May 13 · This Day in America
After four and a half months at sea, three small ships — the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, the Discovery — push up a wide Virginia river and tie off to the trees of a marshy peninsula. Roughly a hundred Englishmen step ashore and begin a fort. They have picked a swamp: brackish water, bad air, a powerful Powhatan nation already living all around them. Most of them will be dead within a year, and the winters to come will be called the Starving Time. And yet this is the one that lasts — the first permanent English settlement in what becomes the United States, thirteen years before Plymouth. Everything that follows on this continent in English, for better and for grievous worse, traces back to a few exhausted men driving stakes into the mud on this day.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1846
President Polk tells Congress that Mexico "has shed American blood upon American soil," and two days later the House and Senate vote for war. The conflict will hand the United States California and the Southwest — and split the country over whether the new land will be slave or free. A young Illinois congressman named Abraham Lincoln demands to see the exact spot the blood was shed. The nation expands; the reckoning is deferred, not avoided.
Source: www.loc.gov