April 3 in History

The Pony Express launched on April 3, 1860, with rider Johnny Fry leaving St. Joseph, Missouri, carrying 49 letters and some newspapers westbound. The system used 400 horses, 190 relay stations spaced roughly ten miles apart, and about 80 riders, many of them teenagers. A rider covered 75 to 100 miles per shift at a gallop, switching horses every station. The fastest delivery took just seven days and seventeen hours, carrying Lincoln's inaugural address. The service was never profitable. Russell, Majors and Waddell lost money from the start. When the transcontinental telegraph was completed on October 24, 1861, the Pony Express shut down two days later, having operated for just 18 months.

Union troops entered Richmond on April 3, 1865, just hours after Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government fled by train. Black soldiers from the 25th Army Corps were among the first to enter the city, marching through streets where enslaved people had been sold. Fires set by retreating Confederates destroyed entire commercial blocks. Abraham Lincoln visited the smoldering capital two days later, walking through the streets with only a small guard while formerly enslaved people knelt before him. The fall of Richmond meant Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had lost its supply base and its reason to fight. Surrender at Appomattox followed six days later.

Truman signed the Economic Cooperation Act on April 3, 1948, launching what became known as the Marshall Plan after Secretary of State George Marshall's 1947 Harvard speech proposing it. The program distributed $13.3 billion (roughly $175 billion in today's dollars) across 16 European nations between 1948 and 1952. The largest recipients were the United Kingdom, France, and West Germany. The plan required participating nations to coordinate economic policies, reduce trade barriers, and modernize industrial equipment. It worked spectacularly: Western European industrial output surpassed prewar levels by 1951. The Soviet Union rejected participation and pressured Eastern Bloc nations to do the same, deepening the continental divide.

Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech at Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, in support of striking sanitation workers. Heavy rain and tornado warnings had thinned the crowd, and King almost sent Ralph Abernathy to speak in his place. The speech's final passage has been endlessly analyzed for its apparent foreknowledge of death: "I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you." King had received dozens of death threats. The FBI had been surveilling and trying to discredit him for years. He was assassinated the following evening on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, struck by a single .30-06 rifle bullet fired from a rooming house across the street.

Bobby Fischer refused to defend his world chess championship in 1975 because FIDE would not agree to his demand that the first player to win ten games would be champion, with no limit on total games played and draws not counting. FIDE accepted most of his 64 conditions but drew the line at this one, fearing an indefinite match. Fischer had won the title in 1972 by defeating Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in what was widely seen as a Cold War proxy battle. His walkaway stunned the chess world. Anatoly Karpov was declared champion by default on April 3, 1975, and held the title for ten years. Fischer vanished from competitive chess for twenty years before resurfacing in 1992.

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson didn't just rule; he slammed his gavel down in 2000, declaring Microsoft held an oppressive thumb over rivals like Netscape. The human cost? Bill Gates lost his temper, screaming that the government was trying to break the company that built his empire, while employees watched their stock prices tank from $60 to near $30 overnight. That legal battle forced the tech giant to unlock its doors, allowing a flood of new browsers and apps to finally compete. You'll remember this: the only thing Microsoft ever truly feared was a competitor they couldn't buy.

The Whitechapel murders of 1888 terrorized London's East End between April and February 1891, though the five canonical Jack the Ripper killings occurred in a tight eleven-week window from August to November 1888. The victims were all impoverished women working as prostitutes in one of the most overcrowded slums in Europe. The killer removed internal organs from several victims with surgical precision, suggesting medical knowledge. Over 200 suspects were investigated. The case generated an unprecedented media frenzy, with newspapers publishing alleged letters from the killer and coining the "Jack the Ripper" name. The murders prompted housing reforms, increased police foot patrols, and exposed conditions that respectable Victorians had deliberately ignored.