For bankers in fledgling Denver gold dust was proving an unwieldy and expensive form of exchange.  Accordingly, Clark, Gruber, and Company set up a private mint and began minting pure gold coins on July 20, 1860 bearing the name of the company.  Fully legal, the mint produced $3,000,000 in coins over the next thirty months.  The U.S. Treasury authorized the Denver Mint in 1862 and purchased the operation in 1863. (By John Osborne) 

A convention of four ordained and four lay members organized the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Georgia and Adjacent States on July 20, 1860.  Its jurisdiction comprised Georgia and Florida and in its first report the following year enumerated five ordained ministers, eight congregations, and more than three hundred members.  It also reported that it had joined the General Synod of the Confederate States.  (By John Osborne)

Under the Islamic Calender, the first day of the new year, or Muharram moves eleven to twelve days each year.  In 1860, Muharram stood on July 20, the first day of the year 1277, dating from the prophet Muhammad's migration to Medina in 622 C.E. (By John Osborne)

Elizabeth Andrew Borden was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, the daughter of a prominent local businessman and his first wife.  On August 4, 1892, her father and his second wife were found murdered and mutilated with ax wounds. Lizzie Borden was charged with both murders but was acquitted in a trial followed across the nation in June 1893.  The case was never solved and Lizzie Borden died in Fall River on June 1, 1927.  (By John Osborne)

The Star of the Union, one of the three ships chartered to return the African slaves rescued from slave ships and landed at Key West, sailed in the early morning hours for Liberia.  It carried the 383 surviving captives from the Bogota, seized by the U.S. Navy that spring, and arrived at Monrovia in late August, 1860. The survivors of their second crossing were delivered to the American Colonization Society agent at Sinoe in Liberia. (By John Osborne)

The 975 ton S.S. South Shore, one of the three ships chartered to return the African slaves rescued from slave ships and landed at Key West, sailed in the early morning hours for Liberia.  It carried the 385 surviving captives from the William, captured by the U.S.S. Wyandotte on May 7, 1860 and arrived at Monrovia on August 30, 1860. One hundred and fifty-two Africans had died during their second crossing of the Atlantic.  The survivors were delivered to the American Colonization Society agent at Bassa, Liberia. (By John Osborne)

Hamilton College in Clinton, New York graduated seventeen young men at its commencement ceremonies, passing one thousand graduates since its founding in 1812.  The college also awarded honorary degrees to Asa Gay, professor of botany at Harvard and future champion of Darwin in the United States, and Henry Allen Foster, former Senator from New York and future chair of the Hamilton board of trustees.  (By John Osborne) 

A strikingly brilliant meteor was seen in a clear sky across the northern United States and Canada in the late evening.  Visible in a swath seven hundred miles wide, it first appeared over Michigan at an estimated altitude of ninety miles and passed between New Haven, Connecticut and New York City at a height of about forty-two miles around ten o'clock, just after having broken into three pieces.  It then streaked out over the Atlantic at an estimated speed of fifty times the speed of sound.  (By John Osborne)   

John Brown Gordon, an ardent and tireless Breckinridge supporter and future Confederate general, gave a lecture before the literary societies of Oglethorpe College, then in Milledgeville, Georgia, during commencement.  In it he called slavery "the hand-maid of civil liberty" and "the Mightiest Engine in the universe for the civilization, elevation, and refinement of mankind - the surest guarantee of the continuance of liberty among ourselves."  (By John Osborne)  

Abraham Lincoln wrote to his vice-presidential running mate, who he had never met, to introduce himself.  Beginning "It appears that you and I ought to be acquainted," he noted that Hamlin entered the Senate while Lincoln served his single term in the U.S. House but could not remember ever being introduced, and then asked Hamlin how he thought the prospects for November were.  (By John Osborne)