1865, A Missouri state constitutional convention votes to free slaves immediately, Jan. 11. Missouri follows Maryland’s action. Both were slave states that remained in Union.
1865, Gen. Sherman issues a field order setting aside a large swath of the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida coast, in 40-acre lots, for farming exclusively by freed blacks, Jan. 16. This includes Sea Island plantations under the Port Royal Experiment.
Sherman’s order will be countermanded later in the year by Pres. Johnson.
1865, 13th Amendment ending slavery throughout Union is approved by Congress and is sent to states for ratification, Jan. 31.
Black regiments celebrate.
1865, Sherman takes Columbia, SC, Feb. 17. Charleston, in ruins from 1861 fire and 587 days of naval and land bombardment, surrenders Feb. 18. Two black regiments lead Union column into the city singing “John Brown’s Body.”
Black citizens celebrate April 14 with a parade of thousands, and return of U.S. flag to Fort Sumter, joined by William Lloyd Garrison and many Northern abolitionists, and addressed by Henry Ward Beecher.
1865, Pres. Lincoln signs bill creating the Freedmen’s Bureau within War Dept., March 3, with wide powers to dispense relief to black and white refugees, including shelter, medical care and education, and to redistribute “abandoned” lands. Gen. Oliver O. Howard is named commissioner. Operates to 1868.
President at the Capitol.
1865, “...Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether...’ ”
1865, Desperate, Pres. Davis issues general order to enlist slaves into Confederate army, with a promise of freedom for service, March. No actual action is taken along this line.
Grant, left, and Lee.
1865, Lee surrenders to Grant, April 9, at Appomattox Courthouse, VA; Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrenders to Sherman, April 26, at Greensboro, NC, basically ending Civil War.
Deaths: More than 752,000 lost on both sides (latest revised estimate and not including civilians), more than 60 percent from disease. Forty percent of combat dead never identified. Bloodiest war, by far, suffered by U.S.
Union deaths exceed Confederate by more than 100,000, but the Confederate percentage is far higher; 37% percent of Confederate men under arms never return home; thousands more return with missing limbs or other disabling injury.
Bones of dead soldiers emerge for many months from shallow graves dug on battlefields across the South.
Civilians: The best estimate (by historian James McPherson) is that 50,000 civilians died, most of them in the South, from disease spread by troop movements, from starvation following the collapse of Southern agriculture (exacerbated by the Union blockade) and from the actual fighting. McPherson estimates that the overall mortality rate in the South was greater during the Civil War than that of any combatant nation in World War I.
Booth's deringer.
1865, Lincoln assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, April 14 (a night of earlier celebratory parades in Washington, Charleston and Philadelphia).
Among other motivations, John Wilkes Booth cites Lincoln’s openness, expressed in his last speech April 11, toward granting blacks the vote (or at least black Union soldiers). Andrew Johnson succeeds to presidency.
1865, Union Gen. James Wilson, leading a large-scale cavalry raid that destroys munition facilities in Selma and Montgomery, AL, fights last battle of the war in the East at Columbus, GA, April 16. Charles A.L. Lamar is a casualty, the last Confederate officer to die in action. (Known for organizing the Wanderer slave-smuggling expedition of 1858.)
Coke story: A Confederate colonel, John Smith Pemberton, is wounded and subsequently becomes addicted to morphine. This leads him to experiment with less dangerous painkillers and tonics, and to ultimately devise early formulas for what came to be known as Coca-Cola.
1865, Black troops play a role in last skirmish of the war, at Palmito Ranch east of Brownsville, TX, May 12-13.
With help from artillery loaned by French soldiers in Matamoros, 300 Texans hold off the larger Union force, including the 62nd U.S. Colored Troops. The Texans are said to be protecting a large shipment of Confederate cotton bound for Mexico.
From a Union pamphlet.
1865, Union forces arrive in Galveston, where Gen. Gordon Granger announces emancipation, June 19. Freed are 180,000 Texas slaves counted in the 1860 census, plus perhaps 150,000 more driven into Texas during the war by Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas slave masters.
