Robert E. Lee, future commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, was born at Stratford Hall plantation in Virginia.

President Thomas Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, banning the transatlantic slave trade into the United States effective 1808.

Giuseppe Garibaldi, the guerrilla general who would help unify Italy, was born in Nice, then part of the French Empire.

German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers discovered Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt, naming it after the Roman goddess of hearth and home.