1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860
Giuseppi Garibaldi founds the Italian National Association to work for unification of the country (see 1849). Garibaldi returned 3 years ago after 5 years at Staten Island, New York, where he worked as a candle maker, and he has attracted supporters who include patriot-historian Giuseppe La Farina (see 1860).
The Irish Republican Brotherhood is founded (see Fenians, 1867).
Afghan independence gains recognition March 4 in the Treaty of Paris, forced by the British upon Persia's Nasir-ad-Din (see 1856; 1863).
St. Petersburg sends a large army to the north Caucasus in a determined effort to suppress the Chechen and Dagestan resistance led since 1834 by the Sufi imam (political-religious leader) Shamil, now nearly 60 (see 1845). The well-equipped army attacks from all sides under the command of generals N. I. Evdokimov and A. I. Baryatinsky, forcing the surrender of many tribes and villages (see 1859).
The Sepoy Mutiny (Sepoy Rebellion) that begins May 9 at Meerut ends control of India by the East India Company. Sepoys (natives) make up 96 percent of the 300,000-man army that controls a population of 210 million; some are Muslims, some Hindus, and the actions of the former viceroy, Lord Dalhousie, has raised fears that the British are trying to break the caste system. Incidents have occurred since January 22, including fires and mutinies. Many historians will blame the uprising on a cartridge used in a new Enfield rifle adapted from designs by Samuel Colt following appearances by Colt before a Parliamentary Committee on Small Arms at London. The cartridges are partially coated with grease and must be bitten open before being loaded; caste Hindus in the Bengal Army insist that the grease is beef fat from the sacred cow, Muslims insist that it is pork fat from flesh forbidden by the Koran, but the British have been levying oppressive taxes and trying to impose Western ways on the people, prompting other historians to cite long-simmering and deep-seated resentment as the root cause. Indian troops at Meerut shoot British officers May 10, they rescue comrades who have been clapped in irons for refusing to accept the new cartridges, and local chiefs encourage scattered revolts in hopes of regaining lost privileges.
The 22-year-old Brahmin patriot Lakshmibai (née Manikarnika Tambe) joins up with the rebels, trains an army of women, and defends the fortress at Jahnsi (she was married at age 8 to the rajah of Jahnsi and buried him 4 years ago). The rani gains support from rebel general Tantia Topi, 37, and although British troops prevail there is a massacre of British forces at Delhi May 11. Gen. Sir Hugh Wheeler receives a warning from sepoy leader Dhondu Pant, 36, who is known as Nana Sahib, that native regiments at Cawnpore (Kanpur) will revolt, and they do so June 5; Wheeler is forced to surrender, and although Nana Sahib promises the British safe conduct to Allahabad for their women and children, sepoys fire on the party June 27 as its members pile aboard boats; those left unhurt, including 15 young women, are later slaughtered (the massacre at Cawnpore July 15 takes the lives of 211 British women and children in one of several atrocities perpetrated by both sides), and news of their fate brings horror to Charlotte Canning and her husband at Calcutta (Kolkata) as they await the outcome of the siege of Lucknow. Scottish-born general Sir Colin Campbell, 65, distinguished himself in the Second Sikh War and has been appointed commander in chief of British forces at the outbreak of the mutiny; his administrator in the Punjab, John Nicholson, 35, pacifies that part of the country, is promoted to brigadier general, arrives at Delhi in early August with loyal Ghurka forces from the Punjab, and defeats rebel forces at Najafgarh.
Karl Marx publishes an article in the New York Tribune August 28 citing the official Blue Books entitled "East India (Torture), 1855-57" that have been presented to the House of Commons to show "that the British rulers of India are by no means such mild and spotless benefactors of the Indian people as they would have the world believe." General Nicholson leads an attacking column against Delhi's Kashmir Gate September 14. Few in India want to restore the Mughal Empire, the rebellion is disorganized, Nicholson's Ghurkas recapture Delhi September 20 to turn the tide against the rebels, but the fighting takes 3,835 British and Indian lives (plus those of hundreds of horses), Nicholson is wounded, and he dies at Delhi September 23. Fresh British troops arrive in September; Scottish-born brigadier of cavalry James Hope Grant, 49, also distinguished himself in the Second Sikh War and directs the march of cavalry and horse artillery in the direction of Cawnpore to open up communication with Campbell, who has given him command of the force marching on Lucknow to relieve the residency there. Grant's men relieve Lucknow November 17, Tantia Topi takes command of rebel forces in Gwalior and drives General C. A. Windham into the trenches at Cawnpore November 27 to 28, but Sir Colin Campbell defeats the rebels December 6 (see 1858).
