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Andrew Johnson Became President
17th president of the United States, he assumed presidency because he was the VP when Lincoln was assassinated -
Nat Turner Salve Revolt
Only effective and sustained slave rebellion, which spread terror throughout the white south -
William Lloyd Garrison Published The Liberator
His publication, THE LIBERATOR, reached thousands of individuals worldwide. His ceaseless, uncompromising position on the moral outrage that was slavery made him loved and hated by many Americans. -
American Anti-Slavery Society Begins
An abolitionist society founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, was a key leader of this society who often spoke at its meetings. William Wells Brown was also a freed slave who often spoke at meetings. -
Sarah Grimke's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women published
She argued instead that God had made the sexes equal, but that men had created women’s inferior condition by denying them opportunity and forcing them to do their bidding. Sarah also sought to demolish the concept of “separate spheres” of influence for men and women. She insisted that women had the same rights and duties as men and should be able to participate fully in education, religion, work and politics—including the abolition movement -
Henry Highland Garnet's "Address to the Slaves of the United States of America"
That the black people cannot rely on the whites to see their own wrong doing for their own good. The blacks cannot depend on the people in the fact that the whites will not change their ways because they look at the black as lesser -
Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls
The meeting launched the women’s suffrage movement, which more than seven decades later ensured women the right to vote. -
Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery
Tubman risked her life to lead hundreds of family members and other slaves from the plantation system to freedom on this elaborate secret network of safe houses -
Fugitive Slave Act
The Fugitive Slave Act or Fugitive Slave Law was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slave-holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers. -
Compromise of 1850
Senator Henry Clay introduced a series of resolutions on January 29, 1850, in an attempt to seek a compromise and avert a crisis between North and South. As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was amended and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., was abolished. -
Sojourner Truth Delivered Her "I ain't a Woman" Speech
Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist woman born into slavery. She delivered an impactful speech speaking out on woman's rights -
Harriet Beecher Stowe Published Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin is an anti slavery novel that played a huge role in the initiation of the civil war -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
It allowed people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 -
Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in the United States between 1854 and 1861 which emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas. -
Republican Party Founded
anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper midwestern states to discuss the formation of a new party. One such meeting, in Wisconsin, is generally remembered as the founding meeting of the Republican Party. -
Creation of the Radical Republicans
The Radical Republicans believed blacks were entitled to the same political rights and opportunities as whites. They also believed that the Confederate leaders should be punished for their roles in the Civil War. -
Panic of 1857
financial panic in the United States caused by the declining international economy and over-expansion of the domestic economy -
Dred Scott Decision
Legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that a slave (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory (where slavery was prohibited) was not thereby entitled to his freedom; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise (1820), was unconstitutional. Decision added fuel to the sectional controversy and pushed the country closer to civil war. -
Lecompton Constitution
Contained clauses protecting slaveholding and a bill of rights excluding free blacks, and it added to the frictions leading up to the U.S. Civil War. -
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Lincoln-Douglas debates, series of seven debates between the Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln during the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign, largely concerning the issue of slavery extension into the territories. -
John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry
Abolitionist John Brown leads a small group on a raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in an attempt to start an armed slave revolt and destroy the institution of slavery. -
South Carolina Secedes from the Union
The convention then adjourned to Charleston to draft an ordinance of secession. When the ordinance was adopted on December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first slave state in the south to declare that it had seceded from the United States. -
Democratic Party Splits into Northern and Southern Halves
The singular political party started to disagree on slavery and issues as such, and then split into the North and the South -
Abraham Lincoln Elected President
First Republican president -
Firing on Fort Sumter
bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina by the Confederate States Army, and the return gunfire and subsequent surrender by the United States Army, that started the American Civil War -
Confederate States of America Founded
Representatives from the six seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to formally establish a unified government, which they named the Confederate States of America -
Battle of Antietam
Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia against Union General George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac and was the culmination of Lee’s attempt to invade the north. The battle’s outcome would be vital to shaping America’s future, and it remains the deadliest one-day battle in all American military history. -
Battle of Gettysburg
Most important engagement of the American Civil War. After a great victory over Union forces at Chancellorsville, General Robert E. Lee marched his Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania -
Emancipation Proclamation
Declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." -
Gettysburg Address
A speech that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg -
Sherman's March to the Sea
Military campaign of the American Civil War conducted through Georgia -
Abraham Lincoln Reelected
Abraham is reelected -
General U.S. Grant Assumed Command of the Union Troops
President Abraham Lincoln signs a brief document officially promoting then-Major General Ulysses S. Grant to the rank of lieutenant general of the U.S. Army, tasking the future president with the job of leading all Union troops against the Confederate Army. -
Lincoln Assassination
Lincoln shot and killed in Ford's Theatre by John Wilkes Booth -
Congress Passed the 13th Amendment
Abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime -
Lee Surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House
Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant -
Johnson Announced Plans for Presidential Reconstruction
Gave the white South a free hand in regulating the transition from slavery to freedom and offered no role to blacks in the politics of the South. -
Arrival of Scalawags and Carpetbaggers in the South
Carpetbaggers refers to Northerners that moved to the South after the Civil War. Scalawags are white southerners that cooperated politically with black freedmen and Northern newcomers -
Ku Klux Klan formed
White supremacist group who's main goal was to make slavery legal again, and believe that whites are the superior race -
Period of "Redemption" after the Civil War
The Redeemers were a political coalition in the South during the Reconstruction era, who sought to overthrow the Radical Republican coalition of Freedmen, carpetbaggers and Scalawags. They were the southern wing of the Bourbon Democrats, the conservative, pro-business wing of the Democratic Party. -
Freedman's Bureau Established
The Freedmen’s Bureau, formally known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, was established in 1865 by Congress to help millions of former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Freedmen’s Bureau provided food, housing and medical aid, established schools and offered legal assistance -
Civil Rights Act Passed over Johnson's Veto
A Republican-dominated Congress enacted a landmark Civil Rights Act on this day in 1866, overriding a veto by President Andrew Johnson. The law's chief thrust was to offer protection to slaves freed in the aftermath of the Civil War. -
First Congressional Reconstruction Act Passed
outlined the conditions under which the Southern states would be readmitted to the Union following the American Civil War -
14th Amendment Ratified
The amendment grants citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" which included former slaves who had just been freed after the Civil War. -
Andrew Johnson Impeached
The U.S. House of Representatives votes 11 articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson, nine of which cite Johnson's removal of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The House vote made President Johnson the first president to be impeached in U.S. history -
U.S. Grant Elected President
Grant won by an electoral margin of 214-80 and received more than 52 percent of the popular vote. At age 46, he became the youngest president-elect in U.S. history up to that time. -
15th Amendment Ratified
Passed by Congress February 26, 1869, and ratified February 3, 1870, the 15th amendment granted African American men the right to vote. -
Slaughterhouse Cases (Supreme Court)
The Slaughterhouse Cases, resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1873, ruled that a citizen's "privileges and immunities," as protected by the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment against the states, were limited to those spelled out in the Constitution and did not include many rights given by the individual states. -
U.S. vs Cruikshank
The Cruikshank case arose from the 1873 Colfax Massacre, in which a group of armed whites killed more than a hundred African American men as a result of a political dispute. -
Compromise of 1877
an informal, unwritten deal, that settled the intensely disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election. It resulted in the United States federal government pulling the last troops out of the South, and formally ended the Reconstruction Era.