This is origin of the Juneteenth celebration that is mainly a Texas event for decades, but which spread in recent years to many more cities and states. Raised to still higher prominence after 2020 death of George Floyd while being held to ground by a Minneapolis police officer. Floyd grew up in Houston.
Text: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection therefore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.”
Charleston at war's end.
1865, As spring runs into summer, most of the South finds itself devastated by war and further plagued by crop failures and drought. Union commanders hard-pressed to feed hungry; thousands, white and black, starve, particularly in mountain counties.
Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta and many other cities are in ruins, as are thousands of plantations and farms. Confederate currency worthless, virtually all banks go bust; riverboats are gone, railroads torn up. The relatively little cotton picked is met with lowest prices since before the war.
Emancipation of slaves eliminates more than $3 billion worth of South’s “assets.” Total plantation land was worth roughly the same in 1860, but sells for far less now.
The entire South will struggle economically for decades. After a brief period of progress during Reconstruction, the black South will find itself in a particularly bleak position.
1865, Pres. Johnson leans toward Lincoln’s lenient Reconstruction policy with restoration of land to former owners, including most of the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida coastal land Sherman had ordered reserved for freed ex-slaves.
Johnson also pardons many plantation owners, giving them a clear path to take control of state legislatures again. As before the war, only white males can vote.
Mississippi (November) and then South Carolina enact first Black Codes, imposing restrictions on blacks such as forbidding them work except as field hands, requiring them to sign labor contracts, and seizing unemployed blacks and then auctioning them to plantations. Black children required to work as “apprentices” until they turn 18. Blacks are forbidden to possess guns.
These are enforced, in the beginning, by all-white sheriffs and militias manned by large contingents of ex-Confederate soldiers.
1865, More than 60 former Confederates, designated by state legislatures, arrive in Washington to take seats in Congress, December. They include four colonels, four generals and six Confederate cabinet officers led by Alexander Stephens, the former Confederate vice president. Radical Republican majorities refuse to seat them.
1865, 13th Amendment ratified by last three states (Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina) of the required 27, Dec. 6, ending slavery throughout U.S.
Border states of Kentucky and Delaware are actually the last states in which slavery remained legal until this ratification.
1865, Northern Republicans help organize white “Unionists” and black freedmen into state and county Union Leagues across the South. While many whites eventually drop out, the leagues become basis of black political organization supporting election of Republican candidates (including many blacks), and supporting Reconstruction.
White Democrats will accuse Union Leagues of organizing “Negro rule” for enrichment of Northern “carpetbaggers” and Southern “scalawags.”
Mississippi Klan members.
1865, Ku Klux Klan founded by former Confederate officers in Pulaski, TN, Dec. 24. Named for “kyklos,” Greek for circle. Quickly evolves into local vigilante groups targeting Union Leagues and freed blacks, especially leading up to elections, with intimidation, arson and murder. From 1866 to mid-1867, 197 killings and 548 injurious assaults are attributed to Klan in the Carolinas alone.
Similar groups—White Liners, White Camelia, Red Shirts—arise with less hocus-pocus and clearer political objectives, even before federal forces suppress the first Klan by 1871.
1865, Union soldiers are rapidly demobilized. From total strength of 1 million May 1, only 152,000 remain in the South at year’s end.
Deacon Bogle.
1865, Several hundred black Jamaicans, led by Baptist deacon Paul Bogle, march on the Morant Bay courthouse to protest a recent trial, prohibitive poll taxes and worsening poverty (after years of cholera, smallpox, floods and drought). When militia kills seven marchers, the crowd attacks a number of the militia and burns the courthouse, Oct. 11. Over the following two days, thousands rise up in St. Thomas in the East Parish.
Gov. Edward John Eyre declares martial law. Troops, aided by Maroons of Moore Town, kill more than 400, including women and children, and arrest more than 300 others.
Many of the 300 arrested are executed, including Bogle; others are whipped and imprisoned in the most severe repression of unrest ever in the British West Indies, 31 years after emancipation. A prominent mixed-race legislator who supported the protests is also executed.
