1880 in the United States

Incumbents

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

• President: Rutherford B. Hayes
• Vice President: William A. Wheeler
• Chief Justice: Morrison Waite
• Speaker of the House of Representatives: Samuel J. Randall
• Congress: 46th

  Governors

Lieutenant Governors

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.
• 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.
• More than 100,000 Chinese men and 3,000 Chinese women are living in the western United States.

  Ongoing

• Gilded Age

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

  July–December

• July 10 - Greye La Spina, born Fanny Greye Bragg, fiction writer
• July 12 - Tod Browning, motion picture director, horror film pioneer
• July 30 - Robert R. McCormick, newspaper publisher
• August 2 - Arthur Dove, abstract painter
• August 10 - Robert L. Thornton, businessman, philanthropist and mayor of Dallas, Texas
• August 12 - Christy Mathewson, baseball player
• August 22 - George Herriman, cartoonist
• September 14 - Archie Hahn, sprinter
• September 12 - H. L. Mencken, journalist
• September 24 - Sarah Knauss, supercentenarian, all-time longest lived American
• October 4 - Damon Runyon, writer
• November 1 - Grantland Rice, sportswriter
• November 10 - Jacob Epstein, sculptor
• November 12 - Harold Rainsford Stark, admiral
• December 4 - Garfield Wood, motorboat racer
• December 24 - Johnny Gruelle, cartoonist and children's book author
• December 31 - George Marshall, United States Secretary of State, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953

  Deaths

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