President Johnson signed the legislation that awarded, on the recommendation of General W.T. Sherman, the Medal of Honor, the Union's highest award for valor to Mary E. Walker who, serving as a nurse had crossed battle lines to treat wounded and had been captured and imprisoned in the Confederacy.  Later Army reforms in 1917 saw her removed from the official list of recipients but President Carter officially restored the award to her in 1977. She is still, in 2016, the only female holder of the medal.  (By John Osborne)

In Chicago the Union Stockyards opened it livestock market, housing thousands of animals for swift and efficient slaughter.  The centerpiece of the massive Chicago meat-packing industry, the market in the city's famous "Square Mile" immediately became a popular tourist attraction and remained so for decades. (By John Osborne)

Hiram Sibley had founded Western Union in 1851 and in ten years built it into one of the dominant American communication companies, boasting transcontinental lines.  When Western Union absorbed the US Telegraph Company around this date, it achieved a virtual monopoly over the telegraph industry.  (By John Osborne)

In a quiet wedding at Wheatland in Pennsylvania, Harriet Lane, the niece of James Buchanan who had served the bachelor president as his hostess at the White House during his tenure, married Baltimore banker Henry Eliiot Johnston who she had first met in 1850.  She was thirty-five years old and eventually had two sons, who both died tragically of disease in their teens.  Her husband died in 1884 and she lived as a very wealthy widow and philanthropist till 1903.  (By John Osborne)