Over two nights, a mob of residents of Staten Island, New York, numbering up to a thousand, destroyed the buildings of the Marine Hospital there. The facility was the main state immigrant quarantine hospital for New York and the local population had long feared the danger of infection from the quarantine center and its immigrant patients. The attackers and the staff removed all the immigrant patients, numbering around a hundred, from the buildings before the arson took place and there were no injuries or fatalities. (By John Osborne)

U.S. Army units under Colonel George Wright came under attack from a force of Native Americans from the Yakama, Pelouse, and Spokane tribes under Chief Kamiakin at Four Lakes in Oregon, near what would soon be the settlement of Spokane. Wright's counter-attack was decisive and the Indians suffered heavy casualties. (By John Osborne)

The Government of India Act came into effect on this day and all authority the East India Company had held since the earliest daysof commercial settlement ends. The bloody Indian Rebellion of the previous eighteen months had convinced the British Government that direct rule under an imperial Viceroy is a more prudent and secure arrangement. (By John Osborne)

Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, the former Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs whose massive diplomatic influence in Europe had reached from his chairmanship of the Congress of Vienna to the Revolutions of 1848, died in Vienna at the age of eighty-six. (By John Osborne)

The French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville died at the age of fifty-three at Cannes in the south of France. He is most famous in the United States for his famous observations during an 1831 visit, published under the title Democracy in America. (By John Osborne)