After visiting an army camp near Washington under the auspices of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and hearing soldiers singing the popular marching song "John Brown's Body," Julia Ward Howe, by her own account, awoke in her Washington DC hotel room in the early hours of the next morning and wrote down a new set of words she had been composing since.  This "Battle Hymn of the Republic" was published anonymously in the February 1862 edition of the Atlantic Monthly and soon became popular across the Northern states.  (By John Osborne) 

Alvan Graham Clark, a well-known telescope-maker and amateur astronomer in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, was testing a new unprecedented 18½ inch lense he had ground originally for the University of Mississippi when he discovered a new star.  Sirius, the brightest in the sky, known also as the Dog Star, had been rumored to have a smaller "companion star" for some time.  Clark observed that this was indeed the case.  Known as "Sirius B," it was also the first observed "white dwarf" star.  (By John Osborne)

In drizzling rain, John Ericsson's new ironclad was lauched at ten in the morning in Greenpoint, New York. The U.S. Navy needed to counter the reported conversion of the Confederate's Merrimack into an ironclad and Ericsson won the contract with a controversial design.  The keel was laid on October 28, 1861.  The first sea-going U.S. Navy vessel built from scratch as an ironclad, she was finished in a remarkable three months and five days and turned over to the Navy on February 19, 1862. She famously saw action on March 9, 1862.  (By John Osborne) 

In a diversionary attack designed to distract Confederate General T.J. Jackson's advance in western Virginia, Colonel Samuel Dunning led a regiment-sized Union force against the Virginia militia at Blue's Gap in Hampshire County in what is now West Virginia.  The Confederates forces were pushed back with ease and Dunnings's men marched back to Romney, Virginia, indulging in looting and destruction of property along the way that did not endear the local population to the Union.  (By John Osborne)  

In one of the first large prisoner exchanges of the war, two hundred and forty Union soldiers were released from Richmond prisons for a similar number of Confederates. The Union men were transported aboard the Confederate steamer Northampton, which met the Union vessel George Washington outside of Newport News, Virginia.  From there they sailed to Fortress Monroe at Hampton.  Most had been captured at Bull Run.  (By John Osborne) 

Jesse Bright of Indiana was a senior Democrat, and a slaveowner in Kentucky, who had earlier written a letter of introduction for an arms-dealer friend to Jefferson Davis in Richmond, addressing him as the Confederate president.  A case for his expulsion was referred to the Judiciary Committee in December 1861.  On January 13, 1862, by a vote of 5-2, the committee ruled that the case did not rise to the level required for expulsion.  Despite this, the Senate expelled Bright on a vote of 32-14, the last expulsion ever by that body.  (By John Osborne) 

Jesse Bright of Indiana was a senior Democrat, and a slaveowner in Kentucky, who had served in 1860 as president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate.  The previous March, he had written a letter of introduction for an arms-dealer friend to Jefferson Davis in Richmond.  A case for expulsion was referred to the Judiciary Committee in December 1861.  By a vote of 5-2, the committee ruled that the case did not rise to the level required for expulsion.  Despite this, three weeks later, the Senate expelled Bright on a vote of 32-14.  (By John Osborne)