Philadelphia-born Pierce Mease Butler was a grandson of a Founding Father and for a time one of the richest men in the country thanks to his family's plantation and slave-owning interests in the South. He was famous for marrying and then divorcing famous British actress Fanny Kemble, who was horrified by the treatment of slaves on her husband's plantations when she visited them and became an outspoken abolitionist. Butler was briefly arrested for treason in Philadelphia at the start of the Civil War but continued a well-regarded legal practice as one the city's elite. He was sixty years old when he died on this day. (By John Osborne)
"Obituaries," The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1867 ... (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1870), 573.
