February 28 · This Day in America
It is a celebration. The USS Princeton, the Navy's newest warship, glides down the Potomac packed with 400 guests — congressmen, diplomats, the President of the United States. Captain Stockton shows off the ship's great wrought-iron cannon, the Peacemaker, firing it twice to applause. Below decks, John Tyler lingers over wine and a song. The crowd asks for one more shot. On the third firing the gun bursts apart, scything iron through the deck. The Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Navy are killed instantly, along with four others. No single day in American history has killed more of the government's senior officials at once. President Tyler, still belowdecks, is spared. He had been courting a young woman named Julia Gardiner, whose father died in the blast; in her grief he comforted her, and within months they married in secret. Catastrophe and tenderness, on the same river, the same afternoon.
Source: www.usni.org
Also on this day · 1854
A small group of Whigs, Free-Soilers, and antislavery Democrats gathers in Ripon, Wisconsin, furious over a bill that would let slavery spread into the western territories. They resolve that if the Kansas-Nebraska Act passes, they will abandon their old parties and build a new one. They even pick the name: Republican. The bill passed. They kept their word. Six years later their second presidential nominee was a railsplitter named Lincoln.
Source: riponhistory.org