British and French forces seize Guangzhou (Canton) late in the year under the command of 55-year-old Rear Admiral Sir Michael Seymour, Royal Navy (see 1856). The French have used the execution of missionary August Chapdelaine in February of last year as a pretext to join with the British in prosecuting the Second Opium War (see 1858).
Mexico's La Reforma culminates in February with the issuance of a liberal constitution, incorporating many of the reforms put through by Valentin Gómez Farías in the 1830s but rescinded soon thereafter (see 1856); Ignacio Comonfort is elected president, and the new Congress appoints Benito Juárez to preside over the Supreme Court, making him effectively the nation's vice president (see 1858).
Nicaragua's dictatorial president William Walker seizes overland transportation properties belonging to the New York-based Accessory Transit Company, which operates between Atlantic Coast ports and San Francisco by way of Nicaragua (see 1856). New York shipping magnate Cornelius van Derbilt has gained control of the company, beating out a rival group that Walker had supported, and sends agents to other Central American nations to help finance a coalition against Walker, who escapes capture by surrendering himself May 1 to Commander Charles H. (Henry) Davis, U.S. Navy, who has intervened in an effort to avoid bloodshed. Returned to the United States, Walker eludes federal authorities, hatches plans for a second expedition, slips out of Mobile, and lands with his followers near Grey Town, where he is arrested in November by Commodore Hiram Paulding and returned once again to the United States (see 1860).
Former Uruguayan president Manuel Ceferino Oribe dies at his native Montivideo November 12 at age 65, having returned from exile in Europe 2 years ago. Civil war continues, as it will for the next 8 years, with Argentina and Brazil interfering, but the liberal Colorado (Red) faction of José Fructuoso Rivera will triumph and rule Uruguay for nearly a century.
The Dred Scott decision announced March 6 by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, now 79, enrages abolitionists and encourages slaveowners. The fugitive slave Dred Scott, now 62, brought suit in 1848 to claim freedom on the ground that he resided in free territory, but lawyer Reverdy Johnson argues that Scott is a non-citizen and has no legal standing; the court rules in Scott v. Sanford that his residence in Minnesota Territory does not make Scott free, that a black may not bring suit in a federal court, and (in an obiter dicta by Taney) that Congress never had the authority to ban slavery in the territories, a ruling that in effect calls the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional. President Buchanan supports the 7-to-2 decision and calls for its reinforcement; Scott dies 9 months later.
The Impending Crisis of the South, and How to Meet It by North Carolina farmer Hinton R. (Rowan) Helper, 28, tries to show that slavery is not only economically unprofitable, but is actually ruinous to small farmers such as himself who do not own slaves. Helper calls slavery "the root of all the shame, poverty, ignorance, tyranny and imbecility of the South." Southerners denounce him; many Northerners hail his courage and vision.
The Spirit Lake Massacre in northwestern Iowa March 8 to 12 ends with more than 30 settlers dead. A band of Sioux warriors led by Inkpaduta attack the five-cabin settlement after a severe winter; they kill 32 men, women, and children on the spot and abduct four women, of whom two are subsequently killed. A relief expedition from Fort Dodge arrives too late to do anything but bury the dead, and another expedition, sent from Fort Ridgely in Minnesota Territory, is unable to catch Inkpaduta, who has fled to the west.
A vigilante at Louisville, Kentucky, kills four blacks at the court house May 14.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah Territory September 11 kills 135 California-bound emigrants. The Fancher wagon-train from Arkansas arrived at Salt Lake City August 3 with 60 men, 40 women, and 50 children, most of them Methodists. They found the Mormon capital disturbed by the fact that President Buchanan has removed Brigham Young as governor and has sent a force under Geneneral Albert Sydney Johnston, 54, to establish the primacy of federal rule in the territory. Led by a few Mormon militiamen acting on orders from Brigham Young, some 300 to 400 Pah-Ute braves ambush the Fancher party some 320 miles south of Salt Lake City. The wagon-train's riflemen repulse the initial assault, the party holds out from Monday to Friday, but Young's friend John D. Lee of the Iron County Militia tricks the emigrants into piling their arms onto a wagon, and the tribesmen butcher to death all but a dozen or so children under age 8 (Lee will be tried, convicted, and executed for the killings, but not until 1877).
