The U.S. Senate confirmed the appointment of Joseph E. Johnston as Quartermaster-General of the Army with the rank of Brigadier-General.  He was replacing General Thomas S. Jesup who had recently died. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Johnson resigned from the U.S. Army and went into the Confederate forces, the highest ranking soldier to do so.  (By John Osborne)  

At five in the morning, the 140 ton schooner Nautilus sailed from Thomaston, Maine with a Williams College scientific expedition to Labrador and Greenland aboard.  Professor G.A. Chadbourne of Williams College led the expedition and the Nautilus was captained by Charles E. Ranlett.  A party was landed on the Labrador coast to camp there while the rest of the group went on to Greenland.  (By John Osborne) 

The Vermont Republican Convention met at Rutland and nominated Erastus Fairbanks for governor and ratified the choices of the Chicago Convention.  Fairbanks had served as governor between 1852-1853 and was again elected.  He provided strong leadership in the provision of Union troops in the first months of the Civil War.  He died in 1864. (By John Osborne)

The steam vessel Kenosha of the Collingwood And Chicago Shipping Company had a boiler explode on Lake Michigan off Sheboygan, Wisconsin.  The accident killed seven of the crew and the stricken vessel was towed into Milwaukee the following day.  (By John Osborne)

Enoch Bartlett, well known horticulturalist, died at his home in Roxbury near Boston, Massachusetts, aged eighty one.  The Bartlett Pear was originally known in England as the Stair Pear after a schoolmaster who grew it in the 1770s and then the Williams Pear after the grower who spread it across England and the United States.  Unknowingly, Bartlett named the fruit after himself when he acquired a small orchard of them and this was the name that stuck.  (By John Osborne)

Chartered in December, 1856, the National Portrait Gallery first opened to the public in its temporary building on Great George Street in London.  George Scharf was named as its first curator.  It moved to South Kensington in March 1870 and then in 1896 to its current site in St. Martin's Place, adjacent to the National Gallery.  (By John Osborne)  

The National Rifle Association of Great Britain was founded at a meeting in the Thatched House Tavern on St. James' in London with Lord Herbert, the Liberal Secretary of War, as its first president.  Initially influenced by the volunteer movement which sprang up in 1859 after tension arose with France, it held its first competitive shooting meeting on Wimbledon Common on July 2, 1860.  Queen Victoria fired the first shot, a "bull's eye".  (By John Osborne)