# 1880 in the United States

Events from the year 1880 in the United States.

## Incumbents
### Federal government

* President: Rutherford B. Hayes (R-Ohio)
* Vice President: William A. Wheeler (R-New York)
* Chief Justice: Morrison Waite (Ohio)
* Speaker of the House of Representatives: Samuel J. Randall (D-Pennsylvania)
* Congress: 46th
* Governors and lieutenant governors
* Governors
* Governor of Alabama: Rufus W. Cobb (Democratic)
* Governor of Arkansas: William Read Miller (Democratic)
* Governor of California: William Irwin (Democratic) (until January 8), George Clement Perkins (Republican) (starting January 8)
* Governor of Colorado: Frederick Walker Pitkin (Republican)
* Governor of Connecticut: Charles B. Andrews (Republican)
* Governor of Delaware: John W. Hall (Democratic)
* Governor of Florida: George Franklin Drew (Democratic)
* Governor of Georgia: Alfred H. Colquitt (Democratic)
* Governor of Illinois: Shelby Moore Cullom (Republican)
* Governor of Indiana: James D. Williams (Democratic) (until November 20), Isaac P. Gray (Democratic) (starting November 20)
* Governor of Iowa: John H. Gear (Republican)
* Governor of Kansas: John P. St. John (Republican)
* Governor of Kentucky: Luke P. Blackburn (Democratic)
* Governor of Louisiana: Francis T. Nicholls (Democratic) (until January 14), Louis A. Wiltz (Democratic) (starting January 14)
* Governor of Maine: Alonzo Garcelon (Democratic) (until January 17), Daniel F. Davis (Republican) (starting January 17)
* Governor of Maryland: John Lee Carroll (Democratic) (until January 14), William T. Hamilton (Democratic) (starting January 14)
* Governor of Massachusetts: Thomas Talbot (Republican) (until January 8), John Davis Long (Republican) (starting January 8)
* Governor of Michigan: Charles Croswell (Republican)
* Governor of Minnesota: John S. Pillsbury (Republican)
* Governor of Mississippi: John M. Stone (Democratic)
* Governor of Missouri: John Smith Phelps (Democratic)
* Governor of Nebraska: Albinus Nance (Republican)
* Governor of Nevada: John Henry Kinkead (Republican)
* Governor of New Hampshire: Natt Head (Republican)
* Governor of New Jersey: George B. McClellan (Democratic)
* Governor of New York: Alonzo B. Cornell (Republican) (starting January 1)
* Governor of North Carolina: Thomas Jordan Jarvis (Democratic)
* Governor of Ohio: Richard M. Bishop (Democratic) (until January 12), Charles Foster (Republican) (starting January 12)
* Governor of Oregon: W. W. Thayer (Democratic)
* Governor of Pennsylvania: Henry M. Hoyt (Republican)
* Governor of Rhode Island: Charles C. Van Zandt (Republican) (until May 25), Alfred H. Littlefield (Republican) (starting May 25)
* Governor of South Carolina:
* until September 1: William Dunlap Simpson (Democratic)
* September 1-November 30: Thomas Bothwell Jeter (Democratic)
* starting November 30: Johnson Hagood (Democratic)
* Governor of Tennessee: Albert S. Marks (Democratic)
* Governor of Texas: Oran M. Roberts (Democratic)
* Governor of Vermont: Redfield Proctor (Republican) (until October 7), Roswell Farnham (Republican) (starting October 7)
* Governor of Virginia: Frederick W. M. Holliday (Democratic)
* Governor of West Virginia: Henry M. Mathews (Democratic)
* Governor of Wisconsin: William E. Smith (Republican)
* Lieutenant governors
* Lieutenant Governor of California: James A. Johnson (Democratic) (until January 8), John Mansfield (Republican) (starting January 8)
* Lieutenant Governor of Colorado: Horace Austin Warner Tabor (Republican)
* Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut: David Gallup (Republican)
* Lieutenant Governor of Florida: vacant
* Lieutenant Governor of Illinois: Andrew Shuman (Republican)
* Lieutenant Governor of Indiana:
* until November 2: Isaac P. Gray (Democratic)
* November 2-November 20: vacant
* starting November 20: Fredrick Vieche (Democratic)
* Lieutenant Governor of Iowa: Frank T. Campbell (Republican)
* Lieutenant Governor of Kansas: Lyman U. Humphrey (Republican)
* Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky: James E. Cantrill (Democratic)
* Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana: Louis A. Wiltz (Democratic) (until January 14), Samuel D. McEnery (Democratic) (starting January 14)
* Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts: John D. Long (Republican) (until January 8), Byron Weston (Republican) (starting January 8)
* Lieutenant Governor of Michigan: Alonzo Sessions (Republican)
* Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota: James Wakefield (Republican) (until January 10), Charles A. Gilman (Republican) (starting January 10)
* Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi: William H. Sims (Democratic)
* Lieutenant Governor of Missouri: Henry Clay Brockmeyer (Democratic)
* Lieutenant Governor of Nebraska: Edmund C. Carns (Republican)
* Lieutenant Governor of Nevada: Jewett W. Adams (Democratic)
* Lieutenant Governor of New York: George Gilbert Hoskins (Republican) (starting January 1)
* Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina: vacant
* Lieutenant Governor of Ohio: Jabez W. Fitch (Democratic) (until January 12), Andrew Hickenlooper (Republican) (starting month and day unknown)
* Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania: Charles Warren Stone (Republican)
* Lieutenant Governor of Rhode Island: Albert Howard (political party unknown) (until May 25), Henry Fay (political party unknown) (starting May 25)
* Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina: vacant (until November 30), John D. Kennedy (Democratic) (starting November 30)
* Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee: John R. Neal (Democratic) (starting month and day unknown)
* Lieutenant Governor of Texas: Joseph Draper Sayers (Democratic)
* Lieutenant Governor of Vermont: Eben Pomeroy Colton (Republican) (until October 7), John L. Barstow (Republican) (starting October 7 )
* Lieutenant Governor of Virginia: James A. Walker (Democratic)
* Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin: James M. Bingham (Republican)