High poll taxes that suppress the black vote to just a few hundred are attributed to white fears of a Haiti-style takeover of Jamaica. Blacks fear that planters want to restore slavery.
Slaves moving cargo.
1865, Cuba finally ends slave imports for real, in part because slaves are now more expensive to buy and smuggle in, thanks to Royal Navy pressure and U.S. emancipation. Cuban plantations turn to Mexican mestizo and Chinese indentured laborers to bolster their still-enslaved workers, and continue to mechanize sugar industry.
1866, Pres. Johnson, in a White House meeting with a black delegation led by Frederick Douglass, rejects their call for black suffrage, Feb. 2.
1866, Congress overrides Pres. Johnson’s veto of extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau, February. A second Freedmen’s Bureau bill is passed and vetoed in July; Congress overrides that veto as well.
Radical Republicans, including Charles Sumner (Massachusetts) in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens (Pennsylvania) in the House, take command of Reconstruction policy.
1866, Congress passes Civil Rights Act declaring all people born in the U.S., including ex-slaves, to be citizens entitled to full legal and property rights, but does not include “political rights,” i.e. right to vote and to hold office; Pres. Johnson vetoes it; Congress overrides veto, April 9.
Churches, schools, homes burn.
1866, Whites attack blacks in streets of Memphis, TN, a refuge for escaped slaves during war. 48 people die, almost all black, May 1-3. Four black churches, eight schools and 91 homes pillaged or burned.
1866, Congress sends 14th Amendment (which grants citizenship and due process to all persons, male and female, born or naturalized in U.S., and backs up Civil Rights Act) to states, June 13. On the vote, it authorizes federal government to reduce representation in Congress of those states violating the right of all male citizens to cast ballots.
Six weeks later, Tennessee becomes first Confederate state to ratify the amendment, and six days after that, the first Confederate state readmitted to Union. But final ratification of the 14th takes two years.
1866, White mob in New Orleans attacks blacks and Radical Republicans attending a black-suffrage meeting; 40 people killed, more than 100 hurt, July 30.
Demobilization of Union troops continues. Only 38,000 remain in South by the fall.
Johnson Draws a Crowd.
1866, Pres. Johnson’s campaign tour of Northern cities backfires. Radical Republicans gain more seats in Congress in November elections.
1866, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw and other tribes of the Indian Territory sign new treaties with U.S. government, replacing their agreements with Confederacy. Included: Amnesty, promise of no federal interference in tribal organization, federal purchase of large chunks of land (to be developed as reservations for tribes new to the Indian Territory).
Important: Freed slaves of tribes (up to 14% of the population) are to receive land allotments and tribal voting rights. Creek freed people are assigned lots in Creek territory including lots in what will become Tulsa. Major oil strikes in 1901 and 1905 lead to city growing from 1,100 in 1895 to 100,000 in 1920, with a healthy, well-to-do black community developing in the Greenwood district.
In 1921, arrest of young black man in a suspected rape leads to an all-out armed white attack on Greenwood. Theaters, hotels, restaurants, seven churches and 1,400 homes are burned. Two dozen whites and more than 100 blacks die; 6,000 blacks detained for days.
1866, First peacetime, black regiments are organized by the U.S. army at Fort Leavenworth, KS: the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry. Their non-coms are black and officers are white (until 1877, when Lt. Henry O. Flipper, a West Point graduate and former slave, joins the 10th). The black units comprise more than 15% of the army.
In defending railroad construction, building forts and pursuing Indian bands that leave reservations, the “buffalo soldiers” engage in scores of Western skirmishes and battles. In 1898, they fight in the Spanish-American War.
1866, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates is published by Edward Alfred Pollard, a former Richmond newspaper editor from a prominent Virginia family. He contends that, unlike Puritan North, the Cavalier South had developed a “feudal” society based on slave labor, which “established in the South a peculiar and noble type of civilization.”
In The Lost Cause Regained (1868) Pollard outlines what becomes the “Lost Cause” view of why the South seceded (to preserve state sovereignty, not slavery).
