November 6 in History

Twenty-five players from Rutgers College and twenty-five from the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, gathered on a field in New Brunswick on November 6, 1869, to play a game bearing almost no resemblance to modern American football. The players could not carry the ball, could not throw it, and advanced it primarily by kicking or batting it with their fists toward the opposing team's goal. Rutgers won 6-4 in what is recognized as the first intercollegiate football game in American history. The game used rules closer to soccer than anything recognizable as football today. Each team fielded 25 men. There were no downs, no forward passes, no line of scrimmage. A point was scored by kicking the ball between two posts set eight paces apart, without a crossbar. Players wore no uniforms, helmets, or padding; Rutgers players tied scarves around their heads to distinguish themselves from opponents. The field was roughly 120 yards long and 75 yards wide. The match culminated a rivalry between the two New Jersey schools that had simmered over various disputes, including a cannon that Princeton students had allegedly stolen from Rutgers. Rutgers captain William Leggett organized his team using a formation that assigned players to specific offensive and defensive roles, an early tactical innovation. Princeton's larger and more athletic players relied on individual skill but lacked coordination. The game attracted roughly 100 spectators, mostly students. A rematch at Princeton a week later went to the home team 8-0, and a planned third game was canceled when faculty intervened, concerned that athletics distracted from studies. From that modest beginning, college football evolved through the contributions of Walter Camp at Yale, who introduced the line of scrimmage, downs, and the snap, transforming a disorganized kicking game into the sport that now generates billions in annual revenue.

The B Reactor at the Hanford Engineer Works in southeastern Washington began producing weapons-grade plutonium on November 6, 1944, solving the most critical bottleneck in the Manhattan Project and enabling the bomb that would destroy Nagasaki nine months later. The reactor, designed by Enrico Fermi and built by DuPont, was the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor, a graphite-moderated, water-cooled system that transmuted uranium-238 into plutonium-239 through neutron bombardment. Hanford was selected in January 1943 for its isolation, access to the Columbia River for cooling, and hydroelectric power from Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams. The Army Corps of Engineers displaced roughly 1,500 residents from the towns of Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland. Construction employed over 50,000 workers who built three reactors and massive chemical separation plants across a 586-square-mile reservation. The B Reactor nearly failed on its first day. After reaching criticality on September 26, 1944, the reactor mysteriously shut itself down and restarted in a repeating cycle. Fermi and physicist John Wheeler diagnosed the problem as xenon-135 poisoning, a fission product that absorbed neutrons and suppressed the chain reaction. DuPont engineers had installed extra fuel channels as a safety margin. Loading additional uranium slugs into these channels provided enough reactivity to overcome the poisoning. The plutonium was chemically separated in enormous processing canyons, purified, and shipped to Los Alamos, where it was fashioned into the core of the Fat Man implosion bomb. The environmental legacy was severe: decades of production released enormous quantities of radioactive waste into the soil and the Columbia River, creating the most contaminated nuclear site in the Western Hemisphere.

The United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 1761 on November 6, 1962, condemning South Africa's apartheid policies and calling on member states to sever diplomatic and economic ties with the regime. The vote, 67 in favor to 16 against with 23 abstentions, marked the first time the body had moved beyond debate to demand concrete action against racial segregation that had governed South Africa since 1948. Apartheid was not improvised bigotry but an elaborate legal architecture. The Population Registration Act classified every South African by race. The Group Areas Act dictated where each race could live. The Bantu Education Act designed an inferior school curriculum for Black students. Pass laws required Black South Africans to carry identification documents at all times and restricted their movement. Interracial marriage and sexual relations were criminalized. The General Assembly's patience had been exhausted by the Sharpeville massacre of March 21, 1960, when police opened fire on unarmed protesters demonstrating against pass laws, killing 69 and wounding 180, most shot in the back as they fled. The massacre shocked the world. South Africa's response was to declare a state of emergency, ban the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress, and arrest thousands. Resolution 1761 recommended diplomatic, economic, and transportation sanctions, but the General Assembly lacked enforcement power. The Security Council, where Britain, France, and the United States held vetoes, blocked binding measures for decades, protecting trade relationships with Pretoria. The resolution nonetheless established the international legal and moral framework that sustained the anti-apartheid movement for the next three decades. Voluntary sanctions, arms embargoes, and cultural boycotts intensified until the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid that followed.