The Matrimonial Causes Act passed by Parliament in July makes it easier for a British woman to obtain a divorce. While it requires that a man merely prove adultery on the part of his wife, whereas a wife must show evidence of desertion as well, the new law does provide for the establishment of divorce courts, gives divorced and separated women the right to their own earnings, grants them the same property rights as single women, and establishes that a husband's responsibility as provider continues in perpetuity after a marriage is ended; judges receive the right to require a man to support his ex-wife, and the law orders the world's first alimony payments. Caroline Norton, now 49, has written essays to support her cause, notably "A Letter to the Queen," published in 1855, and Parliament has changed the original bill somewhat in light of Mrs. Norton's case (see 1842).
Suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton receives a letter dated September 29 from Massachusetts abolitionist Susan B. (Brownell) Anthony, 37, whose father was wiped out in the financial panic of 1837 and who returned to her native Adams in 1850 after teaching school for 14 years in upstate New York. Anthony will become a leading advocate of women's rights.
The Englishwoman's Review begins campaigning for women's rights. London has an estimated 6,000 houses of prostitution (one house in every 60), girls as young as 11 are offered to male passersby in the street, and syphilis is rampant (see Contagious Disease Act, 1864).
Explorer David Thompson dies in obscurity at Longueil, Quebec, February 10 at age 86. His journals will not be published until 1917; Arctic explorer-physician Elisha Kent Kane dies at Havana February 19 at age 37. His body is brought to New Orleans, where it lies in state before being transported to Louisville; Columbus, Ohio; Baltimore; and, finally, Philadelphia, where it lies in state in Independence Hall before burial; Oregon Territory pioneer John McLoughlin dies September 3 at age 73.
The Vienna Coin Treaty signed January 24 encourages the adoption of the decimal system for coinage (see 1873; Paris Exposition, 1854).
Banco Santander is founded by a group of Basque businessmen to finance trade with Latin America. The Spanish government grants the bank privileges to issue currency, and it will grow to be the nation's largest financial institution.
A new U.S. tariff act adopted March 3 reduces import duties. Southern planters have persuaded their congressmen to support the measure, and President Buchanan praises it in his inaugural address March 4; northern industrialists have opposed it.
New York seamstresses stage a demonstration March 8 to demand higher pay and better working conditions (see 1908).
A prime field hand in the South fetches $1,300 and up in the market, and critics such as Hinton Helper point out that slavery ties up capital in human beings when it might better be employed in labor-saving improvements. One thousand Southern families share an income of $50 million per year, while another $60 million is split among 660,000 families, yet even rich slaveholders have their earnings eaten up by commissions, freight charges, tariffs, imports of manufactured goods from the North, and the care and maintenance of slaves whose labor may actually be more costly than free labor in the North (see 1863).
Soap maker-philanthropist William Colgate dies at New York March 25 at age 74.
A gold rush to Canada's Cariboo River begins following news that yellow stones have been found in British Columbia colony creeks leading into the river (see 1858).
Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company has its beginnings in the Mutual Life Insurance Company of Wisconsin founded at Janesville by septuagenarian John C. Johnston, who has taken nearly 2 years to line up the $200,000 in policies needed for the state charter. The company will move to Milwaukee in 1859, rename itself in 1868, and by the end of that year have 28,000 policy holders across the country and assets of more than $4 million.
Financial panic strikes New York in mid-October following failure of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Coompany August 24 and news that the S.S. Central America bound from Aspinwall on the Isthmus of Panama has gone down in a hurricane off the coast of South Carolina with 21 tons of gold from California. A consequence in part of overextending credit after a period of speculation, the economic downturn quickly spreads nationwide and wipes out 47 mutual insurance firms, but the 4-year-old St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company manages to survive (see 1866). Some 30,000 New Yorkers are thrown out of work in the severe depression: 4,932 business firms will fail, and having 1,100 unemployed police officers contributes to the economic woes. Mayor Wood proposes a large work-relief program that will pay the workers in food, but the Common Council balks when he adds, "Truly may it be said that in New York those who produce everything get nothing, and those who produce nothing get everything." Says an editorial in the New York Times, "Mr. Wood raises the banner of the most fiery communism" (see 1858).
"The whale oils which hitherto have been much relied on in this country to furnish light and yearly become more scarce, may in time almost entirely fail," says the Scientific American June 27. The increase in U.S. literacy spurs demand for lighting (see 1866; Drake, 1859).
A nationwide celebration marks the linking by rail of New York and St. Louis.
The Pennsylvania Railroad extends its control through purchase and lease over the entire rail route between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (see 1854). It buys up the state's chief canal system to eliminate competition (see 1871).
