1846
1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850
President Polk precipitates a Mexican War that begins January 13 (see 1845). Having failed in an effort to purchase California and the New Mexico Territory from Mexico, he orders General Zachary Taylor, now 61, to advance from the Neuces River to the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo). President Anson Jones officiates at a ceremony February 19 that formally ends the Republic of Texas. General Taylor reaches the river's left bank March 28 and begins building a fort (Fort Texas) opposite Matamoras. The Mexicans order him to retire beyond the Neuces April 12, Mexican troops under the command of General Marian Arista cross the Rio Grande April 25, kill a U.S. reconnoitering party in a cavalry skirmish, and lay siege to Fort Texas May 3 with 4,500 men. Taylor marches with 2,200 men to relieve the fort, and political infighting at Mexico City delays efforts to reinforce the siege.
The Battle of Palo Alto May 8 ends in victory for General Taylor, whose 2,200 troops are outnumbered two to one but defeat the Mexicans with help from artillery pieces near the water hole of Palo Alto at the southern tip of Texas. The Mexicans lose about 1,100 killed and wounded, the Americans 170. Much of Taylor's army is made up of Irish immigrants, who have enlisted for money and adventure, but their officers have enforced harsh discipline and often abused the Irish, many of whom question attacking a weaker country whose people are Roman Catholic; dozens of them desert, crossing to attend Mass at Matamoros on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande and forming the St. Patrick Battalion (the Mexicans call them the San Patrices). The Battle at Resaca de la Palma May 9 ends in a rout of the Mexicans, who fall back across the Rio Grande.
President Polk sends a war message to Congress May 11 declaring that Mexico "has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil," Congress declares May 13 that a state of war exists by act of Mexico, it votes a war appropriation of $10 million, and it approves enlistment of 50,000 soldiers.
California's Bear Flag Revolt begins June 14 as U.S. settlers at Sonoma in the Sacramento Valley proclaim a republic independent of Mexico and raise a flag bearing a grizzly bear and a red star on a white field. About 500 Americans live in the Valley, whose Mexican population is between 8,000 and 12,000; a dozen or so Americans have seized a large herd of horses from a Mexican military commandant, another group captures Sonoma June 14 under the leadership of William B. Ide, and they issue a declaration of independence. John C. Frémont arrives at Sonoma June 25 and is elected July 5 to head the "Republic of California"; U.S. naval commander John D. (Drake) Sloat, 64, takes possession of Monterey July 7 and claims possession of California for the United States, running up the U.S. flag in place of the bear flag. Sloat's subordinate John B. (Berrien) Montgomery, 51, takes San Francisco July 9, Commodore Robert F. Stockton succeeds Sloat as commander of the U.S. Pacific fleet and enters Los Angeles August 13, accompanied by Frémont, without a shot being fired (see 1845). Naval commander Samuel F. (Francis) Dupont, 42, transports Frémont's troops to San Diego, and news of the naval occupation of California reaches Washington August 31. The only member of the Delaware powder-making family to spell his name as one word and with a capital "D," Dupont enters the Gulf of California, whose waters and coastal areas he clears entirely of Mexican forces (see 1847).
Former Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna, now 51, returns from exile at Havana, takes command of the army at Mexico City September 14, and has his gilded carriage drawn by eight mules while the wives and girlfriends of his men forage for the food that they cook for his troops, but a 10,000-man force commanded by General Pedro de Ampudia sustains a defeat September 24 at Monterrey in northwestern Mexico, where 6,000 men under General Taylor triumph September 24 after a 3-day battle. The Mexicans lose 367 killed and wounded, the Americans 120 killed, 368 wounded; Taylor occupies the city, allows the Mexicans to withdraw, and grants Ampudia's request for an 8-week armistice. President Polk repudiates the armistice, and Taylor marches on Saltillo, capital of Coahuilla. Tampico falls November 15 to U.S. naval forces under Commodore David Conner, 54, and Saltillo falls to Taylor November 16 (see 1847).
