Froebel published "The Education of Man." Famous men dying in 1826 were Lindley Murray, grammarian; John Flaxman, sculptor; Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta and hymn-writer; and Prince Rostopchin, by whose orders Moscow was burned in 1812.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year.
1827
The revolt in Portugal finally suppressed, with the assistance of a British army corps. The Acropolis at Athens captured by the Turks. Many foreign volunteers joined the Greek forces, and England, Russia, and France demanded that Turkey should agree to an armistice. As the Turks refused, and continued their atrocities upon the helpless Greeks, Admiral Codrington, commanding twenty-nine English, Russian, and French vessels, attacked the Turkish and Egyptian fleets at Navarino—consisting of seventy warships, forty transports, and four fire-ships—and utterly destroyed them. The Sultan, however, remained obdurate, refusing all demands, and insisting on an indemnity for his ships.
Popular discontent and anti-clerical riots in France; Charles X disbanded the National Guard, and made ineffectual attempts to gag the press.
Joseph Smith, at Palmyra, New York, began to have visions that later developed into Mormonism. Woehler, German chemist, discovered the metal aluminum; Ohm made important discoveries concerning electric currents. Famous men dying in this year were George Canning, English statesman; Laplace, French astronomer; Ludwig van Beethoven, German musician; William Blake, English poet and artist; and Alessandro Volta, Italian physicist.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year.
1828
Russia concluded peace with Persia, exacting an indemnity of twenty million rubles and annexing two provinces. She now moved against Turkey, where the Sultan Mahmoud had incited his people to a holy war. The Russians won some early successes, but were hampered by poor commissariat and transportation service, and could not pass the Turkish fortresses at Silistria, Varna, and Shumla. Meanwhile a French force landed in Greece; the Morea was evacuated by the Turks, and Greece became independent, with Count Joannes Capo d'Istria, a Greek who had been foreign minister at St. Petersburg, as president.
In the United States, Congress passed a bill establishing a protective tariff. The North, formerly agricultural and in favor of free trade, had turned to manufacturing, and, led by Webster, strenuously upheld protection against the Southern leaders, once its advocates, now its enemies. States rights discussions grew stronger. The first American steam railroad constructed at Baltimore. Webster's Dictionary published.