Burlington & Missouri Railroad stock falls so low in the October panic that James Frederick Joy is able to acquire control for a song (see 1854); the B&M received a federal land grant of 350,000 acres last year, Joy merges it into the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and by 1861 he will have extended it to Ottumwa, Iowa (see Quincy Bridge, 1868; Hill, 1901).
The French Parlement enacts a law to spur railway construction, guaranteeing interest payments on railroad company bonds. France will have 16,207 kilometers of railway line by the end of next year, up from 3,627 in 1851.
Venice gains a rail link to other European cities as the Milan-Venice railway opens across a 3½-kilometer bridge put up in 1846 to span the lagoon between San Giuliano on the mainland and the area of San Giobbea and San Lucia.
The New York & Harlem Railroad and the New York and New Haven build depots side by side in the block between Fourth and Madison Avenues from 26th Street to 27th. More than 30 trains per day, carrying 8,000 passengers, chug in and out of the depots each day on 12 tracks, but the city will ban locomotives within built-up sections of the city next year after two engines blow up and a third engine burns in the crowded area below 14th Street, creating a public outcry. Trains coming into the city will be obliged to stop at 42nd Street and be pulled by horses from there to the depots at 27th Street; stables will be built on the east side of Fourth Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Streets. Stock in the New York & Harlem has a par value of $100 but falls to just $3 (see van Derbilt, 1862).
Congress abolishes shipping subsidies introduced 12 years ago in response to Southern opposition. New York-to-San Francisco ocean freight rates drop to $10 per ton, down from as high as $60 in gold rush days, as an excess of shipping intensifies competition, making the industry unprofitable. Some clipper ships can cover more than 400 miles on a good day, a speed that no steamship can match, but the day of the clipper ship is ending.
The luxury sidewheeler S.S. Central America out of Aspinwall on the Isthmus of Panama runs into a September hurricane 200 miles east of Charleston while en route from California to New York with 21 tons of gold and 578 passengers and crew. The small brig Marine arrives after 30 hours of frantic bailing by every man aboard, the Norwegian bark Ellen also comes to the rescue, and together they save about 141 people, mostly women and children. The 300-foot Central America goes down off the coast of Georgia September 12, the 425 who perish include her skipper, Captain William L. (Lewis) Herndon, U.S. Navy, now 43, who dons full dress uniform at the end, having worked heroically in his efforts to save his wooden-hulled ship. The gold bullion, ingots, and coins that go to the bottom were worth a staggering $1.2 million and their loss precipitates bank failures, contributing to the nation's financial panic. (Salvage operations to recover the gold from a depth of 8,000 feet will begin in 1988 and succeed 2 years later, when the effort will bring in a haul worth $500 million.)
English aviation pioneer Sir George Cayley dies December 15 at age 83.
Eddyville, Kentucky, steelmaker William Kelly, 45, patents a "pneumatic" steelmaking process which he invented in 1847 (see Bessemer, 1856). His patent battle with Henry Bessemer of England will combine with a shortage of sufficiently pure iron to delay adoption of oxygen steel furnaces in the United States (see 1861; 1863).
Bethlehem Steel has its beginnings in the Saucon Iron Company, founded at South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to make beams and other structural parts from local iron ores (see 1863).
The cant hook (peavey) invented on the Stillwater branch of Maine's Penobscot River multiplies the efficiency of a logger. Joseph Peavey sees river drivers trying to break up a logjam and gets an idea; he instructs his blacksmith son Daniel to make a clasp with lips connected by a bolt, and then to attach a hook, two rings, and a pick at the end of the handle. Peavey will also invent a hoist for pulling stumps, a clapboard-making machine, a shingle-making machine, and an undershot waterwheel.
Delaware chemist Lammot du Pont, 27, of E. I. du Pont de Nemours patents a process to manufacture blasting powder using cheap and plentiful sodium nitrate (soda powder) from Chile and Peru in place of potassium nitrate, whose sources in India are mostly under British control (see 1850). Du Pont's grandfather founded the company in 1802, it has prospered (with tacit U.S. Government permission) from sales to both British and Russian purchasing agents in the Crimean War, and the new patent will give it a competitive advantage that it will retain for decades in the high explosives market. The company will buy mills on Big Wapwallopen Creek near the anthracite mills of Pennsylvania's Luzerne County in 1859 to produce blasting powder with less concern about having to transport it long distances (see 1861).