An Oregon Treaty signed with Britain June 15 gives territory south of the 49th parallel to the United States, overriding cries of "54°40' or Fight" (see 1818; 1828; 1845). Britain receives land north of the parallel on the mainland and also receives Vancouver Island, where the 21-year-old Hudson's Bay Company Fort Vancouver outpost is relocated. John McLoughlin, now 52, resigns from the company and remains behind to develop a town on land he claims as his own at the falls of the Willamette River.
Iowa enters the Union December 28 as the 29th state, with its capital at Des Moines.
Britain's Peel government falls June 29 following a split in the Conservative Party over the issue of free trade. Sir Robert Peel has come out in favor of ending the Corn Laws that bar grain imports. Lord George Bentinck, 44, has given up his passion for fox hunting and sold his race horses to devote all his efforts to retaining the Corn Laws (the second son of the 4th duke of Portland, Bentinck has been the last member of the House of Commons to wear a pink hunting coat in Parliament). Protectionist Benjamin Disraeli has joined in the revolt against Peel's ministry, Peel resigns, and the Whigs regain power under the leadership of former home secretary Lord John Russell, now 53, who led the fight for the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, has come out in favor of free trade, and will head the government until 1852, but his own party's disunity and his own weak leadership will frustrate his efforts to extend the franchise to urban workers, guarantee security of tenure to Irish farmers, or end the civil disabilities of Jews.
Denmark's Kristian VIII lays claim July 8 to the independent duchies of Schleswig and Holstein; Prussia contests the claim (see 1848).
Portugal's right-wing António da Costa Cabral government falls after 4 years in power as a popular rising (the Maria da Fonte movement) rebels against higher taxes, but the country is left divided between Septembrists (who hold Porto), and followers of João Carlos Saldanha, now 56, who has gained the confidence of Queen Maria at Lisbon and is made a duke. The queen marries her cousin Francisco, duque de Cádiz, in October; her sister Louisa marries the duc de Montpensier, son of France's Louis Philippe. Britain had hoped that the queen would marry Leopold of Saxe-Coburg; both marriages break agreements made between France and Britain; and they strain Franco-British relations (see 1847).
The tiny republic of Kraków loses its independence November 6 in the wake of a March uprising that has led to occupation by both Austrian and Russian troops; Kraków is annexed to the Austrian-controlled part of Poland called Galicia.
Algeria's emir Abdul-Qadar (Abdulkader) takes refuge in Morocco with a few loyal adherents in July (see 1844), but he has few resources to continue the fight against France (see 1847).
The Battle of Aliwal in the Punjab January 28 ends in victory for an army of 12,000 British and Indian troops with 32 guns over a 15,000-man Sikh army with 67 guns under the command of Rajjur Singh (see 1845). General Harry Smith destroys the Sikh force, killing more than 3,000 (many of whom drown as they flee across the Sutlej River) and capturing all of its artillery, stores, and supplies; his own casualties total 151 killed, 422 wounded. General Hugh Gough hands the Sikhs another defeat February 10 at the Battle of Sobraon, this time with 15,000 troops and 100 guns against the Sikhs' 20,000 and 70 guns under the command of Tej Singh. Another 3,000 Sikhs are killed (many of them drowned, once again, as they try to cross the Sutlej), 7,000 wounded; the British and their Indian troops capture 67 Sikh guns but 164 of them are killed, 2,119 wounded. Gough marches on Lahore; the Punjab becomes a British protectorate (see 1849).
India's British raj installs a Hindu maharajah in Kashmir, whose population has long been chiefly Muslim (see 1845). Hindus and Muslims will contest control of Kashmir for more than 150 years (see 1947).
Former acting governor general of India Charles T. Metcalfe, Baron Metcalfe (of Fern Hill), dies of cancer at Malhanger, Hampshire, September 5 at age 61, having served also as governor of Jamaica and governor general of Canada.
The commander of the U.S. East India Squadron James Biddle negotiates the first Sino-American treaty. Now 63, Biddle goes on to enter Edo (later Tokyo) Bay in July with two ships, requests the opening of trade relations, between Japan and the United States, is refused, and returns to command a Pacific Coast flotilla in the Mexican War (see Perry, 1853).