## Events

* February – The journal Science is first published, with financial backing from Thomas Edison.
* February 2 – The first electric streetlight is installed in Wabash, Indiana.
* March 31 – Wabash, Indiana becomes the first electrically lighted city in the world.
* May 11 – Mussel Slough Tragedy: A land dispute between the Southern Pacific Railroad and settlers in Hanford, California, turns deadly when a gun battle breaks out, leaving 7 dead.
* May 13 – In Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison performs the first test of his electric railway.
* May 30 – League of American Wheelmen is founded in Newport, Rhode Island.
* June 1 – United States Census is 50,155,783. More than 100,000 Chinese men and 3,000 Chinese women are living in the western United States.
* August 1 – Rufus W. Cobb is reelected the 25th governor of Alabama defeating James Madison Pickens.
* September 30 – Amateur astronomer Henry Draper takes the first ever photograph of the Orion Nebula.
* October 6 – The University of Southern California opens its doors to 53 students and 10 faculty.
* October 15 – The first blizzard mentioned in Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter sweeps over the prairie in Dakota Territory.
* November 2 – U.S. presidential election, 1880: James Garfield defeats Winfield S. Hancock.
* November 4 – The first cash register is patented by James and John Ritty of Dayton, Ohio.
* November 22 – Vaudeville actress Lillian Russell makes her debut at Tony Pastor's Theatre in New York City.

### Undated

* The Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction of the Women's Christian Temperance Union is established.
* Charles Wesley Emerson founds the Boston Conservatory of Elocution, Oratory, and Dramatic Art, predecessor of Emerson College.

### Ongoing

* Gilded Age (1869–c. 1896)

## Sport

* September 15 – The Chicago White Stockings clinch their Second National League pennant with a 5–2 win over the Cincinnati Reds.

## Births
### January–June

* January 6 – Tom Mix, Western film actor (d. 1940)
* January 14 – Joseph Warren Beach, poet, novelist, critic and literary scholar (d. 1957)
* January 20 – Walter W. Bacon, accountant and politician, 60th Governor of Delaware (d. 1962)
* January 26
** Sylvia Ashton, silent film actress (d. 1940)
** Douglas MacArthur, general (d. 1964)
* January 28 – Dorothy Donnelly, actress and lyricist (d. 1928)
* January 29 – W. C. Fields, born William Claude Dukenfield, comic actor (d. 1946)
* February – Maud E. Craig Sampson Williams, African American suffragist (d. 1958)
* February 12 – John L. Lewis, labor union leader (d. 1969)
* February 14 – Frederick J. Horne, admiral (d. 1959)
* February 16 – Frank Burke, baseball player (d. 1946)
* February 19 – Arthur Shepherd, composer (d. 1958)
* February 2 – Angelina Weld Grimke, African American lesbian journalist and poet (d. 1958)
* March 4 – Channing Pollock, playwright and critic (d. 1946)
* March 10 – Broncho Billy Anderson, Western film actor (d. 1971)
* March 11 – Harry H. Laughlin, eugenicist (d. 1943)
* March 28 – Louis Wolheim, character actor (d. 1931)
* April 18 – Sam Crawford, baseball player (d. 1968)
* May 6 – William Joseph Simmons, founder of the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915 (d. 1945)
* June 4 – Clara Blandick, actress (d. 1962)
* June 9 – William S. Pye, admiral (d. 1959)
* June 11 – Jeannette Pickering Rankin, first woman elected to U.S. Congress (d. 1973)
* June 17 – Carl Van Vechten, writer and photographer (d. 1964)
* June 21 – Arnold Gesell, developmental psychologist (d. 1961)
* June 24 – Oswald Veblen, mathematician (d. 1960)
* June 26 – Mitchell Lewis, actor (d. 1956)
* June 27 – Helen Keller, campaigner for the deaf and blind (d. 1968)