The aniline dye industry begins in England as W. H. Perkin and his father build a mauve dye works near Harrow (see 1856). The plant is soon turning out magenta dye as well as Perkin's original purple color, it takes 100 pounds of coal tar to produce just a quarter-ounce of dye, but that is enough to color 200 pounds of fabric, and aniline dye is far more color-fast than natural dyes albeit more prone to fade when exposed to light (works by painters who use it will suffer as a result). Mauve remains a fashion sensation, and demand grows for crinolines in that color (steel plants at Sheffield are turning out crinoline hoops at the rate of nearly 500,000 per week), but German companies will soon take the lead in synthetic-dye production (see German Chemical Society, 1868).
Chemist Louis Pasteur, now 32, shows that a living organism causes the lactic fermentation that spoils milk (see 1853; Pasteur, 1848). His analysis of fermentation also explains for the first time how the leavening process works in baking bread.
Mathematician Baron Augustin-Louis Gauchy dies at Sceaux May 23 at age 67; chemist Louis Jacques Thénard at Paris June 21 at age 80.
French physiologist Claude Bernard, 44, pioneers modern physiology by applying the biochemical methods developed by Justus von Liebig in 1842 to the living animal, combining them with physiological methods. Bernard pursues his investigations of glycogen production by the human liver (see nutrition, 1859).
The New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children opens on Florence Nightingale's birthday May 12 under the direction of Elizabeth Blackwell, her younger sister, Emily, 30, and Polish-born physician Marie E. Zackrzewska, 27, who has been head midwife at Berlin's Royal Maternity Hospital (see 1849). The loss of an eye has prevented Blackwell from achieving her ambition to practice as a surgeon. She has been unable to find a position on any other hospital staff because of her sex and has started the new hospital that will be run entirely by women, partly for the benefit of the poor, partly to give women physicians opportunities to gain clinical experience, but while women physicians will be prominent in some European countries, they will remain an insignificant minority in U.S. medicine for more than a century.
New Orleans has a yellow fever epidemic that lasts for months and takes upward of 7,000 lives. Death carts rattle through the streets to the cry, "Bring out your dead."
U.S. cities have higher death rates than any other places in the world. Tuberculosis is the big killer, causing roughly 400 deaths per 100,000 population (the disease is not considered contagious), and while New York has the highest death rate, Philadelphia and Boston are not far behind.
Vietnamese authorities decapitate Spanish bishop José Maria Diaz for preaching Roman Catholicism in defiance of orders from the emperor Tu Duc (see 1856; politics, 1858).
The National Education Association has its beginnings in the National Teachers Association. It will merge in 1870 with the National Association of School Superintendents and the American Normal School Association to form the NEA, creating local and state associations through which teachers and school administrators will work to improve children's education (and their own working conditions).
The University of California founded at Oakland takes in colleges that include the academy started by Henry Durant in 1853 (see 1855; 1860).
The University of Chicago has its beginnings in the First University of Chicago (it will drop the First in 1890).
Cooper Institute is founded in New York's Astor Place by Peter Cooper of 1829 Tom Thumb locomotive fame. The Institute will develop into Cooper Union and carry on extensive programs of adult education (see 1859).
Baltimore's Peabody Institute opens in Mount Vernon Place with a great concert hall, a lecture hall, an art collection, a reference library, and a music conservatory established with a $1.4 million gift from financier George Peabody, 62.
Construction of the Atlantic cable begins in February, with the two firms involved using seven 22-gauge copper wires twisted tightly together to form a conductor 1/12th inch thick and weighing 107 pounds per mile (see 1856). Three layers of gutta percha surround this core, increasing its size to 3/8 of an inch, and surrounding this is a jacket of hemp saturated with pitch tar, beeswax, and boiled linseed oil, the entire cable then being encased with 18 strands of iron wire, each strand containing seven 22-gauge iron wires, but one firm twists its cable with a left-hand lay, the other with a right-hand lay. A. M. McKay has located the break in the cable under the Gulf of St. Lawrence and has it repaired by June. The 3,500-ton H.M.S. Agamemnon and the 5,540 steam frigate U.S.S. Niagara steam out of Valentia Harbor, Ireland, August 7, each carrying about half the cable and paying it out as she moves, but engineers on Agamemnon see that the two separate halves have been twisted in opposite directions, the cable's electrical insulation begins unraveling as it is being paid out, the engineers devise an ingenious device to make sure that the splice will remain tight, but an error in the brake that limits its descent causes the cable to break August 11, and it sinks in 12,000 feet of water some 280 miles off the Irish coast; the ships have no facilities for raising it, they return to Plymouth, the Atlantic Telegraph Co. raises additional capital, and it orders 900 more miles of cable (see 1858).
