1875 in the United States

Incumbents

Federal Government">Federal government of the United States">Federal Government

• President: Ulysses S. Grant
• Vice President: Henry Wilson , vacant
• Chief Justice: Morrison Waite
• Speaker of the House of Representatives: James G. Blaine , Michael C. Kerr
• Congress: 43rd, 44th

  Governors

Lieutenant Governors

Events

• January 25 - Anti-Slavery Society forms in New York.
• February 25 - The majority of the Yavapai and Tonto Apache tribes are forced by the U.S. Cavalry under command of Brigadier General George Crook to walk at gunpoint from the Arizona's Verde Valley to the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, 180 miles to the southeast. The two tribes are not allowed to return to the Verde Valley until 1900.
• February 27 - Newton Booth, 11th Governor of California, resigns, having been elected Senator. Lieutenant Governor of California Romualdo Pacheco becomes the 12th Governor. He is later replaced by elected governor William Irwin.
• March 1 - The United States Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in public accommodations and jury duty.
• March 3 - President Grant authorizes issue of a twenty-cent piece.
• March 3 - The Page Act of 1875 is enacted. Passed amid rising nativistic and anti-Chinese sentiment, the Act restricts the immigration of Chinese women to the U.S.
• March 15 - Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York John McCloskey is named the first cardinal in the U.S.
• April 25 - Ten sophomores from Rutgers College steal a one-ton cannon from the campus of the College of New Jersey and start the Rutgers–Princeton Cannon War.
• May 17 - Aristides wins the first Kentucky Derby.
• June - The record-setting clipper Flying Cloud of 1851 is burned for scrap metal.
• June 4 - Two American colleges play each other in arguably the first game of College Football: Tufts University and Harvard University at Jarvis Field in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• July 2 - The trial, begun on January 4, for criminal conversation brought against popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher by Theodore Tilton for alleged adultery with his wife, suffragist Elizabeth Richards Tilton, in Brooklyn ends with a hung jury.
• July 24 - The Mohican Base Ball Club is established in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.
• September 1 - A murder conviction begins to break the power of the violent Irish-American anti-owner coal miners, the "Molly Maguires".
• October 16 - Brigham Young University is founded in Provo, Utah. This year also Wasatch Academy is founded by Duncan McMillan in Mount Pleasant, Utah.
• October 25 - The first performance of the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is given in Boston, Massachusetts with Hans von Bülow as soloist.
• October 30 - The Theosophical Society is founded in New York by Helena Blavatsky, H. S. Olcott, W. Q. Judge, and others.
• November 9 - Indian Wars: In Washington, D.C., Indian Inspector E.C. Watkins issues a report stating that hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne associated with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse are hostile to the United States.
• November 22 - Vice President Henry Wilson dies from a stroke.
• December 4 - Notorious New York City politician Boss Tweed escapes from prison and flees to Cuba, then to Spain.
• December 9 - The Massachusetts Rifle Association, "America's oldest active gun club", is formed.

  Undated

• The Tong Wars begin in San Francisco.

  Ongoing

• Reconstruction era
• Gilded Age
• Depression of 1873–79

  Births

• January 5 - J. Stuart Blackton, film producer
• January 7 - Thomas Hicks, runner
• January 9 - Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sculptor and socialite
• January 15 - Thomas Burke, sprinter
• January 22 - D. W. Griffith, film director
• January 31 - Horace B. Carpenter, film actor and screenwriter
• March 9 - Evelyn Sears, tennis player
• March 25 - Spencer Charters, actor
• March 28 - Helen Westley, actress
• April 2 - Walter Chrysler, automobile pioneer
• April 4 - Samuel S. Hinds, film actor
• April 9 - Jacques Futrelle, fiction writer
• April 15 - James J. Jeffries, heavyweight boxer
• May - Paul Sarebresole, ragtime composer
• May 4 - John J. Blaine, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin from 1927 to 1933
• May 6 - William D. Leahy, admiral
• May 11 - Harriet Quimby, pilot
• May 23 - Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr., automobile industrialist
• June 6 - J. Farrell MacDonald, character actor and film director
• June 26 - Camille Zeckwer, composer
• July 1 - Joseph Weil, con man
• July 2 - Hubert D. Stephens, U.S. Senator from Mississippi from 1923 to 1935
• July 10 - Mary McLeod Bethune, African American educator
• July 19 - Alice Dunbar Nelson, African American poet, journalist and political activist of the Harlem Renaissance
• August 11 - Raymond E. Willis, U.S. Senator from Indiana from 1941 to 1947
• August 27 - Katharine McCormick, suffragist
• September 1 - Edgar Rice Burroughs, popular novelist
• September 16 - James Cash Penney, businessman, founder of J. C. Penney
• September 17 - John H. Overton, U.S. Senator from Louisiana from 1933 to 1948
• October 23 - Gilbert N. Lewis, chemist, first to isolate deuterium
• October 29 - Alva B. Adams, U.S. Senator from Colorado from 1923 to 1924 and from 1933 to 1941
• November 6 - Richard L. Murphy, U.S. Senator from Iowa from 1933 to 1936
• November 13 - Jimmy Swinnerton, cartoonist and artist
• November 19 - Hiram Bingham III, explorer of South America and U.S. Senator from Connecticut from 1924 to 1933
• November 30 - Myron Grimshaw, baseball player
• Percy MacKaye, dramatist and poet

  Deaths

• January 18 - William Henry Aspinwall, financier
• January 22 - Charles Sprague, banker and poet
• February 5 - William Alfred Buckingham, U.S. Senator from Connecticut from 1869 to 1875
• February 7 - Edmund Spangler, carpenter and stagehand employed at Ford's Theatre at the time of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln
• May 17 - John C. Breckinridge, 14th Vice President of the United States from 1857 to 1861
• May 20 - Jesse D. Bright, U.S. Senator from Indiana from 1845 to 1862
• July 8 - Francis Preston Blair, Jr., U.S. Senator from Missouri from 1871 to 1873
• July 10 - Henry L. Benning, Confederate general, lawyer, and judge
• July 25 - Celia M. Burleigh, women's rights activist and Unitarian pastor
• July 29 - Paschal Beverly Randolph, occultist
• July 30 - George Pickett, Confederate General
• July 31 - Andrew Johnson, 17th President of the United States from 1865 to 1869, 16th Vice President of the United States from March to April 1865
• August 11 - William Alexander Graham, U.S. Senator from North Carolina from 1840 to 1843, Confederate States Senator from 1864 to 1865, 30th Governor of North Carolina from 1845 to 1849 and U.S. Secretary of the Navy from 1850 to 1852
• August 17 - John B. Weller, U.S. Senator from California from 1852 to 1857
• October 15 - Lone Horn, Native American Chief
• November 21 - Orris S. Ferry, U.S. Senator from Connecticut from 1867 to 1875
• November 22 - Henry Wilson, 18th Vice President of the U.S. from 1873 to 1875
• November 24 - William Backhouse Astor, Sr., businessman
• December 13 - Théonie Rivière Mignot, restaurateur
• December 27 - William Alexander Richardson, U.S. Senator from Illinois from 1863 to 1865