June 2: The Queen Is Crowned, The Last Confederate Lays Down His Arms, The Babe Walks Away

Some June 2s ask for ceremony; others ask for reckoning. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was the former — an ancient ritual conducted in Westminster Abbey before a global television audience that numbered in the hundreds of millions, a young woman in a thousand-year-old institution choosing, with full awareness, to carry it forward into the modern world. The surrender of General Edmund Kirby Smith in 1865 was the latter — not a ceremony of triumph but a final accounting, the last act of a catastrophic war's administrative close. And Babe Ruth's retirement in 1935 was something else again: the quiet exit of a man who had been louder than any ballpark, leaving behind statistics and a legend that the sport would spend the next century trying to contextualize. Three June 2s, three very different kinds of conclusion.

The Coronation

On June 2, 1953, in Westminster Abbey — a building that has witnessed English and British royal ceremonies since 1066 — Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was crowned Queen Elizabeth II in a service lasting approximately three hours and involving robes, orbs, scepters, anointing oil, and an oath that had been administered to every English monarch since the tenth century. She was twenty-seven years old, had been queen in name since the death of her father King George VI on February 6, 1952, and had spent the intervening sixteen months preparing for a ceremony that her advisers had debated opening to television cameras. She ultimately agreed; the decision transformed the coronation from a state occasion into a global media event. An estimated 27 million people in Britain watched on television — more than had ever watched any broadcast in the country's history — and millions more watched in cinemas, community halls, and the homes of the small fraction of the population that already owned sets. In the United States, the broadcast was shown on a delayed basis and drew enormous audiences. The coronation of June 2, 1953, was the moment the British monarchy entered the television age.

Elizabeth II would go on to reign for seventy years — the longest reign of any British monarch and the longest of any female head of state in recorded history. The young woman who sat in the Coronation Chair at Westminster on June 2, 1953, would preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, the transformation of Britain's relationship with Europe, fifteen prime ministers from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss, and a monarchy that she worked, through the extraordinary longevity of her presence, to make feel simultaneously ancient and continuous with the present. She died on September 8, 2022, at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, at the age of ninety-six. The crown that was placed on her head in Westminster Abbey in 1953 passed to her son, King Charles III. The abbey where it happened was, by then, the same building it had always been — which was, in some ways, the whole point.

The Last Surrender

On June 2, 1865 — nearly eight weeks after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox on April 9 — General Edmund Kirby Smith signed surrender terms for the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi, the last significant Confederate military force still nominally in the field. Smith had commanded the department west of the Mississippi River — Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri — a territory so distant from the eastern theaters of the war that it had operated with considerable autonomy. When news of Lee's and Johnston's surrenders reached the Trans-Mississippi in April and May, Smith's army had already begun dissolving: soldiers drifted home, officers fled to Mexico and Brazil, and the department's civilian administration collapsed. By the time Smith signed his surrender aboard the USS Fort Jackson in Galveston Bay, Texas, his army had already largely ceased to exist. The signature was the administrative close of what the fighting had already ended.

Smith himself did not wait for the formal surrender; he had already fled to Mexico before signing, returning to the United States only after receiving a presidential pardon. His departure was typical of a Confederate high command that, having fought a war to preserve a social order built on enslaved labor, found the prospect of postwar accountability more than it wished to face. The June 2 surrender is often cited as the legal end of the Civil War, though Confederate resistance of various kinds — guerrilla activity, political resistance to Reconstruction, and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan — continued for years. Juneteenth, the holiday that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved people, is celebrated on June 19 — the date in 1865 when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and informed the enslaved population of Texas that they were free, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and more than six weeks after Smith's surrender. The war's official end and the reality of freedom for those it was ostensibly fought over arrived, as so often in American history, on separate schedules.

The Sultan Hangs Up His Spikes

On June 2, 1935, Babe Ruth formally retired from professional baseball after announcing his retirement to the Boston Braves — the team he had joined that winter in a last, largely unhappy attempt to extend a career that had peaked a decade earlier and had been declining steadily since. He was forty years old, overweight, and had not been the dominant force he once was for several seasons. His final game had been May 30, 1935; his final home run — number 714, the record that would stand until Hank Aaron surpassed it in April 1974 — had come three days earlier. The retirement was quiet by the standards of the life: no ceremony, no special day at the stadium, no farewell tour. He simply was, and then he wasn't, and baseball had to figure out what to do with the space he left.

The career Ruth retired from on June 2, 1935, remains one of the most astonishing in the history of American sport. He had begun as a pitcher — and was, by most accounts, one of the finest left-handed pitchers in the American League — before the Red Sox converted him to the outfield to take advantage of his bat. He hit 714 career home runs at a time when no one had ever hit more than a fraction of that number. He had a career batting average of .342, a career on-base percentage of .484, and a career slugging percentage of .690 — numbers that remain, nearly ninety years later, essentially incomprehensible. He is credited, more than any other single figure, with saving baseball's public image after the 1919 Black Sox scandal and transforming the sport from a pitcher's game of strategy and contact hitting into the power-hitting spectacle it became in the 1920s. He ate prodigiously, drank prodigiously, spent money prodigiously, and played baseball in a way that made every game feel like a special occasion. The sport he retired from on June 2, 1935, was recognizably his invention.