His views evolve to favor Northern capitalism, limited civil rights legislation and black suffrage before his death in 1872 at age 40.
1866, Under pressure from U.S. government, which has supplied munitions and 30,000 rifles to Juárez’s forces, Napoleon III says all French troops will be withdrawn from Mexico, Dec. 19. Totaling 38,500 at their 1863 peak, the last depart Vera Cruz on March 12, 1867.
1866, Jamaica’s colonial assembly, dominated by white plantation owners through its 200-year history under the British, consents to government directly by the crown and disbands. A new governor appoints judges who report to the crown. These reforms result from uproar in Britain over harsh suppression of Morant Bay uprising.
But elimination of assembly also eliminates any political role for blacks.
1866, Last successful slave voyage recorded in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is aboard an unnamed brigantine of unknown flag, which embarks 851 captives from an unnamed port in Africa and delivers 700 to an unspecified port of Cuba.
Several other sources say a later trans-Atlantic slave voyage ended in Havana in 1867, but no details are specified.
Casting ballots.
1867, Congress extends the right to vote to black male citizens of Washington, DC, over Pres. Johnson’s veto, Jan. 8.
1867, New Congress passes stricter Reconstruction laws, requiring returning states to adopt new constitutions and the 14th Amendment (citizenship and due process of law for all born in U.S.), to allow black voting and to accept new military districts, March 11. Vetoes by Pres. Johnson are overridden.
The execution of Maximillian.
1867, In Mexico, besieged Maximilian is caught trying to flee, and is tried and executed in Querétaro, June 19. Mexico City falls to Juárez and Republican forces the next day.
A page from Slave Songs.
1867, Slave Songs of the United States is published by abolitionists William Francis Allen, Lucy McKim Garrison (William Lloyd Garrison’s daughter-in-law) and Charles Pickard Ware. This collection of Negro spirituals, passed down through many decades, includes “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” “Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Had” and 134 other songs—words and music—collected from all corners of the South and inspired by the editors’ involvement in the wartime Port Royal Experiment in South Carolina, including Sundays at the church on St. Helena island.
Howard's main building.
1867, Congress charters Howard University to support liberal arts and medical education of blacks, in Washington. The university was founded the previous year by Gen. Oliver O. Howard, commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He serves as university president, 1869-1874.
Baptist Home Mission Society creates the National Theological Institute to open Wayland Seminary in Washington, Richmond Theological Seminary in Virginia and, later, the Augusta Institute in Georgia, all for education of freed blacks.
1867, Congress guarantees burial for every fallen Union soldier and sailor in expanding national cemeteries. Still-emerging bodies, from shallow battlefield graves and prison camps, are reinterred in these cemeteries.
Confederate dead are not included. Women’s organizations rise in the South to fund and carry out internment of tens of thousands of bodies from Northern battlefields as well as those of the South. In honoring lost husbands and sons, they play a large role in developing “the Lost Cause.”
Federal government provides some support in marking Confederate graves beginning in 1906.
1867, First patent for barbed wire is issued to Lucien B. Smith of Ohio. Cheap fencing, mass-produced by late 1870s, protects new farms on the Plains from remaining buffalo and from free-ranging cattle.
1867, Kansala, capital of Mandinkan Kaabu Empire (in present-day Guinea-Bissau), falls to Muslim forces of Futa Jallon, May 24. As the latter pour through the gates, the Mandinka ignite powder magazines, killing hundreds of the invaders as well as most of the defenders.
South Carolina legislature.
1868, Blacks and whites work side by side in Southern state constitutional conventions dominated by Republican Party, January.
South Carolina: Blacks, in their first experience of voting, elect black majority to constitutional convention, who in turn propose constitution that will guarantee free education for all and create other social-welfare institutions. Black voters approve this in April yea-nay vote.
In the next election, a black Republican majority is elected to the state legislature in Columbia.
They pass property-tax increases that hit white plantation owners.
Ex-Confederates cannot run for office in these elections; many other whites boycott.