Texas authorities hire Cherokee scout and trader Jesse Chisholm in February to bring Comanche to a council at Comanche Peak (see 1844); the meeting takes place May 12, but the Comanche remain aggrieved at the incursion of whites that is decimating the bison herds on which the tribes depend not only for food but also for the hides used to make blankets, clothing, teepees, and so much else (see 1850).
The Wilmot Proviso precipitates a stormy U.S. national debate over the issue of extending slavery into the territories. Offered August 8 by U.S. congressman David Wilmot (D. Pa.), who has acted in behalf of antislavery forces nationwide, the amendment to a bill regarding the settlement of the war with Mexico, it would forbid any such extension, but the measure will fail to gain approval by both houses of Congress (see Alabama Platform, 1848; Republican Party, 1854).
Concord, Massachusetts, philosopher-pencil maker Henry David Thoreau is arrested August 14 and jailed overnight for refusing to pay a poll tax levied to pay for the Mexican War. Thoreau's antislavery views have motivated his action, and when his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson asks him why he went to jail Thoreau, now 29, replies, "Why did you not?" (see Nonfiction ["Resistance to Civil Government"], 1849).
Milwaukee is incorporated (see 1818). The new city on the shore of Lake Michigan comprises several neighboring Wisconsin Territory villages.
Boston aristocrat Francis Parkman, 23, journeys westward from St. Louis on the Oregon Trail but is overcome by illness (see 1847).
Brigham Young leads Mormons in a trek to the Mexican Territory beyond the western limits of the United States, stopping at the town of Omaha en route to the Great Salt Lake Valley (see 1844; 1847).
Orkney Islands-born Scottish surgeon John Rae, 32, begins an expedition into the Canadian Arctic. Resident surgeon since 1835 at the Hudson's Bay Company's Moose Factory trading post on James Bay, he will survey Committee and Repulse bays, proving Boothia to be a peninsula.
Parliament finally repeals Britain's Corn Law June 28. Conservatives led by Benjamin Disraeli oppose Prime Minister Robert Peel's free-trade actions, denounce Peel for betraying his protectionist principles, but are unable to prevent repeal of the 1828 Corn Law, which is replaced by laws that reduce (and will soon virtually eliminate) duties on grain imports, reduce duties on imported cheeses, butter, and other foods, and abolish duties on live animal imports. Repeal of the Corn Law removes the favored status that Ireland has enjoyed as a supplier to the British market. Large Irish landowners (most of them absentee landlords) switch from growing wheat to raising cattle; they throw cotters off the land so that it may be used for pasturage. Abolition of tariff protection for colonial produce in the British market further reduces the price of sugar and in many cases destroys the profits of Caribbean planters.
Economist Frédéric Bastiat founds the Association for Free Trade and advances his antiprotectionist views through the association's journal Free Trade (Le Libre-Echange) (see 1845). Bastiat promotes the ideas proposed by the late Adam Smith in 1776.
The United States moves closer to free trade July 30 with passage of the Walker Tariff Act, named for President Polk's secretary of the treasury Robert J. Walker, 45, of Alabama. The act taxes luxuries at a high rate but lowers import duties and enlarges the list of items admitted duty-free. Britain and America will both benefit in the next 15 years by the lowering and suspension of tariffs. U.S. exports will double to $306 million in the first 10 years of the Walker Tariff Act, while imports will triple to $361 million; customs revenues will more than double, and U.S. consumers will enjoy cheap manufactured products while Britons enjoy low food prices.
New York's Marble Dry-Goods Palace opens on Broadway at Chambers Street, where merchant A. T. Stewart will outgrow his new store and its additions in less than 15 years (see 1823; 1862).
John A. Roebling completes a suspension bridge across the Monongahela River (see 1855; aqueduct, 1845).
The Pennsylvania Railroad is chartered April 13 for the purpose of constructing a line between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh (see 1851).
