13 April
April 13: Born to Contradict, Blood on the Courthouse Steps, Wings Against the Wind
April 13: Born to Contradict, Blood on the Courthouse Steps, Wings Against the Wind
A date of founding ideals and their brutal betrayal — and one crew of aviators who refused to let an ocean tell them no
April 13 opens with a birth and closes with a flight, and between them sits a massacre that forces us to hold the first and third stories in honest tension. Thomas Jefferson's birthday is a celebration of the ideals that launched a nation; the Colfax Massacre, thirty years after his death, is a document of what those ideals cost the people they were never fully intended to include. The transatlantic flight of the Bremen belongs to a different register entirely — three aviators from three countries pointing a small plane into the unknown and bringing it home — but it too is about the refusal to accept the world's limits as final. Together, April 13 asks what we choose to remember, what we are obligated to remember, and why those are not always the same list.
The Man America Cannot Resolve
On April 13, 1743, Thomas Jefferson was born at Shadwell plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia, the son of a prosperous planter and surveyor. He would go on to write the most consequential sentence in American political history — "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" — and to own, over the course of his lifetime, more than six hundred enslaved people. That contradiction is not a footnote to Jefferson's life. It is the central fact of it, and the central fact of the American founding he did more than almost anyone to articulate. He knew it. He wrote about it with apparent anguish, called slavery a moral and political depravity, and did almost nothing substantive to end it — not in the nation, and not on his own plantation.
What remains, after the accounting, is both enormous and genuinely complicated. Jefferson's vision of a republic grounded in natural rights and popular sovereignty was radical in its time and became the philosophical engine of democratic movements around the world. His drafting of the Declaration of Independence, his authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, his founding of the University of Virginia, his stewardship of the Louisiana Purchase — these were acts of political imagination on a scale that few individuals in history have matched. He was also, as the scholar Annette Gordon-Reed has argued, a man who made choices, not a passive prisoner of his era, and the choices he made about slavery were, by any moral measure, indefensible. His birthday is a useful occasion not for simple celebration or simple condemnation, but for the harder and more honest work of holding both things at once — which is, in the end, the work that American history has always required of its citizens.
A quill, a draft, and the most consequential sentence in American political history — written by a man whose life embodied the nation's deepest contradiction.
Colfax, and the Cost of the Vote
On April 13, 1873 — Easter Sunday — white supremacist paramilitary forces attacked a group of Black freedmen who had occupied the Grant Parish courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana, to defend the results of a disputed election in which Republican candidates, supported by the Black community, had prevailed. The freedmen had been holding the courthouse for weeks, organized and determined to protect a political outcome that represented everything Reconstruction had promised them: the right to vote, the right to hold office, the right to participate in the governance of the country they had built with their labor and their lives. The attacking force, armed with a cannon and rifles, outnumbered and outgunned them. After several hours of fighting, the courthouse was set on fire. Many of the defenders were killed as they fled or surrendered. Those who survived the initial assault were executed after the fact. The death toll among the Black defenders is estimated at between 60 and 150 men.
The Colfax Massacre — the deadliest single incident of racial violence during the Reconstruction era — had consequences that extended far beyond Louisiana. Federal prosecutors charged more than ninety men; ultimately three were convicted under the Enforcement Acts, federal laws designed to protect Black civil rights. Those convictions were appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) that the federal government lacked the authority to prosecute private individuals for violating other citizens' constitutional rights — a decision that effectively gutted the Enforcement Acts and left Black Americans in the South without federal protection against exactly the kind of violence that had been perpetrated at Colfax. The decision accelerated the collapse of Reconstruction and opened the door to the era of Jim Crow. For nearly a century afterward, a marker at the Colfax site described the event as a "riot" and honored the white attackers. The full historical record, slowly and incompletely reclaimed, tells a different story: of men who stood for their rights and were killed for it, and of a legal system that looked away.
A marker in rural Louisiana — the site of a massacre whose victims defended the right to vote and were abandoned by the courts that were supposed to protect them.
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The Wrong Way Across the Atlantic
On April 13, 1928, a Junkers W33 monoplane named Bremen touched down on the ice-covered surface of Greenly Island, off the coast of Labrador, Canada, after thirty-six and a half hours in the air — completing the first nonstop east-to-west transatlantic flight in history. The crew was international by design and by happenstance: Captain Hermann Köhl of Germany, who had survived nearly four hundred combat missions in World War I and become an experienced long-distance aviator; Baron Ehrenfried Günther von Hünefeld, a German aviation enthusiast who had financed much of the venture despite being nearly blind in one eye and suffering from chronic illness; and Major James Fitzmaurice of Ireland, the last-minute addition whose skill as a navigator and pilot proved essential. They had lifted off from Baldonnel Aerodrome near Dublin on April 12, flying into headwinds that Charles Lindbergh had not faced on his celebrated eastward crossing the year before.
The east-to-west crossing was, by nearly every measure, harder than Lindbergh's flight. The prevailing Atlantic winds blow west to east; flying against them meant burning more fuel, fighting for altitude and airspeed, and navigating in conditions that would have defeated a less determined crew. The Bremen carried no radio. Its compass, affected by the northern latitudes, was unreliable for the final hours of the journey, and the crew flew the last stretch largely by instinct and dead reckoning. They had aimed for New York but landed in Labrador — having traveled more than four thousand miles through fog, ice, and darkness to a runway they hadn't planned for. They were rescued, celebrated, and given a ticker-tape parade in New York City that rivaled Lindbergh's reception. Their names faded more quickly from popular memory than his, but the achievement did not: the Bremen's flight proved that the Atlantic could be crossed in both directions, and helped accelerate the development of transatlantic air routes that would, within a generation, shrink the ocean to a commute.
The Bremen somewhere over the North Atlantic — flying into the wind, without a radio, toward a continent they couldn't yet see.
