Tensions in Boston were still high after anti-abolitionists had broken up a meeting earlier in the month in the city.  Wendell Phillips gave a ninety minutes morning speech at the Music Hall condemning both the violence against abolitionists and the complicity of the police and the Mayor in not protecting legally constituted meetings from "the mob."  An hostile crowd was waiting outside the hall when he emerged and he had to escorted home by a large force of police.  (By John Osborne) 

At around six o'clock on a misty morning on the Mississippi River forty miles above Memphis, Tennessee, the 275-ton stern-wheel steamboat South Bend heading downriver from Cincinnati and another fully loaded stern wheeler called the Goody Friends voyaging upriver from New Orleans collided.  The South Bend was heavily damaged and sank within minutes in thirty feet of water. (By John Osborne)

The small sailing sloop Garret Demarest had left Newburgh on the Hudson River making for New York City.  Opposite Irvington in Westchester County, a squall capsized her around nine o'clock that night.  The four man crew clung to the wrecked vessel throughout a freezing night, one of the coldest of the year so far, till they were discovered and rescued in the early morning.  One of the four later died of exposure.  (By John Osborne)

With the endorsement of both wings of his own party and the Whigs, Joseph Wightman, an inventor and designer of scientific instruments, was elected as the seventeenth mayor of Boston, the first Democrat so elected.  His vote count of 8,768 on rain-filled day in the city easily outpaced his nearest rival, Republican Moses Kimball, who garnered 5,681. Wightman was reelected the following year but lost his bid for a third term to the Republican candidate, former major Frederic W. Lincoln, Jr.  (By John Osborne)

A Spanish serviceman was killed, and three others injured in a small explosion aboard the Spanish naval frigate Bereguala, then in dry-dock undergoing repairs in the Brooklyn Naval Yard in New York.  Newspaper reports stated that carelessness with a cigarette was the cause and that the fatal injuries were incurred both from the explosion and a fall to the dockside. (By John Osborne)

Soon after dawn, John Woods of Boston and George King of New York City fought a much anticipated bare-knuckle, and illegal, boxing contest in the fields near Bull's Ferry, New Jersey just across the Hudson from New York.  More than five hundred spectators watched as Woods had much the best of a ninety minute, fifty-five round encounter, winning on a retirement.  Woods was arrested later that day in New York City and charged with "leaving the State to engage in a prize fight."  (By John Osborne)