securing full military rank for nurses.” She marshaled her arguments for “full” rather than “relative” rank at hearings before a succession of Congressional committees. Full rank was won on a temporary basis in July, 1944, and was made permanent by the Army and Navy Nurse Corps Law of April 16, 1947. Behind all the arguments was a matter of down-to-earth pay–or, in today’s terms, should women earn less than men for the same work? In March, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Mrs. Julia O. Flikke, Miss Blanchfield’s predecessor as superintendent, as a colonel and Miss Blanchfield as a lieutenant colonel. The Controller General then ruled that there could not legally be a woman colonel in the Army. He issued Colonel Flikke the pay of a major and Lieutenant Colonel Blanchfield the pay of a captain. It took a new law to permit the rate of pay to catch up with the rank. She was born at Sheperdstown, W. Va. She attended the public schools of Walnut Springs, Va., and was graduated from the Granda Institute of Granda, Va. She took a secretarial course at the Martin Business College of Pittsburgh and other courses at the University of California and Columbia University. Her attention then turned to nursing, and she studied at Pittsburgh’s South Side Training School for Nurses, from which she was graduated in 1906. She took a postgraduate course in surgical techniques and operating room supervision at Dr. Howard Kelly’s Sanitarium and at Johns Hopkins Hospital and worked in three Pennsylvania hospitals. A year of work in the Canal Zone followed, with general and anesthetic duties, and she became industrial nurse at the United States Steel Company’s plant at Bessemer, Pa. In 1916 she went to the Suburban General Hospital in Bellevue, Pa. and then, in 1917, took a military leave. She entered the Army Nurse Corps on Aug. 20, 1917. Miss Blanchfield, who never married, concerned herself with the privilege of Army nurses to take a husband. In June, 1944, with the war still on, she reported that over a four-month period an average of 14 nurses each day became wives. At the time the Nurse Corps numbered about 40,000. It was another six months, in January, 1945, that the Navy Nurses Corps permitted nurses in service to marry without resigning. The Navy at the time still barred married nurses. The reason for the reluctant acceptance of the married nurse was the hard fact that nurses who wanted to be married were resigning in large numbers, and the only way to keep them, it seemed, was to permit them to be married. Miss Blanchfield, in service in many countries, China, the Phillipines and Europe in addition to a number of Army installations in the United States, paid tribute to the nurses’ aides, and added: “We have no fears of there being a surplus of nurses after World War II as after World War I.”
1893 – Navy General Order 409 of 25 February 1893 establishes the rank of Chief Petty Officer as of this date.
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