Confederate commerce raider C.S.S. Nashville, with Lieutenant Robert Baker Pegram in command, returned from her European adventures by running the U.S. Navy blockade into Beaufort, North Carolina.  She had in the past months destroyed several Union ships, docked at Southampton in England for repairs, and eluded units chasing her.  Speedy but not strong enough in construction for a warship, she was later sold and employed as a pure blockade runner.  Called the C.S.S. Rattlesnake, she was destroyed by the Union Navy exactly one year later. (By John Osborne)

Charles Gounod's opera La Reine de Saba (The Queen of Sheba) premiered at the L'Operà in Paris.  The work, set in Jerusalem with a text by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, did not receive its United States debut until January 12, 1889, in New Orleans.  (By John Osborne)

The War Department, acting under a congressional mandate passed the month before, took control of all telegraph lines in the United States.  From then on, all information passed over the telegraph would require Army approval and all news organizations that broke the rules governing the dissemination of military news and information would be punished by witholding their use of the telegraph and, further, having the transport of their newspapers by railroad restricted.  (By John Osborne)  

The three-act light opera "The lily of Killarney" with music by Sir Julius Benedict, premiered at the Covent Garden Theater in London in an evening performance. (Other sources cite Monday, February 10, 1862 as its actual public debut) Set in eighteenth century Ireland with a John Oxenford libretto drawn from Dion Boucicault's Colleen Bawn, this production later toured Europe under the title "The Rose of Erin" and became Benedict's most performed opera.  (By John Osborne)

Agoston Haraszthy was an Hungarian winemaker who had settled first in Wisconsin and then in northern California, where he founded the Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma County.  At San Francisco, more than 100,000 cuttings of 350 different varieties of vines Haraszthy had collected in Europe arrived.  Haraszthy tried to enlist state funds for their distribution around the northern counties but the legislature refused to help.  Haraszthy struggled financially, ultimately declaring bankruptcy in 1868, but his boldness and his vines changed the face of California.  (By John Osborne)   

Before the war, Frederick West Lander was an Army engineering officer and a famous transcontinental explorer who discovered several routes westward across the United States.  He was also a published poet of some note and the husband of the famous English-born actress, Jean Davenport, who he had married in 1860. He had been commissioned a brigadier-general and badly wounded early in the war.  Later, he fell ill with pneumonia and died from a stroke at his headquarters in Paw Paw, Virginia.  He was forty years old.  (By John Osborne)