October 6: The Peacemaker, the Train Robbers, the Faithful
October 6: The Peacemaker, the Train Robbers, the Faithful
Three October 6ths defined by the courage to break from what came before — a leader who chose peace over politics, outlaws who invented a new kind of crime, and a people who crossed an ocean to worship as they believed
October 6 holds three stories about the price of conviction — about what it costs to act on what you believe when the world around you has decided otherwise. An Egyptian president stood in a grandstand at a military parade and paid the ultimate price for having chosen peace. A band of Indiana brothers looked at a moving train and decided, for the first time in American history, that it could be robbed. And a small group of Mennonites stepped onto the shores of a new world carrying nothing but their faith, their traditions, and the determination to practice both without interference. Three October 6ths. Three acts of defiance against the way things were supposed to be.
The Grandstand
On October 6, 1981, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat sat in the reviewing stand at a military parade in Cairo, watching a procession of vehicles and soldiers mark the eighth anniversary of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. A truck stopped in front of the grandstand. Soldiers dismounted. One threw a grenade. Others opened fire with automatic weapons. Sadat, struck by multiple bullets, died at a military hospital later that afternoon. He had been president of Egypt for eleven years, and in that time he had done something that none of his predecessors had — and that many of his successors have struggled to match. He had decided, at considerable personal and political risk, that peace with Israel was worth more than the solidarity of a united Arab front.
The Camp David Accords, which Sadat had negotiated with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin under the mediation of President Jimmy Carter in 1978, had ended thirty years of war between Egypt and Israel and earned both leaders the Nobel Peace Prize. They had also made Sadat a pariah in much of the Arab world — Egypt was expelled from the Arab League, and the radical Islamist factions that grew within Egypt itself viewed his accommodation with Israel as an unforgivable betrayal. The men who killed him were members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, acting on a religious decree that declared Sadat an apostate. He was sixty-two years old. His successor, Hosni Mubarak — seated beside him in the grandstand and wounded in the attack — would govern Egypt for the next thirty years, and the peace treaty Sadat signed with Israel remains in force to this day. The peacemaker did not live to see what his peace endured.
The military parade grounds in Cairo where Anwar Sadat was assassinated on October 6, 1981 — eight years to the day after the war whose anniversary the parade was marking.
First Train Out of Seymour
On October 6, 1866, John and Simeon Reno and a small crew of accomplices boarded an Ohio and Mississippi Railroad train near Seymour, Indiana, overpowered the guards, threw the express safe out the door of the moving car, and made off with approximately $13,000 — inventing, in the process, a crime that would define the American imagination for the next half century. The train robbery was not merely a theft; it was a conceptual breakthrough. Railroads had created a new kind of wealth: concentrated, mobile, and moving on a predictable schedule through the open countryside, far from sheriffs and city police. The Reno brothers simply looked at that system and saw its vulnerability before anyone thought to secure it.
The Renos were not romanticized outlaws in the style of Jesse James — who would follow their template within a few years — but working-class Indiana criminals who had spent the Civil War years running cons and committing fraud. Their train robbery operation lasted less than two years before Pinkerton detectives dismantled it. Three of the brothers were seized by a vigilante mob and lynched in 1868 before they could be tried; a fourth served time in prison. But the template they established — the stopped train, the overpowered express car, the split and scatter into open country — proved irresistible to a generation of outlaws who followed. Train robbery became so common in the decades after Seymour that railroads lobbied Congress for federal criminal statutes specifically addressing it. The Reno brothers had, without intending to, written the first chapter of America's most enduring outlaw mythology.
The Ohio and Mississippi Railroad line through Indiana, where the Reno brothers established a criminal template that would define the American outlaw era for decades.
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Germantown
On October 6, 1683, a group of Mennonite families arrived in Pennsylvania aboard the ship Concord — a crossing so significant to German-American history that the vessel is sometimes called the German Mayflower. They had come from Krefeld, in the Rhineland, and they settled in what would become Germantown, just north of Philadelphia, on land purchased through the assistance of William Penn, whose Quaker colony had been established specifically as a refuge for those fleeing religious persecution in Europe. The Mennonites who arrived that October were among the first of what would become a sustained migration of Anabaptist communities — Mennonites, Amish, and others — fleeing the continent where their beliefs in adult baptism, pacifism, and separation from state authority had made them targets of violence for more than a century.
What the Germantown Mennonites built in Pennsylvania was more than a community — it was a demonstration. Less than a year after their arrival, in February 1688, they produced the Germantown Petition Against Slavery, the first formal protest against slavery in American colonial history. The document, written in German and signed by four members of the community, argued that the enslavement of human beings was incompatible with Christian teaching and with the Golden Rule. It was ignored by the Quaker meetings to which it was submitted, but it did not disappear. Historians regard it as one of the foundational documents of American abolitionism — a text that planted a seed that would take nearly two centuries to fully flower. The community that crossed the Atlantic to practice their faith in peace arrived and, almost immediately, began insisting that peace required something of everyone.
A colonial Pennsylvania harbor — the destination of the Mennonite families who arrived in 1683 and, within a year, produced the first antislavery document in American history.
