Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesWednesday, September 23
From the desk
Start with 1779: John Paul Jones lashed the Bonhomme Richard to HMS Serapis off Flamborough Head, turned a losing fight into a four-hour brawl at arm's length, and answered a call to surrender with "I have not yet begun to fight." His ship sank two days later; he sailed the enemy's frigate home anyway. Worth a longer look: 1957, when Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas Guard and turned Orval Faubus's own troops against him to get nine students into Central High. Nixon's Checkers speech, same date, shows a career saved by thirty minutes of television.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1779Featured · This day in history
Jones refuses to strike, and takes Serapis by lantern light
Off the Yorkshire coast on the evening of September 23, 1779, John Paul Jones brought the USS Bonhomme Richard alongside the British frigate HMS Serapis, guarding a merchant convoy near Flamborough Head. When Captain Richard Pearson called for surrender, Jones answered, "I have not yet begun to fight," and ordered his crew to lash the two ships together, canceling out Serapis's speed and turning the fight into a close-range brawl. After roughly four hours, an American grenade set off gunpowder on Serapis's lower deck, and Pearson struck his colors around 10:30 p.m. Bonhomme Richard, burning and taking water, sank two days later; Jones sailed his prize to the Dutch Republic.
The line, "I have not yet begun to fight," became the founding boast of the American Navy, still recited at Annapolis two centuries later. Jones proved that a scratch squadron of borrowed French ships could beat the Royal Navy at sea, a claim that helped convince French backers the alliance was worth continuing.
Did you know
QWhy was the Bonhomme Richard named after an almanac?
Jones named his flagship in honor of Benjamin Franklin, who was serving as America's envoy in France and had secured the ship for Jones's squadron. Franklin's wildly popular "Poor Richard's Almanack" had made the pen name Poor Richard a household phrase in the colonies, and Jones translated it into French as a tribute. The ship itself had begun life in 1765 as a French East Indiaman called Duc de Duras, a merchant vessel never built for combat. Its conversion into a 42-gun warship left it slower and structurally weaker than a purpose-built frigate like Serapis, a mismatch that shaped nearly every decision Jones made once the fighting started.
QWhat kept Countess of Scarborough out of the main fight?
Captain Thomas Piercy, commanding the smaller British ship Countess of Scarborough, traded fire with USS Alliance early on but then pulled back rather than risk hitting Serapis by accident. The two British vessels were operating close together to guard the Baltic merchant convoy, and once Alliance and Countess of Scarborough separated, Piercy's ship played almost no further role in deciding the main duel between Bonhomme Richard and Serapis. Two other American ships, Pallas and Vengeance, also held back for most of the opening phase instead of joining Jones. The result was that the war's most famous naval duel was fought largely between two ships out of the six involved.
QHow badly outnumbered were the sailors by the time Serapis struck?
Bonhomme Richard's crew had already been worn down from roughly 400 men to about 320 by earlier raids on British and Irish shipping before Serapis ever came into view. Serapis, newer and more heavily built, could throw a broadside of about 300 pounds of shot compared with Bonhomme Richard's reduced weight of around 250 pounds after she lost two of her heavier 18-pounder guns early in the fight. Losses on both ships during the battle ran close to half their crews. Those numbers explain why Jones needed the grapple, the grenade, and sheer stubbornness rather than firepower to force Pearson's surrender.
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1957civil-rights
Eisenhower orders troops into Little Rock to open Central High's doors
Nineteen days after Governor Orval Faubus posted the Arkansas National Guard outside Central High School to keep nine Black students out, President Dwight D. Eisenhower moved to reverse the standoff. On September 23, 1957, he signed Executive Order 10730, stripping Faubus of control over the Guard and placing it under federal command with orders to enforce integration. The move came after Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann wired Washington asking for federal troops. The following day, September 24, Eisenhower ordered paratroopers of the 101st Airborne to join the federalized Guard on the ground.
Central High School, Little Rock, ArkansasStory page →
Eisenhower, a five-star general who had commanded armies in Europe, turned federal force against a sitting American governor to enforce a Supreme Court ruling rather than a battlefield command. It was the first time since Reconstruction a president had used federal troops to compel a state to comply with desegregation.
