The legislature allows Minnesota's Civil War soldiers to vote by passing the state's first absentee ballot law.

Ironton thug John Henry Seadlund and accomplice James Atwood Gray kidnap Charles Sherman Ross in Chicago. The kidnappers demand a $50,000 ransom from their hideout near Emily, Minnesota. In the end, Seadlund murders Ross and Gray at a location north of Spooner, Wisconsin. Seadlund would be captured at a racetrack in California and executed by order of the state of Illinois in 1938.

Generals Oliver O. Howard, Daniel Sickles, Alexander Stewart, and Russel Alger speak against the silver standard, a Populist platform, and in support of William McKinley, to an audience of about 6,000 at St. Paul's Auditorium. On their speaking tour of the Northwestern states, the generals also stop in Le Sueur, Little Falls, Mankato, St. Peter, and Willmar.

Horace Goodhue Jr. opens a prep school in Northfield with twenty-three students. The institution is first known as Northfield College, but a generous donation from William Carleton of Charlestown, Massachusetts, inspired its later name, Carleton College.

The Minnesota Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated in St. Paul.

Dakota people who had opposed the 1862 war gain control of 269 white captives and release them to General Henry H. Sibley at a location later marked by Camp Release Monument in Lac qui Parle County.

Elmer A. Benson is born in Appleton, Minnesota. He served as governor from 1937 to 1939, representing the Farmer‒Labor Party. Under his watch, the state's first workers' compensation law was passed. His sympathy for communist principles led to distrust among members of his party, but he retained control of the Farmer‒Labor Party until 1944, when it merged with the Democratic Party.

Soldiers under General Henry H. Sibley defeat Dakota warriors in the Battle of Wood Lake in Yellow Medicine County. Although this battle traditionally marks the end of the US‒Dakota War, Sibley and General Alfred Sully undertook punitive expeditions against the Dakota the following year.

St. Paul hosts the state's first St. Patrick's Day parade. Although Irish immigration to St. Paul would not peak until 1890, many Irish had already settled in town, working both as household servants and as laborers on the docks of the Upper Landing.

Clyde Elmer Anderson is born in Brainerd. A champion of social and humanitarian causes, he would serve a record eleven years as the state's lieutenant governor beginning in 1939 and then as the state's twenty-eighth governor from 1951 to 1955. He died in 1998.