Inventor William Howe of 1840 Howe truss fame obtains a third patent August 28, having improved on his original rectangular design. By using a curved timber running from each buttress to the center of the span, his new truss substantially increases the strength of a bridge, but railroads continue to use wooden bridges and only a fraction of them have the benefit of Howe trusses.
The Lehigh Valley Railroad has its beginnings in the Delaware, Lehigh, Schuylkill & Susquehanna Railroad Company; it will change its name to Lehigh Valley in 1853 (see 1855).
The Michigan Central Railroad becomes a private company under terms of a charter drawn up by Detroit lawyer James Frederick Joy, now 35 (see 1837). The new company pays the state $2 million, installs Bordeaux-born Boston capitalist John Murray Forbes, 33, as president, and undertakes to extend its tracks eastward to Chicago. Forbes began his career at age 15 working in his uncles' Boston counting-house, spent 7 years at Guangzhou (Canton), demonstrated unusual business abilities working for Perkins & Company in the China trade, returned to America at age 24, and has prospered since then in land investments (see Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, 1854).
Britain adopts a standard four foot, eight-an-a-half-inch gauge for railroads in a move that will spur development of the nation's rail system (see Pennsylvania, 1852).
English inventor Robert William Thompson patents a pneumatic tire and equips a horse-drawn buggy with his tires (see Dunlop, 1888).
The lavishly appointed steamboat Niagara arrives at Milwaukee May 20, the second "palace steamer" on the Great Lakes. Built at New York for merchant Charles M. Reed at a cost of $95,000, the 245-foot vessel combines the latest marine engineering technology with luxurious carpeting and furnishings, stained-glass domes, parlors, salons, accommodations for several hundred passengers, and abundant cargo space for flour, furs, livestock, and other goods. She will continue to ply the Great Lakes for the next 10 years, making the 2,000-mile round-trip voyage between Buffalo and Chicago every 2 weeks even as steamboats 100 feet longer come into use. By 1857 there will be 25 sidewheelers on the lakes, many of them carrying immigrants from Europe.
Britain's merchant fleet total 3.2 million tons, but steamships account for only 131,000 tons.
About 175 U.S. ships leave port with 65,000 tons of ice for export as Boston's Tudor Ice Company ships large tonnages to the Far East, where it is sold at high prices to buy silk that can be bought cheap and resold at high prices in America (see 1833; 1856).
The 900-ton clipper ship Sea Witch designed by John Willis Griffiths puts to sea December 23 bound for Rio de Janeiro, the Cape of Good Hope, and Guangzhou (Canton) (seeRainbow, 1845). Commanded by Robert Waterman, she is 192 feet long overall, 34 feet in the beam, and has a figurehead representing a black dragon as a symbol of the Chinese empire (seeOriental, 1850).
Samuel Colt receives an order for revolvers as the Mexican War produces a shortage of firearms (see 1836). Texas Ranger Samuel Walker has persuaded President Polk to place the order with Colt, who engages E. K. Root to help him mass-produce the revolvers with interchangeable parts at a new factory he has built at Hartford, Connecticut (see 1851; Hunt repeating rifle, 1849).
The plough plane introduced by London inventor Thomas Falconer is an innovative woodworking tool whose flexible steel fence can be raised or lowered by means of a thumb screw to vary the depth of the groove to be cut by its cutting edge (see Bailey, 1855).
The Howe sewing machine of 1843 receives a U.S. patent September 10, but tailors and garment makers are fearful of using it lest they antagonize their workers. Howe's English agent pirates British royalties on the machine and there is widespread infringement on the patent (see Singer, 1850).
German optical instrument maker Carl Zeiss, 30, opens a factory at Jena in Thuringia.
English-born East India Company diplomat and Assyriologist Henry C. (Creswicke) Rawlinson, 35, deciphers a cuneiform inscription of Darius I Hystapis at Behistun and opens Assyrian history to modern understanding (see Grotefend, 1837; Layard, 1845; Smith, 1872).
