Peabody is awarded the United States Congressional…

Peabody is awarded the United States Congressional Gold Medal on March 16, 1867.

Also in 1867, he is awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by Harvard University, and an Honorary Doctorate in Civil Law by Oxford University.

Renowned Washington banker and art patron William Wilson Corcoran is one of Peabody’s longtime business associates and friends.

Peabody is known to have provided benefactions of well over eight million dollars, most of them in his own lifetime.

In America, Peabody has founded and supported numerous institutions in New England and elsewhere.

With the close of the American Civil War, he  stablishes the Peabody Education Fund to "encourage the intellectual, moral, and industrial education of the destitute children of the Southern States." 

This will establishes public education in the South.

His grandest beneficence, however, is to Baltimore; the city in which he had achieved his earliest success.

In February 1867, on one of several return visits to the United States, and at the height of his financial success, the name of the well-known British-American banker had been suggested by Francis Preston Blair as a possible Secretary of the Treasury in the cabinet of President Andrew Johnson.

At about the same time, his name was also mentioned in newspapers as a future presidential candidate.

Peabody describes the presidential suggestion as a "kind and complimentary reference", but considers that he is too old for either office. (Parker, Franklin (1995). George Peabody: A Biography (2nd ed.). Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. pp. 164-5, 203, 214.)