January 9 · This Day in America
An unarmed merchant steamer, the Star of the West, slips toward Fort Sumter before dawn carrying troops and provisions for the small federal garrison cut off in Charleston Harbor. From a sand battery on Morris Island, cadets from The Citadel — boys, really — sight the ship and open fire. Shots skip across the water. The captain, hit nothing serious but warned plainly, comes about and steams back out to sea. No one is killed. The fort holds its fire. And yet something irreversible has happened: a state has fired on the flag of the United States, and the United States has swallowed it. Everyone watching understands the arithmetic. The bombardment that starts the Civil War is still three months away. But the first shots have been fired, and the country now knows which way the wind is blowing.
Source: www.battlefields.org
Also on this day · 1788
Connecticut's convention votes decisively to ratify the new federal Constitution, the fifth state to sign on. The Connecticut Compromise its own delegates had brokered in Philadelphia — a House by population, a Senate by state — is the hinge the whole document turns on. A small state had insisted on a seat at the table, and won one for every small state to come.
Source: www.battlefields.org