The state elections saw the Democrats retake the governor's office and hold their control in both houses of the legislature. Gove Saulsbury, the elder brother of two U.S. Senators, beat his Republican opponent James Riddle by 9,810 votes to 8,598 and replaced Republican William Cannon as governor while the Democrats held the State Senate by six seats to three and the House 15 seats to six. (By John Osborne)
Samuel Ryan Curtis had represented Iowa in the U.S. Congress for two terms between 1857 and 1861 and then became a leading Union general as the commander of the Army of the Southwest. He won notable victories at Pea Ridge in Arkansas in 1862 and Westport in Kansas in 1864. After the war, he took charge of the Department of the Northwest and then involved himself with the Union Pacific Railroad. He was sixty-one years old. (By John Osborne)
The leading Church of England clergyman on the Indian sub-continent, the Right Reverend George Edward Lynch Cotton, the Bishop of Calcutta since 1858, was known for his educational efforts, founding schools for Europeand and Eurasian children in Calcutta and Bombay. He had travelled to Kushtia in northern India to consecrate a cemetery and returning to his river boat slipped on the boarding plank and was swept away in the River Ganges. His body was never found. He was fifty-two years old. (By John Osborne)
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, October 20, 1866, p. 76.
Though the stalemate over Kansas statehood continued, the year began with the relatively uncontroversial admittance of Oregon as the nation's 33d state. It was also a year of discoveries. Prospectors reported a massive deposit of silver in Nevada known as the Comstock Lode, and in northwestern Pennsylvania, Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well in the U.S.
During a speech in Cleveland, Ohio, Civil War political general and Radical Republican Benjamin Butler threatened President Johnson with impeachment in fiery language. Butler thundered that Congress will "sooner or later...put on record in due form a list of these and other direct violations of the Constitution, and call on him (Johnson) either to justify them, or answer for them...He will further find that the people of this country know how to deal with a usurping President, King, or a Dictator." (By John Osborne)
Emperor Maximilian of Mexico had ordered a blockade of the Mexican port city of Matamoras, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas, and then under the control of the rebel forces of Benito Juarez. Underlining the United States impatience with Imperial Mexico, President Johnson issued a proclamation stating in forceful terms that the United States would completely ignore this blockade. Any attempt, the document said, to enforce the blockade against American citizens "will be disallowed." (By John Osborne)
The famous giant pre-fabricated Crystal Palace building from the 1851 Great Exhibition had been taken apart from its Hyde Park location and re-erected at Sydenham, south of London. Incorporated with redigned sections, the "new" building, containing many of the original exhibits and display rooms was dedicated in 1854. In the afternoon a serious fire broke out and destroyed a large part of the northern end of the structure and its contents. The surviving displays opened as usual the next day, however, and up to 8000 people attended. Fire did, however, see the final and total destruction of the Crystal Palace in November 1936. (By John Osborne)
The New York Yacht Club's great race of three yachts, the Henrietta, the Fleetwing, and the Vesta, across the Atlantic had begun the week before off Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Progress had been excellent till mid-winter gales were encountered. The Fleetwing bore the brunt of the storm and just before ten in the evening a massive wave carried away and drowned six of the eight men on watch. With a quarter of her crew lost, Fleetwing's eventual finish in second place, just a few hours behind the victor, Henrietta, was a remarkable effort of seamanship. (By John Osborne)