Impeachment Committee.
1868, Pres. Johnson impeached by House in March, but survives Senate trial by one vote, May 16. Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina readmitted to Union, June.
1868, 14th Amendment (guaranteeing citizenship) declared ratified, July 28. Several Southern states balk but then ratify, in part to secure readmission, South Carolina completing the process. Alabama readmitted, July 13.
Black man hung after massacre.
1868, Shooting breaks out between black and white factions in Opelousas, LA. Whites, led by Knights of White Camelia, take 29 blacks prisoner. All but two are executed a day later, including two Republican party leaders, Sept. 28. This is followed by weeks of white attacks on blacks in St. Landry Parish. Scores of blacks, who have far fewer firearms, killed.
1868, Ulysses S. Grant (Illinois) elected president, Nov. 3, defeating Horatio Seymour, former Democratic governor of New York. Grant’s slogan: “Let us have peace.” Blacks in South cast 700,000 votes, virtually all for Grant. Democrats pick up 20 House seats, but Republicans pick up 12 Senate seats in readmitted Confederate states, for overwhelming 57-9 majority.
1868, Black elected officials ousted from Georgia state legislature with support of most Democrats and some white Republicans. But they eventually win reinstatement.
1868, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute founded in Virginia with support of American Missionary Association and former Union officers. Booker T. Washington becomes a student in 1872 at age 16.
Navajos on long walk home.
1868, U.S. government reverses course and allows Navajo (Diné) people to return to their homeland in northwest New Mexico. Treaty of Bosque Redondo ends their internment under deplorable conditions on Pecos river. Signing treaty were Barboncito and 28 other Navajo headsmen, and Gen. Sherman and Samuel Tappan for the government, June 1.
1868, Leading Cuban plantation owners ignite Ten Years’ War, Oct. 10, with Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freeing his slaves and urging them to join fight for independence. Previously these more liberal planters had pressed for final end to slave trade. Now they call for abolition of slavery altogether, independence from Spain and constitutional, democratic government.
Oriente province rises up, but not Havana or Matanzas. Spanish forces strike back ruthlessly with thousands sent to reconcentrados (early concentration camps) and hundreds killed in field executions. Internal dissension, death of Céspedes, U.S. support of Spain and capture of rebel president Tomás Estrada Palma undermine rebel efforts. But conflict continues to 1878.
News of amendment passed.
1869, Congress passes 15th Amendment, Feb. 26, which guarantees that the vote cannot be denied on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” in reaction to poll violence in the South.
Railroad leaders join forces.
1869, Pacific Railroad begins running trains 1,912 miles between Council Bluffs, IA, and Oakland, CA, Sept. 6. “Last Spike” ceremony was May 10 at Promontory Point, UT, before Sacramento-Oakland leg was complete.
What had been a 25-day stagecoach journey is reduced to four days.
1869, Panic on Wall Street as financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fisk unsuccessfully attempt to corner gold supply, Sept. 24.
1869, Tennessee is first former Confederate state to replace a biracial Republican legislature with all-white Democratic “Redeemer” government, November. Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia follow in 1870.
1869, U.S. Supreme Court upholds Radical Reconstruction, 5-3, in Texas vs. White, April, and affirms that secession from Union is illegal.
Freedman’s Bureau reports establishment of nearly 3,000 schools in the South serving more than 150,000 black students.
Grant shakes hands with Indians.
1869, At first inauguration, Pres. Grant promises a “Peace Policy” to end Indian conflicts, reform Indian policy, recruit Quakers and other religious groups as trustworthy Indian agents, and provide more federal help. His first commissioner of Indian affairs is Ely S. Parker, Grant’s adjutant at Appomattox and a Tonawanda Seneca.
But basis of policy is to push more Indians, especially Plains tribes, onto reservations and toward assimilation in white society. (At least tribes are able to maintain communal ways.)
This leads to army support of extermination of buffalo herds by commercial hunters as crucial toward forcing Indians to accept reservations. That, in turn, will free up Plains for cattle, and for barbed-wire-and-plow agriculture.