March 15 Birthday
The Ides of March, 44 BCE: Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times by a group of senators led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. Caesar had been declared dictator perpetuo — dictator for life — by the Senate, and the conspirators believed they were defending the Republic from tyranny. They were too late — the Republic had effectively died years earlier, and Caesar's assassination triggered a civil war that ended it permanently. The liberators, as they called themselves, fled the Senate and found that the people did not support them. Within three years, the liberators were dead — killed at the Battle of Philippi by the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony. The Republic was replaced by an empire, and Octavian became Augustus, the first emperor. Shakespeare dramatized the assassination in Julius Caesar, which gave us the line "Et tu, Brute?" — though Suetonius records that Caesar's actual last words were "You too, child?" in Greek. Maine became the twenty-third state on March 15, 1820, under the Missouri Compromise. Maine had been a district of Massachusetts since 1652, and its separation was orchestrated by Congress to maintain the balance between free and slave states. Missouri had applied for statehood as a slave state, which would have tipped the Senate. The compromise admitted Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, and banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the 36°30′ parallel. The compromise held for thirty-four years until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed it, leading to Bleeding Kansas and, eventually, the Civil War. Columbus returned to Spain on March 15, 1493, from his first voyage. He had been gone seven months. He brought with him six captive Taíno people from the Bahamas, parrots, and gold. He presented his discoveries to Ferdinand and Isabella in Barcelona. He insisted he had reached the islands off the coast of Asia — he estimated Japan was only 2,400 miles west of the Canary Islands, a miscalculation of roughly 8,000 miles. His error was convenient, because no one would have funded a voyage of that length. The indigenous people he brought died; the parrots survived. Columbus would make three more voyages, each less successful than the last. He died in 1506, still insisting he had reached Asia. Andrew Jackson, born this day in 1767, was the first president from the frontier and the first who was not from Virginia or Massachusetts. He fought in the Revolution at thirteen, was captured, and was slashed by a British officer's sword for refusing to shine his boots. He carried the scar and a hatred of the British for the rest of his life. He owned 150 slaves, signed the Indian Removal Act, and destroyed the Second Bank of the United States. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, born this day in 1933, was the second woman on the Supreme Court. She argued six gender-discrimination cases before the Court and won five. People born on March 15 fall under the zodiac sign of Pisces. The birthstone is Aquamarine and the birth flower is Daffodil. Historical events on March 15 include 44 BCE: Julius Caesar assassinated on the Ides of March, 1493: Columbus returns to Spain from first voyage to the Americas, 1820: Maine becomes 23rd US state as part of Missouri Compromise. Famous people born on March 15 include Andrew Jackson (1767), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933), Bret Michaels (1963).