### July–December

* July 10 – Greye La Spina, born Fanny Greye Bragg, fiction writer (d. 1969)
* July 12 – Tod Browning, motion picture director, horror film pioneer (d. 1962)
* July 26 – Jean Clemens, youngest child of Mark Twain (d. 1909)
* July 30 – Robert R. McCormick, newspaper publisher (d. 1955)
* August 2 – Arthur Dove, abstract painter (d. 1946)
* August 10
** Robert L. Thornton, businessman, philanthropist and mayor of Dallas, Texas (d. 1964)
** Catherine Evans Whitener, textile manufacturer (d. 1964)
* August 12 – Christy Mathewson, baseball player (d. 1925)
* August 22 – George Herriman, cartoonist (d. 1944)
* September 14 – Archie Hahn, sprinter (d. 1955)
* September 12 – H. L. Mencken, journalist (d. 1956)
* September 24 – Sarah Knauss, supercentenarian, all-time longest lived American (d. 1999)
* October 4 – Damon Runyon, writer (d. 1946)
* October 31 – A. J. Rosier, politician (d. 1932)
* November 1 – Grantland Rice, sportswriter (d. 1954)
* November 10 – Jacob Epstein, sculptor (d. 1959 in the United Kingdom)
* November 12 – Harold Rainsford Stark, admiral (d. 1972)
* December 4 – Garfield Wood, motorboat racer (d. 1971)
* December 24 – Johnny Gruelle, cartoonist and children's book author (d. 1938)
* December 31 – George Marshall, United States Secretary of State, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 (d. 1959)

### Undated

* Eliza Grant, African American midwife
* Aunt Molly Jackson, folk singer and union activist (d. 1960)

## Deaths

* January 1 – Morris Ketchum, financier (b. 1796)
* January 8 – "Emperor Norton", eccentric (b. c.1818 in the United Kingdom)
* January 12 – Ellen Lewis Herndon Arthur, wife of future President Chester A. Arthur (b. 1837)
* January 19 – James Westcott, U.S. Senator from Florida from 1845 to 1849, died in Montréal, Québec, Canada (b. 1802)
* February 14 – Samuel G. Arnold, U.S. Senator from Rhode Island from 1862 to 1863 (b. 1821)
* February 17 – James Lenox, bibliophile (b. 1800)
* May 4 – Edward Clark, Confederate Governor of Texas (b. 1815)
* May 8 – Jones Very, Transcendentalist essayist, poet, clergyman and mystic (born 1813)
* June 12 – Albert G. Brown, U.S. Senator from Mississippi from 1854 to 1861 (b. 1813)
* June 13 – James A. Bayard Jr., U.S. Senator from Delaware from 1851 to 1864 (b. 1799)
* June 17 – James B. Howell, U.S. Senator from Iowa from 1870 to 1871 (b. 1816)
* June 28 – Texas Jack Omohundro, frontier scout, actor and cowboy (b. 1846)
* July 7 – Lydia Maria Child, novelist and abolitionist (b. 1802)
* July 21 – Hiram Walden, politician (b. 1800)
* August 9 – William Bigler, U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania from 1856 to 1861 (born 1814)
* August 16 – Herschel Vespasian Johnson, United States Senator from Georgia from 1863 until 1865. (born 1812)
* August 19 – James Seddon, 4th Confederate States Secretary of War (born 1815)
* August 24 – Ouray, Ute leader (b. c. 1833)
* September 19 – Lafayette S. Foster, U.S. Senator from Connecticut from 1855 to 1867 (born 1806)
* October – Victorio, Chiricahua Apache chief (b. c.1825)
* November 3 - Solon Robinson, founder of Crown Point, Indiana (born 1803)
* November 9 – Edwin Drake, first American to successfully drill for oil (b. 1819)
* November 11 – Lucretia Mott, abolitionist and women's rights activist (born 1793)
* December 20 – Gaspar Tochman, lawyer and Confederate colonel (b. 1797 in Poland)
* December 30 – Epes Sargent, editor, poet and playwright (b. 1813)