Lectures on Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Vertebrate Animals and A History of British Fossil Mammals by Richard Owen help to build their author's reputation (see 1841; 1860).
Boston dentist William T. G. (Thomas Green) Morton, 27, pioneers modern anesthesiology. Unfamiliar with C. W. Long's 1842 ether discovery, he hears a lecture by chemist-geologist Charles Jackson, now 41, and learns that inhaling sulfuric ether will cause a loss of consciousness and is safer than chloroform. After trying it on himself and then on his dog, Morton uses ether September 30 to extract a tooth from a patient who leaks news of the painless extraction to the newspapers (whiskey and opiates have been used heretofore as painkillers in dentistry). Boston surgeon Henry J. (Jacob) Bigelow, 56, reads a newspaper account of the tooth extraction and persuades Morton to demonstrate his procedure at Massachusetts General Hospital, where surgeon John C. (Collins) Warren employs ether October 16 to anesthetize a patient during an operation on a "congenital but superficial vascular tumor." Morton obtains a patent November 12, but actions taken by C. T. Jackson and C. W. Long will prevent him from enforcing it (Jackson is a brother-in-law of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who champions his objections to Morton). Ether will be called an anesthetic at the suggestion of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who writes to Morton the week that he receives his patent, and ether finds immediate use in operations on Mexican War casualties, opening a new era in surgery (see 1847; cocaine, 1884).
Smallpox vaccination pioneer Benjamin Waterhouse dies at his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home October 2 at age 92.
Pope Gregory XVI dies at Rome June 1 at age 80 after a 15-year reign in which he has retained his monastic lifestyle, denounced intellectualism, opposed liberalism, and overseen the entrenchment of Roman Catholicism in the Americas. He is succeeded by Giovanni Maria Mastai Cardinal Feretti, 54, who promptly embarks on a series of reforms and will reign until 1878 as Pius IX. Thought to favor the ideas expressed by philosopher Vincenzo Gioberti in his 1843 work On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italian Race, the new pontiff is called by some people "Gioberti's pope."
Protestant ministers provide soup for starving Irish people but only if they renounce Catholicism. Those who "take the soup" will often in future years be condemned by those who remained staunch Roman Catholics.
Korea's first Catholic priest Kim Dae-gon is arrested while trying to explore a new sea route for transporting missionaries into his country; ordained in his lst year at Shanghai after receiving religious training at the Portuguese colony of Macao, he is executed outside Seoul September 16 at age 25.
Bishop Hill is founded 100 miles west of Chicago by Swedish immigrants under the leadership of their preacher Erik Jansson, who predicts an imminent apocalypse. The commune is named for Biskopskulla, the Swedish birthplace of Jansson, who will be murdered in 1850 by his cousin's husband, whereupon leadership will pass to Jonas Olson as new immigrants swell the commune's population to 1,500. The communally-owned property will be divided among the settlers in 1861 and 1862 as internal wrangling and economic problems make it impossible to continue the communal way of life.
The Putney Community organized in Vermont by John Humphrey Noyes and his followers antagonizes its neighbors (see 1839). Noyes preaches promiscuity and free love in what he calls the communism of the early Christian Church; he opposes monogamy, his neighbors have him arrested, and they try to break up his communal society (see 1848).
The introduction of effective anesthesia at Boston October 16 draws condemnation from some religious leaders, who insist that pain is God's will and sulfuric ether an invention of the Devil.
Brook Farm at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, celebrates the completion of a large new central building with a dance the night of March 2, but the building catches fire and burns to the ground. The commune has attracted such eminent visitors as Amos Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller; its weekly journal the Harbinger has published items contributed by Horace Greeley, poet James Russell Lowell, and poet John Greenleaf Whittier; but the new building consumed all available funds and the Brook Farm experiment will end next year.
