March 13 - Uncle Sam first appears in a weekly comic publication.
March 20 - Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is published.
June 5 - Members of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity build the first fraternity house in the U.S.
August 13 - English politician Benjamin Disraeli writes: "These wretched colonies will all be independent in a short time, and are a millstone round our necks."
October 20 - An advertisement in the Burlington Free Press offers the first steam-heated factory.
October 24 - Massachusetts statesman Daniel Webster dies in Marshfield, Massachusetts.