Federal government edit

• President: Martin Van Buren (D-New York)
• Vice President: Richard M. Johnson (D-Kentucky)
• Chief Justice: Roger B. Taney (Maryland)
• Speaker of the House of Representatives: James K. Polk (D-Tennessee) (until March 4), Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter (W-Virginia) (starting December 16)
• Congress: 25th (until March 4), 26th (starting March 4)

• February 11 – The University of Missouri is established in Columbia, Missouri, becoming the first public university west of the Mississippi River.
• March 5 – Longwood University is founded in Farmville, Virginia.
• March 7 – Baltimore City College, the third public high school in the United States, is established in Baltimore, Maryland.
• March 23 – The Boston Morning Post first records the use of "OK".
• August 8 – The Beta Theta Pi fraternity is founded in Oxford, Ohio.
• September 9 – In the Great Fire of Mobile, Alabama hundreds of buildings are burned.
• October – Robert Cornelius takes the first photographic self portrait in the United States.
• November 11 – The Virginia Military Institute is founded in Lexington, Virginia.
• November 27 – In Boston, Massachusetts, the American Statistical Association is founded.

Undated edit

• The first U.S. state law permitting women to own property is passed in Jackson, Mississippi.
• Episcopal High School, Alexandria, Virginia, is founded, the first in the state.

Ongoing edit

• Second Seminole War (1835–1842)

• February 9 – Laura Redden Searing, deaf poet and journalist (died 1923)
• March 9 – Phoebe Knapp, hymn writer (d. 1908)
• April 7 – David Baird, Ireland-born U.S. Senator from New Jersey from 1918 to 1919 (died 1927)
• July 8 – John D. Rockefeller, oil industry business magnate and philanthropist (died 1937)
• August 1 – Middleton P. Barrow, U.S. Senator from Georgia from 1882 to 1883 (died 1903)
• August 23 – George Clement Perkins, U.S. Senator from California from 1893 to 1915 (died 1923)
• August 26 – Hernando Money, U.S. Senator from Mississippi from 1897 to 1911 (died 1912)
• September 2 – Henry George, writer, politician and political economist (died 1897)
• September 10 – Charles Sanders Peirce, philosopher, logician, scientist, and founder of pragmatism (died 1912)
• September 13 – Thomas J. Mastin, Confederate captain and lawyer (d. 1861)
• September 18 – William J. McConnell, U.S. Senator from Idaho from 1890 to 1891 (died 1925)
• September 28 – Frances Willard, American educator, temperance reformer and women's suffragist (died 1898)
• September 29 – James Kimbrough Jones, U.S. Senator from Arkansas from 1885 to 1903 (died 1908)
• October 20 – Augustus Octavius Bacon, U.S. Senator from Georgia from 1895 to 1914 (died 1914)
• November 4 – Thomas M. Patterson, Ireland-born U.S. Senator from Colorado from 1901 to 1907 (died 1916)
• December 5 – George Armstrong Custer, U.S. Army Officer and Cavalry Commander from Ohio from 1861 to 1876 (died 1876)
• December 12 – Caroline Ingalls (b. Caroline Lake Quiner), American pioneer, mother of author Laura Ingalls Wilder (died 1924)

• January 14 – John Wesley Jarvis, portrait painter (born c.1781 in Great Britain)
• February 26 – Sybil Ludington, heroine of the American Revolutionary War (born 1761)
• April 1 – Benjamin Pierce, governor of New Hampshire from 1827 to 1828 and from 1829 to 1830, father of the 14th president of the United States, Franklin Pierce (born 1757)
• April 2 – Hezekiah Niles, magazine publisher (born 1777)
• April 5 – John Tipton, U.S. Senator from Indiana from 1832 to 1839 (born 1786)
• April 22 – Samuel Smith, U.S. Senator from Maryland from 1822 to 1833 (born 1752)
• May 11 – Thomas Cooper, political philosopher (born 1759)
• June 10 – Nathaniel Hale Pryor, sergeant in the Lewis and Clark Expedition (born 1772)
• July 16 – The Bowl (Di'wali), Cherokee chief, shot (born c.1756)
• August 22 – Benjamin Lundy, abolitionist (born 1789)
• September 28 – William Dunlap, actor-manager, dramatist and painter (born 1766)
• December 4 – John Leamy, merchant (born 1757 in Ireland)

• Timeline of United States history (1820–1859)

•   Media related to 1839 in the United States at Wikimedia Commons