The turbulent Virginia Democratic Convention in Richmond had just adjourned and many members immediately convened a mass meeting.  The meeting heard from Mississippi representative to Virginia Peter B. Starke, who urged that Virginia attend a southern convention that coming June.  The gathering then agreed to a strongly worded resolution recommending that the Virginia Legislature accept the invitation.  (By John Osborne)  

Johannes Brahms' Second Serenade in A was premiered in Hanover.  

The new Continental Hotel on the corner of Ninth and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia was opened for guests on this day.  During the earlier part of the week it had been open for tours from stockholders and the press.  Six stories high and with rooms for a thousand people, it was then the largest hotel in the country.  Abraham Lincoln would stay there in early 1861 on his way to Washington D.C. (By John Osborne)

The new Continental Hotel on the corner of Ninth and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia was opened first, on this day, to visitors and stockholders.  Six stories high and with rooms for a thousand people, it was then the largest hotel in the country.  It opened for guests three days later.  Abraham Lincoln would stay there in early 1861 on his way to Washington D.C. (By John Osborne)

Aaron Dwight Stevens and Albert Hazlett, both convicted for their role in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, appeared in a Charlestown, Virginia courtroom to hear the death sentence passed upon them.  The two were hanged together at Charlestown on March 16, 1860, the last of the captured raiders to do suffer that fate.  (By John Osborne) 

Christopher Memminger had earlier been dispatched from South Carolina to Richmond, Virginia to urge the legislature there to join in a convention of southern states designed to make a concerted response to the sectional crisis.  The Virginia legislature appointed a committee to study the matter and the group produced resolutions declining the invitation and holding that separate state action would be more useful to the Union.  (By John Osborne)  

The Montreal Ocean Steamship Company's mail steamer Hungarian had left Liverpool in England for Portland, Maine on February 5. 1860, with two hundred passengers and crew.  Twelve days later she ran up on the rocks off Cape Ledge, Nova Scotia and was completely wrecked.  All aboard drowned and only three bodies were found.  (By John Osborne)

The American barque Lima had left Le Havre in western France two days before bound for New Orleans with seventy-five emigrant passengers and a crew of twenty-six.   The vessel was seen off Barfleur in difficulties in a storm.  A large crowd gathered on the shore and saw the Lima was driven up on the rocks known as Rocher de Quillboeuf and quickly smashed to pieces.  Only two men survived; all others were lost.  (By John Osborne)

A large public meeting in Cumberland, Maryland gave vocal support to their congressman, Henry Winter Davis, who the Maryland Legislature had censured the week before over his vote for Republican William Pennington as Speaker of the House.  Praising Pennington's election as a defeat for radicals of both sides, the meeting decried those who would use sectional issues to gain party triumphs and condemned the censure vote.  (By John Osborne)