August – P. T. Barnum begins his career as a showman in New York City by displaying Joice Heth, a black woman who he claimed was 161 years old and the former nursemaid of George Washington.
December 29 – The Treaty of New Echota, ceding all the lands of the Cherokee east of the Mississippi to the United States, is signed.
Undatededit
Judge William Harper of South Carolina rules that a person's acceptance as white, not the proportion of white and black blood, determine a person's race.
Fort Cass is established, the military headquarters and site of the largest internment camps during the 1838 Trail of Tears.
Tensions between the United States and France reach an all time high as President Andrew Jackson and the French government of Louis Philippe I trade threats and insults over France's refusal to pay the United States reparations which the United States government insists France owes from the Quasi-War.[2]
October 26 – Thomas M. Bowen, U.S. Senator from Colorado from 1883 to 1889 (died 1906)
October 31 – Adelbert Ames, 27th and 30th governor of Mississippi from 1868 to 1870 and from 1874 to 1876 and U.S. Senator from Mississippi from 1870 to 1874, Medal of Honor recipient (died 1933)