This Day In Founding Fathers History – 15 April

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This Day In Founding Fathers History – 15 April 2013

On this day in 1865, President Lincoln succumbed to a gunshot wound inflicted by John Wilkes Booth the previous night while in Ford’s Theater. Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Henry Seward had also had an attempt on his life, although he survived. Lincoln was taken to a room across the street from Ford’s Theater where he died nine hours later, at 7:22 a.m. ₁

In 1947 on this day, California, New Jersey and Vermont all ratified the 22^nd Amendment, which set the presidential term limits to two four-year terms. ₂

On this day in 1817, the first American school for the deaf opened in Bennett’s City Hotel in Hartford, Connecticut. The school was started by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, with the help of Dr. Mason Fitch Cogswell and Laurent Clerc. The school was the first to receive educational state aid when the Connecticut General Assembly awarded an annual grant to the school in 1819, and the U.S. Congress awarded the school a land grant in 1820, the first case of federal aid to elementary and secondary special education in the United States. ₃

 

 

_{1 “Assassination of President Abraham Lincoln,” memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alrintr.html
2 “Ratification of Constitutional Amendments,” www.usconstitution.net/contamrat.html
3 “A Brief History of ASD,” American School for the Deaf, www.asd-1817.org/page.cfm?p=429}