Boston's primary school committee denies a petition by black citizens that schools exclusively for blacks be eliminated pursuant to a statute adopted last year providing that any child in the commonwealth who has been unlawfully excluded from public school instruction is entitled to damages against the city or town by which such instruction is supported. The committee adopts the report of a subcommittee June 22 and appends a resolution: "Resolved, that in the opinion of the board, the continuance of the separate schools for colored children . . . is not only legal and just, but is best adapted to promote the education of that class of our population" (see Sarah Roberts, 1847).
Yale University trustees elect Theodore Dwight Woolsey, 45, president; a professor of Greek, he will remain in the post until 1871, introducing innovations that will become common to institutions of higher learning.
The Smithsonian Institution is founded at Washington, D.C. by an act of Congress signed into law by President Polk August 10. The late English chemist James Smithson left a £100,000 to the United States when he died in 1829, Congress received the $508,314.46 in 1838, Sen. Rufus Choate, 46 (Whig, Mass.), favored using it for a national library, but Robert Dale Owen and his friend Sen. Benjamin Tappan, 73 (D. Ohio), have pushed for the establishment of a more egalitarian institution "for the increase and distribution of knowledge." Most of its initial collection comprises specimens brought home by Lieut. Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, in 1842; its first president is physicist Joseph Henry, who will retain the position until his death in 1878.
The rotary "lightning press" patented by New York printing-press manufacturer Richard M. Hoe, now 34, can run more than 8,000 sheets per hour, a rate nearly eight times faster than that of traditional flatbed presses (see Church, 1824; Hoe, 1833). Columns of type on Hoe's press are attached to the outer surface of a large-diameter central cylinder rather than to a flatbed, four to 10 impression cylinders revolve about the central cylinder and apply pressure, sheets of paper are fed manually to each of these four cylinders, but if the forms containing the type are not locked properly the type may fall out of the main cylinder, a hazard that will lead to increased use of stereotypes in which plates are cast from printing surfaces (seePublic Ledger, 1847).
The London Daily News begins publication January 21. The first cheap British newspaper, it has been established by English botanist, landscape gardener, architect, and entrepreneur Joseph Paxton, now 45 (approximately), who in his early 20s became foreman at the Chiswick Gardens Arboretum, leased by the Horticulture Society from the 6th duke of Devonshire, who in 1826 appointed him superintendent at Chatsworth House. Paxton was born into poverty and left school at age 15, but he has educated himself, managed the duke's six estates, built enormous fountains at Chatsworth House, and become a director of several railroad companies (see Crystal Palace, 1851). His paper's first editor is Charles Dickens.
The Boston Herald begins publication May 1 with William O. Eaton, 22, as editor of the single-sheet paper. Some local printers have joined under the name John A. French & Company to produce the two-sided sheet; editor Eaton says, "The Herald will be independent in politics and religion; liberal, industrious, enterprising, critically concerned with literacy and dramatic matters, and diligent in its mission to report and analyze the news, local and global." A Sunday Herald will be added in 1861 (see 1863).
Vermont-born inventor Royal E. (Earl) House, 31, receives a patent for a printing telegraph that can print more than 50 words per minute. Raised in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna County and educated at home, House has received financial backing for a telegraph that writes out messages in the common alphabet. He will be credited with such innovations as stranded wire and a glass screw insulator that make his system superior in many ways to the Samuel F. B. Morse system, and he will win patent suits against the Morse interests. However, improved Morse systems will gradually supersede his own in the 1850s.
A telegraph line opens July 3 to link New York and Buffalo (see 1844; 1847).
Electric Telegraph Company is founded in England by W. F. Cooke and J. L. Ricardo, the latter a member of Parliament (see 1837; 1845). Physicist Charles F. Wheatstone has organized an act of Parliament to establish the company, but the House of Lords has summoned inventor Alexander Bain to give evidence. Wheatstone resigns in a huff, and the Lords will eventually compel Electric Telegraph to pay Bain £10,000 and hire him as manager. The Bain chemical telegraph patented December 12 employs a solution of nitrate of ammonia and prussiate of potash to leave a blue stain that quickly records the dots and dashes of Morse code when decomposed by the current from an iron contact or stylus (in a test between Paris and Lille, it transmits signals at the rate of 282 words in 52 seconds where a Morse electro-magnetic instrument can transmit only 40 words in 60 seconds). Electric Telegraph acquires Cooke's patents for £168,000 and by September of next year two British telegraph networks will be in operation, the northern system taking in most major cities from Edinburgh to Birmingham, the southern system linking London with Dover, Gosport, and Southampton. Rates will be based on distance at first, and long-distance telegraphy will be prohibitively expensive, but beginning in March 1850 the rate will be reduced to a maximum of 10s for any distance, and competition will force the rate down to 1d or 2d for most inland telegrams by 1860. A private monopoly in America will keep U.S. rates much higher than those in Britain and Europe, where government post offices will exercise control.