Did you know
QWhy did the 101st Airborne arrive in Little Rock without any of its black soldiers?
The Department of Justice specifically requested that the 101st Airborne's black soldiers be left behind when the division deployed to Little Rock. Federal officials worried that the presence of black troops enforcing integration would inflame segregationist crowds further and hand propaganda material to opponents of the operation. The request shows how cautiously Washington handled the optics of the mission, even while taking the historically aggressive step of sending federal soldiers against a state governor. The Little Rock Nine were escorted into a newly desegregated school by an all-white military unit, a detail that shows how racial calculation shaped even the mechanics of enforcing Brown v. Board of Education on the ground.
QWhat happened when segregationists clashed physically with federal troops outside Central High?
On September 25, 1957, two segregationists were injured in confrontations with the newly arrived federal soldiers. One man was struck in the face with a rifle buttstock, and another suffered a minor bayonet wound. These were not the students or the mob's usual targets but adult protesters who pressed too close to the perimeter the 101st Airborne had established around the school. The injuries marked one of the few moments the standoff turned into direct physical violence between federal forces and civilians, The injuries marked one of the few moments the standoff turned into direct physical violence between federal forces and civilians.
QWhat specific justification did Governor Faubus give for calling out the National Guard in the first place?
Faubus claimed on September 4, 1957 that integrating Central High School posed an imminent danger of tumult, riot, and breach of peace, language he used to justify posting the Arkansas National Guard at the school's entrance to physically block the nine Black students. He framed his defiance of the federal court order as a matter of public safety rather than resistance to desegregation. Eisenhower's administration had to counter that pretext before it could justify sending in federal troops.
1952government
Nixon goes on television and refuses to give up the dog
By late September 1952, more than a hundred newspapers had editorialized over a secret expense fund, with opinion running roughly two to one against Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower's own aides had phoned a possible replacement. On September 23, Nixon walked onto a bare stage at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood and spoke to the cameras for thirty minutes, laying out his family's modest finances line by line. Near the end he said he intended to keep one gift, a cocker spaniel named Checkers, regardless of what happened to him.
El Capitan Theatre, Hollywood, CaliforniaStory page →
The Checkers speech taught American politicians that television could bypass editors and party bosses entirely and speak straight to households. Nixon's gamble, an appeal over the heads of a hostile press to sixty million viewers, became the template for the modern televised political defense, still cited whenever a candidate goes on camera to survive a scandal.
Did you know
QHow specific did Nixon get about his family's actual bank account numbers on air?
Nixon told viewers that he and Pat had a combined annual income of $20,000 after his Senate salary and expense allowance, and that the couple had paid $6,000 in income tax that year. He walked through the numbers like a man reading a ledger rather than delivering a stump speech, an unusual choice for a national broadcast. Rather than deny wrongdoing in general terms, Nixon put the actual numbers on the table for anyone to check. It was accounting as political theater, and it worked precisely because it sounded so unglamorous.
QWhat false story was already circulating on the wires before Nixon even reached the microphone?
United Press International reported well ahead of the broadcast that Nixon intended to resign from the ticket, a rumor that spread through newsrooms even as Nixon and his team were still finalizing the speech. The wire report meant that some Americans tuned in already believing they were about to watch a farewell address rather than a defense. That mismatch between expectation and reality meant his refusal to quit landed as a reversal of what the press had already told the public to expect. The premature report was never formally corrected before airtime.
QWhat four words did Eisenhower use to end days of uncertainty when he finally met Nixon face to face?
When the two men finally met in person after the telegrams and calls had overwhelmed RNC offices, Eisenhower greeted Nixon simply with, "You're my boy." The line was short, four words, after days in which Eisenhower had refused to commit publicly and had aides quietly lining up an alternative. No lengthy statement of confidence, no press conference walk-back, just four words delivered face to face. It became one of the more understated endorsements in American political history, closing an episode that had opened with newspaper editorials demanding resignation.
