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)

George Washington Lafayette Bickley, the mysterious but notorious Copperhead activist and Confederate surgeon who spent three years in a federal prison during the Civil War, died at his home in Baltimore on this day. Virginia born, he was imprisoned as a preventative measure, largely because of his reputation. He claimed to be one of the founders in the pre-war years of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a Southern organization with the goals of expanding the number of slave states by "filibustering" into Mexico and Central America. At the end of the war, he was released from his long imprisonment without trial but died at the early age of forty-four.  (By John Osborne) 

William Riddle, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, died by violence on this day in Philadelphia aged twenty-five.  Riddle had served throughout the Civil War during which he had been wounded several times, captured, escaped Libby Prison, and had fought at Antietam and Gettysburg. He had risen to the rank of Brevet Lieutenant Colonel, commanding a regiment besieging Petersburg. Surviving all that, he was killed in a Philadelphia bar-room in an argument over business that escalated into a brawl.  Four men were tried later for his murder.  (By John Osborne)

Isaac Newton, a Pennsylvania agriculturalist and the first United States Commissioner of the Agriculture Department, died on this day. He had been appointed as head of the Agricultural Section of the Patent Office after he befriended President Lincoln in 1861 and when a seperate Department of Agricultural was authorized in May 1862, Newton became its first commissioner.  A controversial and often divisive figure, he nevertheless established reporting procedures and efforts at experimental farms that set the new department firmly on its way.  He died in office a year after suffering a debilitating sunstroke while surveying the experimental farm in Washington, D.C. He was sixty-seven years old and is buried in the Mount Vernon Cemetery in Philadelphia.  (By John Osborne)

Thomas Bulfinch, whose publications on mythology, notably his Bulfinch's Mythology, sold thousands of copies and were for decades a Victorian staple in both schools and amongst the reading public, died on this day in Boston. The son of a famous architect, he had been educated at Harvard and became a clerk at the Merchant's Bank in Boston, Massachusetts.  Supporting himself with his salary, he published dozens of works on myth of many types, beginning in 1853 at age fifty-seven with a book on Hebrew myths.  He died, aged seventy, never having married and is buried in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  (By John Osborne)