December 5 in History

Students from the College of William and Mary gathered in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern to establish Phi Beta Kappa, creating the nation's first scholastic fraternity. This bold move immediately shifted campus culture by prioritizing academic excellence over social clubs, setting a lasting standard for scholarly societies across the United States.

President James K. Polk confirmed in his annual message to Congress on December 5, 1848, that 'the accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by authentic reports.' Gold had been discovered at Sutter's Mill in January, but news traveled slowly. Polk's official confirmation triggered the largest mass migration in American history: roughly 300,000 people arrived in California within four years, coming from every continent. San Francisco's population exploded from 200 to 36,000 in two years. California was admitted as a state in 1850, bypassing territorial status entirely. Most miners found little gold. The real fortunes were made by merchants: Levi Strauss selling durable pants, Leland Stanford selling supplies, and Wells Fargo moving money.

The Twenty-first Amendment was ratified on December 5, 1933, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment and ending 13 years of national Prohibition. Utah, of all states, provided the decisive 36th ratification vote. The repeal was the only time a constitutional amendment has been entirely reversed by another. Prohibition had been a spectacular failure: alcohol consumption initially dropped but then recovered to near pre-ban levels through speakeasies, home brewing, and bootlegging. Organized crime built empires on illegal liquor distribution. Al Capone earned an estimated $60 million annually from bootlegging alone. The federal government lost $11 billion in tax revenue while spending $300 million on enforcement. FDR had campaigned on repeal, and the new amendment was ratified in less than ten months. The first legal drinks were served at midnight on December 5.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died on December 5, 1791, in Vienna, at 35. The cause has never been definitively established — rheumatic fever, kidney disease, and trichinosis have all been proposed. He was buried in a common grave, in accordance with Viennese custom for his social class, not from poverty as the legend suggests. The Requiem he was writing when he died was completed by his student Franz Xüssmayr from sketches; nobody is certain exactly which parts Mozart finished. He'd composed 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 23 string quartets, 18 masses, 22 operas. He was paid well for his work and died with almost nothing, because he spent extravagantly. His wife Constanze survived him by 50 years and spent them correcting the record about his life.

At 68, penniless and partially paralyzed from a stroke, Dumas died in his son's house — the same son he'd once refused to acknowledge. The man who'd earned millions from *The Three Musketeers* and *The Count of Monte Cristo* spent it all: a château with a monkey theater, a private newspaper, mistresses across Europe, and 500 meals a week for anyone who showed up. He'd written 300 books, some dictated to ghostwriters he called his "factory." But he left behind something stranger than swashbuckling heroes: his father was a French general born to a slave in Haiti, making Dumas's adventure stories a quiet revolution — Europe's most popular novelist had Black ancestry nobody talked about.

He spent 27 years in prison. On Robben Island, he cracked limestone in a quarry and was permitted one letter every six months. When he walked free in 1990, the world expected rage. What came out instead was a man who invited his former jailer to his inauguration. Mandela became South Africa's first Black president in 1994, inheriting a country that could have burned. It didn't. He died in December 2013, ninety-five years old. The question his whole life answered: what does it take to forgive something like that?

Colonel Henry Knox, a 25-year-old bookseller turned artillerist, set out from Fort Ticonderoga on December 5, 1775, with 59 cannons, mortars, and howitzers weighing a total of 60 tons. His mission was to drag them 300 miles over frozen lakes, through forests, and across the Berkshire Mountains to the Continental Army besieging Boston. Knox used ox-drawn sleds and flat-bottomed boats, crossing the Hudson River four times where the ice kept breaking. The journey took two months. Washington placed the guns on Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston Harbor on the night of March 4, 1776. British General Howe woke to find his fleet and army under the muzzles of the captured artillery. He evacuated Boston on March 17 without a fight. Knox's 'noble train of artillery' was one of the most audacious logistics operations of the Revolution.