Nonfiction: The People (Le Peuple) by French historian Jules Michelet, 48, calls on France to unite, find her strength in the people, eliminate class divisions created by the Industrial Revolution, and return to the ideals of the Revolution of 1789: "I have acquired the conviction that this country is one of invincible hope. With France, nothing is finished. Always everything begins anew"; The Works of David Ricardo with annotations by John R. McCulloch; "The Biglow Papers" by Boston poet-essayist James Russell Lowell, 27, begin appearing June 1 in the Boston Courier. The letters in dialect by a fictional Ezekiel Biglow discuss the Mexican War and the possibility of the extension of slavery.
Fiction: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by New York-born novelist Herman Melville, 27, whose father died bankrupt and insane 16 years ago. The young man shipped out of New York as a cabin boy aboard the Liverpool-bound packet St. Lawrence at age 19 and left Fairhaven, Massachusetts, January 3, 1841, for a voyage of nearly 4 years on the whaler Acushnet. He jumped ship with fellow deserter Richard Tobias Greene after 18 months and found refuge on a jungle island of the Marquesas, whose friendly but cannibal Taipi tribe he describes in a first novel that gains wide readership with its spicy tale of adventure and romance based in part on his experiences in the South Pacific; The Wandering Jew (Le Juif errant) by Eugène Sue; "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe appears in the September Godey's Lady's Book.
Poetry: The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow includes "The Arsenal at Springfield" and "The Arrow and the Song"; Voices of Freedom by John Greenleaf Whittier, now 38, includes "Massachusetts to Virginia."
Juvenile: A Book of Nonsense by English poet-artist Edward Lear, 34, who made up nonsensical rhymes to entertain the children of Edward Stanley, earl of Derby, while engaged in sketching the earl's menagerie at Knowsley Hall.
Painting: The Stag at Bay by Edwin H. Landseer; Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru by English painter John Everett Millais, 17; The Abduction of Rebecca by Eugène Delacroix; The Jolly Flatboatmen by George Caleb Bingham; Noah's Ark by Edward Hicks.
Knoedler's opens at the corner of Broadway and 9th Street in New York under the direction of French-born art dealer Michel Knoedler, who has bought the business started by Goupil et Cie of Paris and opens a gallery.
Theater: Maria Magdalena by Friedrich Hebbel 3/13 at Königsberg's Stadtheater.
First performances: Symphony No. 2 in C major by Robert Schumann 11/5 at Leipzig's Gewandhaus.
Oratorios: Elijah by Felix Mendelssohn 8/26 at England's Birmingham Musical Festival; The Damnation of Faust (La Damnation de Faust) by Hector Berlioz 12/8 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris.
Popular song: "Jim Crack Corn, or the Blue Tail Fly" is published at Baltimore.
New York surveyor Alexander Cartwright of the Knickerbocker Baseball Club codifies baseball (see Doubleday, 1839). Members have been playing the "New York game" since 1842 in an open area near Broadway at 22nd Street; Cartwright sets the distances between bases at 90 feet, each team is to have nine players and is allowed three outs per inning and three strikes per man, but Cartwright's team is defeated 23 to 1 by the New York Nine June 19 in its first game at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey (see 1884; Cincinnati Red Stockings, 1867).
