US troops garrison Fort Taylor, Key West

Fort Taylor at Key West

• Louisiana troops occupy Fort Pike near New Orleans/1861

• Knowing of many installations being seized by state militias and hearing talk that the local militia might take Fort Taylor at Key West, Florida, Captain John Brannam of Battery B, 1^st US Artillery, under cover of darkness and with four months provisions, moves his 44 men from their barracks east of town into Fort Taylor, preventing Florida troops from occupying the installation. Fort Taylor will become an important coaling station for the Union blockade operations in the future/1861

• In Washington, the US House Committee of Thirty-Three, the counter-part of the US Senate Committee of Thirteen and composed (theoretically) of one Congressman from each state, has had the same lack of success in finding a way forward in the Secession Crisis. Today, however, Rep. Thomas Corwin of Ohio scrapes together all the ideas discussed, and on behalf of the Committee of Thirty-Three, submits to Congress a proposed Constitutional amendment to take away federal authority over slavery and leave it to the states, to extend the Missouri Compromise line to California and receive New Mexico as a slave state, and federal enforcement of fugitive slave laws. It also would repeal state personal liberty laws./1861