The Eighth Minnesota Regiment helps defend Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from a Confederate attack, suffering ninety casualties. Murfreesboro had been the scene of the Third Minnesota's surrender two and a half years earlier.

Abolitionist, feminist, and newspaper publisher Jane Grey Swisshelm is born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She moved to Minnesota in 1857 and established the St. Cloud Visiter and, later, the St. Cloud Democrat. During the Civil War she moved to Washington, DC, and become a nurse. She died in 1884.

Martha G. Ripley is born in Lowell, Vermont. A crusader for public health, Dr. Ripley established Minneapolis's Maternity Hospital in 1886. A memorial to her was dedicated in the Minnesota State Capitol in 1939.

Gordon Parks is born in Fort Scott, Kansas. He moved to St. Paul as a teenager and eventually developed a career as a photographer, writer, filmmaker, composer, and musician. He worked for the Farm Services Administration, bacome a war photographer in 1943, and was the first African American on Life magazine's staff. His movies include The Learning Tree, based on his autobiography.

Pioneering journalist Marvel Jackson Cooke dies in New York. Born in Mankato in 1903, Cooke moved to Harlem in 1926 and worked for the NAACP's Crisis magazine, the Amsterdam News, and the People's Voice. In 1950 she joined the staff of the New York Daily Compass and was the first African American woman to work full-time for a major white-owned American newspaper.

Henry M. Rice is born in Waitsfield, Vermont. At twenty-three he became a sutler at Fort Snelling, running a concessionary store that sold sundry items to the soldiers. Rice later entered the political arena, encouraging Congress to define the state's boundaries and serving as one of Minnesota's first two senators. He died in 1894.

Aaron Goodrich, Minnesota Territory's first supreme court justice, is accused of adultery. An effort to impeach him fails, but President Millard Fillmore exercises his executive power to remove Goodrich from office in 1851.

Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike, reaching the mouth of the Mni Sota Wakpa (Minnesota River), stops at Wita Tanka (later called Pike Island after him) and raises the Stars and Stripes inside present-day Minnesota for the first time.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt is the keynote speaker at the first meeting of the Women's Institute in St. Paul.

At the Battle of Chickamauga in Georgia, the Second Minnesota is one of the few Union units on hand to repel a fierce Confederate attack. Casualties claim one-third of the regiment, with forty-five dead, 103 wounded, and fourteen captured out of the 382 engaged in battle.