Congress passes an Overland California Mail bill, and John Butterfield of American Express organizes an Overland Mail Company (see commerce, 1850). He wins the government contract to carry mail from St. Louis to San Francisco via Little Rock, El Paso, Tucson, Yuma, and Los Angeles, using the route pioneered in large part by Philip Cooke's Mormon Battalion in 1847 (see 1858).
The Atlantic begins monthly publication at Boston in November under the editorship of James Russell Lowell. Oliver Wendell Holmes has suggested the magazine's name, and when Lowell accepts the editorship on condition that Holmes be a contributor, Holmes revives his 1831 title "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" for his contributions (see Poetry, 1858). "In Politics," say the founders, "the Atlantic will be the organ of no party or clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea."
The New York Tribune sacks all but two of its foreign correspondents in an economy move. One of the two retained is Karl Marx.
The Sacramento Bee begins publication in California under the direction of Irish-born journalist James McClatchy, who has worked as a correspondent for the New York Tribune. After his death in 1883 McClatchy's sons C. K. (Charles Kenny) and Valentine will buy out their father's partner to make the paper a family-owned enterprise (see 1922).
La Prensa begins publication at Buenos Aires July 31, continues only until December 1, but will resume October 16, 1869 and continue to January 1951.
The Birmingham Post begins publication in England.
Nonfiction: The Religious Revolution of the 19th Century (La Révolution religieuse au XIXe siècle) by Edgar Quinet; Young America in Wall Street and An American Merchant in Europe, Asia, and Australia by Boston-born New York merchant George Francis Train, 28, who calls New York "the locomotive of these United States." A former partner in his father's ship-owning firm Enoch Train & Company at Boston, the handsome, charming, and abstemious young Train has enjoyed financial success at Liverpool and in Australia while developing a reputation for eccentricity and reckless behavior.
Philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte dies at Paris September 5 at age 59.
Irish prelate and poet Richard Chenevix Trench, 50, delivers an address at the London Library November 5 "On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries" (see Johnson, 1755). A lexicographer, he tells the Philological Society, should be "an historian . . . not a critic," and a dictionary should be "an inventory of the language," not a guide to proper usage. It should, he says, be "an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view, and the wrong ways into which the language has wandered . . . may be nearly as instructive as the right ones." Trench proposes that hundreds of unpaid volunteers be recruited to comb the pages of London and New York newspapers, magazines, and journals for examples with which to trace the history of every English word for a monumental New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (see 1858).
Fiction: Madame Bovary by French novelist Gustave Flaubert, 36, who is prosecuted for immorality but wins acquittal (the attending publicity makes his book a bestseller); Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens: "Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prisms are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prisms"; Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope, who continues the Barsetshire chronicle that began with The Warden in 1855; "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton" by English writer George Eliot (Mary Anne, or Marian, Evans), 37, is published in Blackwood's Magazine. A puritan at heart, Eliot 3 years ago began living openly with philosopher-critic George H. (Henry) Lewes, 40, a married man who cannot divorce his wife because he has failed to condemn her for having had a child by another man. Eliot calls herself Mrs. Lewes, but she is shunned by proper Victorian wives; The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville, whose bitter satire is published April 1 and portrays as hypocrisy the optimistic attitudes of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Poetry: "Santa Filomena" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a tribute to Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale: "Lo! in that house of misery/ A lady with a lamp I see" (see medicine, 1854); Rime by Italian poet Giosuè Carducci, 22.
Juvenile: Tom Brown's School Days by English jurist Thomas Hughes, 35, whose Rugby principal, Dr. Thomas Arnold, says, "Life isn't all beer and skittles." Hughes worked 3 years ago with London theologian Frederick Denison Maurice, 52, to found Working Men's College.
Painting: The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet; The Return of Tobias by French painter William (-Adolphe) Bouguereau, 31; Niagara Falls by Frederick Edwin Church; Backwoods of America by Jasper Francis Cropsey, who goes abroad for a second time and will remain in Europe until 1863.
