Mob attacks abolitionists at a memorial service for John Brown.

Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, John Brown Jr. and others are attacked during an afternoon service at Tremont Temple that is held a year and a day after Brown’s execution. According to the Boston Evening Transcript, the members of the mob are mainly Irish and were hired by merchants engaged in the Southern trade. Douglass calls the attack “One of the most barefaced, outrageous acts on free speech that I have ever witnessed in Boston or elsewhere.” Some 2,000 people, subsequently described by the Daily Courier as “discharged workmen,” protest outside a similar service that evening at the African Meeting House.