In Japan, Emperor Komei died of smallpox. Fifteen year old Crown Prince Mutsuhito became Emperor. (By John Osborne)

The future emperor of Japan was born to the Emperor Komei and the lady-in-waiting Nakayama Yoshiko. He was adopted as the heir to the throne and given the name Crown Prince Mutsuhito. He became the 122nd Emperor of Japan on January 31, 1867 and was formally crowned on October 31, 1868.  He ruled till his death in 1912. (By John Osborne)

Martha Bulloch (Mittie) Roosevelt, husband of Theodore Roosevelt, gave birth on this day to the couple's first son, and second child, in their house on East 20th Street in New York City. Mittie was from a slave-owning Southern family and had a brother, Jame Dunwoody Bulloch, who would become a Confederate Admiral, while Theodore is a wealthy merchant who would soon become an ardent supporter of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. The boy was named after his father and grew up to be President. (By John Osborne)

Princess Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria of Britain and wife of Prince Frederick William of Prussia, gave birth to her first child, William, in Berlin at three o'clock in the afternoon. The son became the Crown Prince of Prussia in 1861 after the death of his father from throat cancer and eventually reigned as Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany from 1888 till 1918. (By John Osborne)

The Echo had been captured off the coast of Cuba six days earlier carrying 318 African slaves, survivors of an initial total of around 490 that had begun the voyage on the 187 ton vessel. On August 29, 1858, the slaves, mostly young, were landed at Castle Pinckney, a federal fortress in Charleston Harbor and placed under the jurisdiction of local U.S. Marshal D.H. Hamilton. The crew had already been transported to Boston in the U.S. naval vessel that had made the capture. The Africans would eventually be returned across the Atlantic, as federal law dictated, aboard the warship U.S.S. Niagara. (By John Osborne)