The first Currier & Ives prints go on sale as New York lithographer Nathaniel Currier, 44, takes into partnership James Merritt Ives, 33, his bookkeeper of 5 years, and begins signing all his prints with the new firm name. Currier has been issuing lithographs since 1835 that illustrate U.S. manners, personages, and notable events and has been famous since 1840 for his prints of W. K. Hewitt's lurid depiction of a fire aboard the steamship Lexington. His most prolific talent since 1849 has been English-born artist Fanny Bond Palmer, now 45, who draws directly on the stones used to make her lithographs. Her views of Manhattan, one from Brooklyn Heights and the other from Weehawken, New Jersey, have been among Currier's bestsellers; her American Farm Scenes (1853), American Winter Scenes (1854), and American Country Life (1855) have also won wide acclaim, and although she will travel no farther than Long Island or up the Hudson River, she will produce Midnight Race on the Mississippi in 1860, The Rocky Mountains, Emigrants Crossing the Plains in 1861, and Across the Continent, Westward the Course of Empire in 1868. Priced at 15¢ to $3, Currier & Ives prints will be sold all over the United States and distributed through branch offices in European cities.
Photography pioneer Frederick Scott Archer dies in poverty at London May 2 at age 43, having spent all his money on research.
Theater: The Poor of New York by Dion Boucicault 1/8 at Wallack's Theater, New York. Boucicault emigrated to New York in 1853 and has adapted Les pauvres de Paris by Edouard-Louis-Alexandre Brisebarre and Eugène Nus.
Playwright-poet Alfred de Musset dies at Paris May 2 at age 46; melodramatist-humorist Douglas Jerrold at his native London June 8 at age 54.
Opera: Giulia Grisi, now 45, reappears at the Théâtre des Italiens, Paris, 1/11 after a long absence, singing the role of Leonora in the 1853 Verdi opera Il Trovatore; Simon Boccanegra 3/12 at Venice's Teatro la Fenice, with music by Giuseppe Verdi to a libretto based on history concerning Genoa's first doge (who served from 1339 to 1344). The opera is a failure and will not be successful until 1881, when it will be given a new libretto by Arrigo Boito.
Composer Mihail Ivanovich Glinka dies at Berlin February 15 at age 52.
First performances: Piano Concerto in A major and Symphonic Poem No. 1 (Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne, after Victor Hugo) by Franz Liszt 1/7 at Weimar's Grand Ducal Palace; Sonata in B minor by Franz Liszt 1/22 at Berlin, with pianist Hans von Bülow, who marries Liszt's daughter Cosima, 19, August 18; the Faust Symphony in Three Characters (after Goethe) by Liszt 9/5 at Weimar's Grand Ducal Palace; Symphony to Dante's Divine Comedy by Liszt 11/7 at Dresden; The Battle of the Huns (Die Hunnenschlacht) symphonic poem by Liszt 12/29 at Weimar.
England's Hallé Orchestra is founded at Manchester by German-born pianist-conductor Charles (originally Carl) Hallé, 38, who fled to England to escape the revolution in 1848, became conductor of the Gentlemen's Concerts at Manchester 2 years later, organizes the orchestra for Manchester's Art Treasures Exhibition, and will give regular concert performances beginning next year.
The Philadelphia Academy of Music opens at the corner of Broad and Locust Streets in a building designed by Napoleon Le Brun and C. Runge (see Philadelphia Orchestra, 1900).
Hymn: "We Three Kings of Orient" by English-born U.S. clergyman John Henry Hopkins, Jr., 37.
Popular song: "Jingle Bells" ("One-Horse Open Sleigh") by Boston composer James Pierpont, 35.
Longchamp racetrack opens April 27 in the new Bois de Boulogne park at Paris.
The Harvard constructed at Brooklyn, N.Y., is the first U.S. racing shell (see Henley Regatta, 1829). Built by James Mackay for the Harvard Boat Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the six-oared rudderless craft is 40 feet long, 26 inches wide, weighs 50 pounds, and will be used in competition with similar white-pine racing shells that will be built for Harvard and other American colleges (see 1876).
English bareknuckle boxer Tom Sayers wins his most important match June 16, defeating the 185-pound "Tipton Slasher" Bill Perry in 10 rounds (see 1858).
The first American Chess Congress opens at New York in the fall. Top honors go to New Orleans player Paul Charles Morphy, 20, who taught himself the game in childhood by watching his father play, won two out of three games (the third was a draw) against a visiting Hungarian chess master before he was 13, and will tour Europe in the next 2 years, defeating all challengers and winning the unofficial world title (see Steinitz, 1886).
Gayetty's Medicated Paper for the Water Closet is introduced at New York by New Jersey toilet paper manufacturer Joseph C. Gayetty, who sells the product in his shop at 41 Ann Street in Lower Manhattan (see 1392). The first commercially produced toilet paper, it sells for 50¢ per 500 sheets, is watermarked with the name J. C. Gayetty on each sheet, and will soon be advertised as being "conducive to comfort. It is elegant and pure. It is proven beyond doubt to be the finest and purest paper ever made from Manila hemp, and four grand medicines incorporated with the pulp render it a sure cure and preventive of piles" (see Scott, 1879).
