…[A]ll eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.—Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826

Two of America’s founding fathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, died 190 years ago on this date. For each man it was a remarkable date to leave this life: Adams had pushed the legislation to declare independence from Great Britain, and he enlisted Jefferson to write the document that acted as the vehicle for independence.

July 4, 1826, was the fiftieth anniversary of independence. Adams was 90 and Jefferson was 83. They had continued their correspondence with one another and their final letters to each other date from the anniversary year. Neither man was able to attend festivities in honor of the event or his role in it.
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Pickett’s Charge, the disastrous infantry assault that ended the days-long Battle of Gettysburg, took place on this date in 1863 in southern Pennsylvania.

Having failed to take out the Union forces on either flank, General Robert E. Lee decided to attack the center. General Meade, the leader of the Union forces, correctly predicted this, so he and his troops waited out an artillery barrage that was intended to take out the North’s cannons. The barrage was indeed launched, but it did not damage the Union’s emplacement.

The Confederate forces assembled a mile-wide line of over 12,000 soldiers and began to march towards the Union forces across an open field, who took dead aim as the line advanced. Within an hour, the field was littered with some 7000 Confederate dead or dying, and the Union accepted a truce to allow the survivors to collect the dead and wounded.
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“We have not been lucky enough to find anyone who saw him come down,” wrote H. L. Pinckney in the Charleston Mercury, “but the important fact that he was there is incontestable—and as he couldn’t have got there any other way, it was decide unanimously that he rained down.” On this date in 1843 in Charleston, South Carolina, a two-foot alligator was found on the corner of Wentworth and Anson in that city after a particularly violent thunderstorm, in which “the whole firmament growled thunder and shot lightning.”

Weather is fairly complex but it is also quite consistent. There are many stories of rainstorms bearing tadpoles and sometimes larger creatures that have been given a baffling free ride. In a world of many weather events taking place continuously, these things happen. But a two-foot-long gator, perhaps and perhaps not. As the writer in the Mercury confessed, no one saw the gator deposited with the downpour. But no one didn’t, either. By that standard, a two-foot-long alligator came down with the rain on this date in 1843 in Charleston, South Carolina.

The story was briefly popular in the national press; the clipping at the top of today’s “Today in History” is from the July 11, 1843, New Orleans Times-Picayune, but it reproduces Pinckney’s article.
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