September 14 · This Day in America
President William McKinley had seemed to be recovering. An anarchist shot him in Buffalo eight days earlier, but the doctors were hopeful. Then gangrene set in, and at 2:15 in the morning on this day, he is gone. Theodore Roosevelt — vice president, 42 years old — is in the Adirondack wilderness when the word reaches him, and rides through the night down mountain roads to a waiting train. That afternoon, in the borrowed library of his friend Ansley Wilcox's house in Buffalo, with no Bible at hand and the country in shock, he raises his right hand and becomes the youngest president in American history. No grand hall, no inaugural crowd. A nation's continuity carried, in a single afternoon, by a quiet room and a steady voice. The republic had a hard rule and kept it: the office never empties, even for a day.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1814
After twenty-five hours of bombardment, the firing stops. In the gray light of this morning, Francis Scott Key squints across Baltimore harbor from a truce ship and sees it: the enormous American flag, still flying over Fort McHenry. The British have failed. Moved past words and then finding them, he begins writing on the back of a letter in his pocket. Set later to an old tune, "Defence of Fort M'Henry" would become "The Star-Spangled Banner" — and, in 1931, the national anthem.
Source: amhistory.si.edu
“The President of the United States has been struck down; a crime not only against the Chief Magistrate, but against every law-abiding and liberty-loving citizen.”Theodore Roosevelt, proclamation, September 14, 1901