Parliament eases British game laws after years of harsh penalties that made anyone caught poaching liable to transportation to Australia for 7 years. Poached game has been a dietary mainstay for many families.
Scottish gentlewoman Madeleine Hamilton Smith, 22, stands trial at the High Court of Edinburgh on charges of having murdered her ex-lover Pierre Emile L'Angelier, a clerk whom she met at Glasgow 2 years ago. The prosecution shows that she became engaged to William Kinnock, a richer suitor, and that she purchased arsenic on three occasions, but it cannot show that she met L'Angelier in the week prior to his final violent illness. The verdict is "not proven," Smith's family nevertheless ostracizes her, and she moves to London, where she will marry George Wardle in 1861. She will later divorce him, emigrate to America, and live until 1928.
Detective Eugène François Vidocq dies at Paris May 11 at age 81, having lived to see his Brigade de la sûreté become a national institution. Vidocq leaves a substantial bequest to charity.
Mentmore Towers goes up in Buckinghamshire for English sportsman-art collector Lionel Rothschild, 39, who will be elected to Parliament next year. The 75-room neo-Elizabethan house designed by Joseph Paxton of 1851 Crystal Palace fame is a fantasy of pierced towers in buff sandstone and pioneers the use of large plate-glass windows.
Viennese authorities pull down the city's inner rampart and fill in its ditches (see Ringerstrasse, 1865).
The world's first commercial passenger elevator is installed in the five-story New York china-and-glass emporium of E. G. Haughwout, a new building designed by Irish-born architect John Plant Gaynor, 30 (with a prefabricated iron front designed by Daniel Badger), at 488 (later 490) Broadway, northeast corner Broome Street. Installed by Elisha G. Otis, the elevator does not have a completely enclosed cab (see 1854; 1861).
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is founded by men who include architect Thomas U. Walter, now 52. He has completed the extension of the House of Representatives in the Capitol building at Washington, D.C., and by 1859 will have enlarged the Senate chamber (see 1850; dome, 1863).
New York appoints Hartford, Connecticut-born landscape gardener Frederick Law Olmsted, 35, superintendent of the new Central Park, which is under construction but whose name belies the fact that it is far to the north of the city's population center (see 1844). Olmsted and English-born architect Calvert Vaux, 32, have won a design competition for the park; William Cullen Bryant, Tribune publisher Horace Greeley, botanist Asa Gray, financier August Belmont, and author Washington Irving (now 74) have endorsed Olmsted's application, but he finds the park site filled with hog farms, bone-boiling works, and squatters' shacks which make it "a pestilential spot where rank vegetation and miasmatic odors taint every breath of air." Work on the park becomes a relief project for city politicians struggling to cope with the economic depression (see 1858).
A March 21 earthquake shatters Edo (later Tokyo), leaving about 107,000 dead.
John Deere produces steel plows at the rate of 10,000 per year (see 1852).
The California honey industry has its beginnings at San Diego, where hives of Italian honeybees are introduced. California will become the leading U.S. honey producer.
The California grape and wine industries have their beginnings at Buena Vista in the Valley of the Moon near the Sonoma Mission, where Hungarian-born viniculturist Count Agoston Haraszthy de Mokcsa, 45, plants Tokay, Zinfandel, and Shiras grape varieties from his native Hungary. The count founded Sauk City, Wisconsin, in the 1840s and came to California in 1849; the vines that he plants are the first varietal grape vines in America (see 1861).
Commercial production of Borden's condensed milk begins at Burrville, Connecticut, where Borden has opened a condensing plant with financial backing from New York grocery wholesaler Jeremiah Milbank, 39, whom he has met by chance on a train (see 1856). Gail Borden Jr. & Company is founded at New York and Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper helps its sales by crusading against "swill milk" from Brooklyn cows fed on distillery mash. Samples of Borden's product are carried through the streets of New York and now meet with more success (see New York Condensed Milk Co., 1858).
Demand for Minneapolis flour begins in the East as a Minnesota Territory farmer ships a few barrels to New Hampshire in payment of a debt as economic depression makes specie payment difficult. The flour is made from winter wheat, which produces a whiter flour, and since Minnesota spring wheat yields a darker flour, the demand from the East will spur efforts to refine milling methods (see 1874).
The population of Chicago reaches 93,000, up from 4,100 in 1837 (see 1870).
Parliament enacts legislation limiting explicit advertising of contraceptives.
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