March 13 · This Day in America
For the first time in the Republic's history, the United States Senate convenes as a court of impeachment to try a president. Andrew Johnson stands accused of defying Congress and obstructing Reconstruction in a wounded, half-rebuilt nation still counting its war dead. The Chief Justice of the United States presides. Senators take a special oath to do impartial justice. The galleries are packed; tickets are printed; the country holds its breath. The case is messy and political, and in the end Johnson survives by a single vote. But the deeper outcome is the precedent itself: that no one, not even the president, stands above the law — and that the remedy for it is a trial, conducted in the open, by the people's representatives, under oath. The Constitution had a brake. On this day America found out it worked.
Source: www.senate.gov
Also on this day · 1639
A struggling little school in the Massachusetts Bay wilderness, barely three years old, gets a name. A young minister named John Harvard had died and left it half his estate and his library of some four hundred books. The colony names the college for him. From a few hundred books in a frontier village grows the oldest university in the country — proof that the first English settlers, scratching out survival, were already building for a future they would never see.
Source: www.harvard.edu