Stearns & Foster mattresses are introduced by Cincinnati entrepreneurs George S. Stearns and Seth S. Foster, who open a factory at the corner of Clay and Liberty streets using cotton obtained via the Ohio River and Canal. The firm will soon move to Lockland, Ohio, and will grow to become a major producer (see Simmons Beautyrest, 1925).
Prussian philosophy student Ferdinand Lassalle, 21, meets the unhappily married Countess Sophie Hatzfeldt at Düsseldorf and agrees to help her obtain the divorce that her husband has been unwilling to grant. Despite his lack of any legal qualification, Lassalle will bring 35 lawsuits in her behalf before achieving success in 1854, whereupon she will provide him with an annual pension of 4,000 thalers, making him financially independent.
A new Trinity Church is completed in Gothic revival style on New York's Broadway, opposite Wall Street. Designed by Richard Upjohn, the new church has a spire that is visible throughout the city.
New York's Grace Episcopal Church is completed on Broadway at East 10th Street by New York-born architect James Renwick, Jr., 28.
Drought begins on the Great Plains, where rainfall has been above average for the past 40 years. Native American hunters have been bringing more than 100,000 bison robes per year to the steamboats, and have been using about 500,000 of the animals per year for their tribes' subsistence, but as bison herds have decreased the hunters have taken to raiding other tribes for women, who are put to work doing the slave labor of processing hides for robes, labor that the men disdain to perform themselves.
Famine sweeps Ireland as the potato crop fails again and food reserves are exhausted (see 1845). British Conservatives ascribe the famine to the divine hand of Providence; Whigs put free-trade principles ahead of compassion, saying that it would paralyze trade to give away food to the Irish. Other European governments enter the markets to buy food for famine relief, but the limited food in British government depots was intended to be sold at market prices plus 5 percent to the pauperized, starving Irish, not distributed free. Britons marshal private aid programs and set up soup kitchens. Queen Victoria sends £2,000 of her own money for famine relief, but the Treasury sends assistant secretary Charles Edward Trevelyan, 39, to head up relief efforts; a devotee of laissez-faire capitalism, he dismantles Sir Robert Peel's soup kitchens, keeps government food depots closed, says, "We attach the highest public importance to the strict observance of our pledge not to send orders [for food] abroad, which would come into competition with our merchants and upset all their calculations." He justifies profiteering: "If dealers were to confine themselves to . . . fair profits, the scarcity would be aggravated to a fearful degree," and by the time Trevelyan gives permission in September for more food to be purchased there is little to be had. Although Americans raise $1 million and send relief ships with thousands of tons of cornmeal, the aid programs are mismanaged, the Irish lack horses and carts for carrying imported grain to inland famine areas, they lack ovens and bakers for making bread, and at least half a million die of starvation, far more of hunger-related typhus and other diseases to which their malnutrition makes them easy prey.
Philadelphia dairymaid Nancy Johnson devises a portable hand-cranked ice cream freezer.
A U.S. patent (No. 4,879) issued December 10 to New Orleans-born chemist Norbert Rillieux, 40, covers a process that reduces the time and cost of refining sugar from cane and beets while also making it safer. Son of a French planter by a slave woman, Rillieux has studied at the L'Ecole Centrale in Paris, returned to New Orleans, seen that the crude methods used by slaves to refine sugar—laboriously boiling down cane juice and using ladles to transfer it from one scalding kettle to another until it crystallized—not only required back-breaking labor but were also dangerous. He has designed the Multiple Effect Vacuum Pan Evaporator, a pan that encloses a series of condensing coils in vacuum chambers; it saves workers from having to ladle boiling cane juice, it saves fuel because the juice boils at lower temperatures, it produces a superior grade of sugar, and it will come into widespread use in Louisiana, Mexico, Cuba, and other West Indian islands (it will also be used to make gelatin and soap).
Ireland's famine and the repeal of the Corn Law spur emigration to England, Canada, Australia, and America as cotters are thrown off the land and small farmers denied their favored status in the English market. Montreal and Quebec attract the poorest emigrés who cross the Atlantic (see 1847).
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