Count Cavour and Napoleon III meet "by chance" at the southern French spa of Plombières-les-Bains and negotiate a secret treaty. The plan involves the goading of Austria into a war with Piedmont that France will then enter as the Italian state's ally. In return, the French are to increase their influence with the Pope and gain areas in south-west Italy, including Nice. Though not all will go according to plan, the war will arrive and France and Piedmont will defeat Austria and France will receive its new territories.

Charles Hamilton leads a Missouri pro-slavery group into Kansas where they capture eleven free soil supporting Kansan men. At a remote spot near Marais des Cygnes, the Missourians attempt to execute their captives; five are killed. This was the final significant violence in Kansas before the outbreak of the Civil War but poet John Greenleaf Whittier will make sure that the event is remembered the following September when he he publishes his poem "Le Marais du Cygnes" in the Atlantic Monthly. (By John Osborne)

Alexis Benoist Soyer, the French chef who had made his name a household word in Britain, dies in London at the age of forty-eight. The long-time at the elite Reform Club in London, he has become famous with his efforts in Ireland during the Potato Famine, running a soup kitchen that helped save thousands of lives. During the recent Crimean War, he had traveled to the front, put British army catering on a far more efficient basis and invented a field kitchen that will still be in use a century later in the British forces. His work in the war had left him ill and weakened, however, and contributes to his death. (By John Osborne)

Former Mexican War general, Mississippi governor, and current U.S. congressman, John Anthony Quitman dies on his plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. He is said to be a victim of the notorious "National Hotel Disease" that had recently afflicted Washington, D.C. Though born in New York, Quitman has became a wealthy slave-owner and a tireless advocate of southern slates rights and slave power influence to the point of advocating the re-opening of the Atlantic slave trade and financing filibustering efforts in the Caribbean. (By John Osborne)