Around eleven p.m. on New York City's west side docks, the West Washington Market were discovered to be on fire.  A northwest wind drove the blaze through scores of fruit and vegetable stalls and damaged buildings in the market complex.  Ships moored nearby had to be moved into the channel as the fire burned and the wind carried sparks.  Total damage was later estimated at $100,000 but no-one suffered serious injury.  (By John Osborne)  

New York's state Constitutional Union Party Convention was held at the Mechanics' Hall in Utica, New York.  It endorsed unanimously the candidacies of John Bell and Edward Everett and named a committee to select electors. Speakers included former governor Washington Hunt and former congressman James Brooks, both ex-Whigs who would soon migrate to the Democratic Party when the Constitutional Union failed to gather momentum in New York.  (By John Osborne) 

At a mass meeting of the Young Man's Republican Union at the Cooper Institute Hall in New York City, Senator Charles Sumner gave a fiery speech calling for victory in the November election.  Discussing the future of slavery, he held that if the institution could be driven back into the slave states and kept out of the territories then slavery would die "as a poisoned rat dies of rage in its hole." (By John Osborne)

Colonel William T. Sherman was writing to his wife in Ohio from Alexandria, Louisiana, where he was the first director of the Louisiana State Seminary, later Louisiana State University.  He declared himself in this letter disinterested in politics, commented that the country was clearly ungovernable by politicians, and opined that whoever was elected in November "the same old game will be played, and he will go out of office like Pierce and Buchanan with their former honors sunk and lost."  (By John Osborne)