Abraham Lincoln won the presidency on November 6, 1860, without appearing on the ballot in ten Southern states, carrying not a single county south of Virginia, and receiving less than 40 percent of the national popular vote. The election was a four-way fracture that exposed the irreparable division over slavery and set the country on an irreversible path toward civil war. Before Lincoln even took the oath of office, seven states would vote to secede. The Democratic Party had split at its convention in Charleston, South Carolina, when Southern delegates walked out after the platform committee refused to include a plank protecting slavery in the western territories. Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas; Southern Democrats chose Vice President John C. Breckinridge. A fourth candidate, John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party, campaigned on a vague platform of preserving the Union without addressing slavery at all. Lincoln's Republican platform opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories but did not call for abolition where it already existed. This distinction was meaningless to Southern leaders who saw any restriction on slavery's expansion as an existential threat to their political power and economic system. Lincoln won with 180 electoral votes, a clear majority, by sweeping every Northern state except New Jersey, which he split with Douglas. South Carolina voted to secede on December 20, 1860, six weeks after the election and ten weeks before Lincoln's inauguration. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed by February 1861. The outgoing president, James Buchanan, declared secession illegal but insisted the federal government had no power to prevent it. Lincoln, still in Springfield, Illinois, could only watch as the country disintegrated. By the time he delivered his inaugural address on March 4, 1861, the Confederate States of America had already elected its own president. The war came six weeks later.

South African police arrested Mohandas Gandhi on November 6, 1913, as he led a column of over 2,000 Indian miners, their wives, and children across the border from Natal into the Transvaal in deliberate violation of laws restricting Indian movement between provinces. The march was the climax of a nonviolent resistance campaign Gandhi had been developing for two decades, the laboratory in which he refined the methods he would later use to dismantle British rule in India. Gandhi had arrived in South Africa in 1893 as a 23-year-old lawyer hired for a commercial dispute. The racial discrimination he encountered transformed him from a diffident barrister into a political organizer. In 1906, he coined the term satyagraha, meaning "truth-force," to describe his philosophy of resisting injustice through nonviolent non-cooperation. He led campaigns against registration requirements and organized the burning of registration certificates. The 1913 march was triggered by two grievances: a three-pound annual tax on former indentured laborers who chose to remain in South Africa, and a court ruling that invalidated Hindu and Muslim marriages, rendering thousands of Indian women concubines and their children illegitimate under law. The marchers, many of them coal miners who had gone on strike, walked from Newcastle in Natal toward Charlestown on the Transvaal border. Gandhi was arrested three times during the march and imprisoned. The government's harsh response, including mounted police forcing strikers back to work at gunpoint, generated international condemnation. Negotiations led to the Indian Relief Act of 1914, which abolished the tax and recognized Indian marriages. Gandhi left South Africa for India in July 1914, carrying a fully developed philosophy of nonviolent resistance that he would apply on a continental scale. The march proved that ordinary people, organized around moral principle and willing to accept suffering, could force a government to yield.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky died on November 6, 1893, nine days after conducting the premiere of his Sixth Symphony — the Pathétique — in St. Petersburg. He was 53. The officially given cause was cholera, from drinking unboiled water during an outbreak. The theory that he was forced to commit suicide by a court of honor at the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence — to cover up a relationship with a male member of the aristocracy — has circulated since 1978 and remains unproven. Whatever the cause, the Pathétique's final movement, an Adagio lamentoso that fades into silence, sounds in retrospect like a farewell. He'd had a lifetime of suppressed misery about his sexuality under Russia's laws and his own tortured conscience. The symphony ends, and then it's very quiet.