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Greater Reconstruction
Historian Elliott West (as well as others, such as Stacey Smith) suggested that we should define Reconstruction not as occurring in the South from 1865 to 1877, but as occurring across the whole country (with particular attention to the West) from 1845 to 1882. This expanded definition, which West deemed "Greater Reconstruction," represents a major historiographical intervention in the way historians think about Reconstruction. -
Gold Rush begins in California
Chinese immigration to California began after gold was discovered in 1848. -
Seneca Falls Convention
The Seneca Falls Convention -- held in Seneca Falls, New York -- was the first major (and most famous) event of the women's rights movement. All five women who organized the Convention were also abolitionists. -
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CIVIL WAR
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Pension Act of 1862
This Act created a general pension system for Civil War veterans and their dependents. Union veterans who were disabled as a result of their wartime service (or the dependents of men killed in action) were eligible to apply for a pension. (Confederate veterans were not eligible for federal pensions until 1958, though many southern states awarded state pensions to Confederate veterans.) -
Butler's General Order No. 28
This wartime order by Union General Benjamin Butler was aimed at controlling the behavior of Confederate women in the occupied city of New Orleans. The order declared that any woman acting disorderly or disrespectful towards the Union Army would be treated as a prostitute. -
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Smallpox epidemic
A smallpox epidemic in the South hit freedwomen and children particularly hard. -
Andersonville Prison opens
The Confederate Army kept prisoners-of-war in Andersonville Prison for the last year of the war. About 13,000 men died at Andersonville of disease, starvation, or exposure. -
Contract Labor Act of 1864
This law (also known as "An Act to Encourage Immigration") permitted private employers to recruit workers from foreign countries and pay their transportation costs. In return, these employees would sign legally-binding contracts that outlined their wages and certified that their first year’s wages would go straight to the company to defray those transportation costs. This law was repealed in 1868. -
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RECONSTRUCTION
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Special Field Order No. 15
Union General Sherman proclaimed Special Field Order No. 15 in January 1865, which allocated 40 acre plots of land -- which the Union Army had confiscated from the Confederacy -- to black freed families; later adjustments to the order also gave many families a mule. -
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Freedmen's Bureau operates in the South
Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau to oversee many tasks deemed central to helping freedpeople in the wake of the Civil War; its responsibilities included -
Civil War ends (surrender in Appomattox)
Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia. (Although marking the precise end of the Civil War is tricky and contentious, the surrender at Appomattox is often used to mark the effective end of the war.) -
Abraham Lincoln is assassinated
After Lincoln's assassination, his vice president -- Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee who remained loyal to the Union -- became the new U.S. president. -
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Presidential Reconstruction
With Congress out on recess, President Andrew Johnson oversaw the federal government's efforts to reconstruct the South in the wake of the war. During this period, Johnson gave thousands of pardons to former Confederates (which meant also returning their property) and allowed former Confederate leaders to return to state-level political office; every former Confederate state, in turn, passed discriminatory laws deemed black codes. -
Juneteenth
The last enslaved people (living in Texas) learned that the Confederacy had surrendered, the Union had won the Civil War, and abolition was the law of the land. -
Captain Henry Wirz executed
Captain Wirz was a Confederate military leader who oversaw the Andersonville Prison. After the Civil War ended and the Union Army released the prisoners held at Andersonville, Wirz was arrested, tried, and hanged for war crimes. -
13th Amendment adopted
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. It passed the Senate in 1864 and the House in January 1865; by December, the required 22 states had ratified the amendment and it was officially adopted into the Constitution. -
Congress takes over Reconstruction
After returning from its 1865 recess (which lasted December), Congress took control of the federal efforts to reconstruct the South. -
National Labor Union founded
The NLU represented workers from all different industries and skill-levels, including wage laborers, farmers, and reformers. In August 1866, they petitioned Congress for a federal 8-hour-work-day law, though without success. The NLU lasted less than 10 years, but it did succeed in expanding public awareness about labor issues, particularly long work days. -
Ku Klux Klan founded
The Ku Klux Klan was one of the most prominent and dangerous paramilitary organizations formed during Reconstruction. The KKK targeted freedpeople and other supporters of the Republican Party, and tried to prevent black people from voting or registering to vote. Their activities were squashed by the early 1870s thanks to federal legislation and enforcement. -
Civil Rights Act of 1866
When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, it was the U.S.'s first federal civil rights law. -
14th Amendment passes Congress
Its adoption into the Constitution, however, required ratification by two-thirds of states -- a process that took over three years. -
Tennessee rejoins the Union (1st readmission)
Tennessee was the first former Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union; unlike the other ten states, Tennessee ratified the 14th Amendment soon after it was passed. -
New Orleans Race Riot of 1866
A race riot in New Orleans was one example of the backlash to Congress's passage of the 14th Amendment. -
San Francisco passes the first "ugly law"
The first known example of an "ugly law" passed in San Francisco in 1867. This law was “an order to prohibit street begging and to prohibit certain persons from appearing in streets and public places.” The phrase ‘Certain Persons’ referred specifically to people who were “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed.” -
Reconstruction Act of 1867
This Act declared that, with the exception of Tennessee -- which had ratified the 14th Amendment -- none of the state governments in the former Confederacy established under President Johnson’s guidance were legitimate or legal. It also placed the South under full federal military oversight until those states could prove that they had taken political power away from former Confederates and that they were giving black men the right to vote. -
Thaddeus Stevens proposes H.R. No. 29
Radical Republican Stevens, a House representative from Pennsylvania, proposed a bill that would have allocated plots of land to freedpeople. The bill failed to pass. -
Hampton Institute founded
The Hampton Institute, located in Virginia, was originally intended to educate freedpeople. In 1878, the school also began admitting Native American students, most of whom were defeated members of the tribes attacked as part of the Indian Wars (such as Arapaho and Comanche). -
14th Amendment adopted
The 14th Amendment declared that all persons born in the U.S. were citizens, regardless of their race. It also guaranteed to all citizens the protection of the federal government over their citizenship rights and equal protection before the law, and prevented states from depriving citizens of life, liberty, or property without being prosecuted in a court of law. Passed Congress in June 1866; ratified and adopted more than three years later, in July 1868. -
Election of 1868
Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant (a former Union general) defeated the Democratic candidate (a man named Horatio Seymour). Three states were not permitted to vote in this election because they had not yet fulfilled the reconstruction criteria that would give them readmission to the Union: Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia. -
Redemption in Tennessee and Virginia
The state legislatures of Virginia and Tennessee were both returned to Democratic control in 1869. These were the first two states to end their reconstruction governments. -
Enforcement Act of 1870
This federal law made it illegal to prevent someone from voting or registering to vote; the penalty was even higher if the perpetrator(s) were wearing a disguise. This law was directly aimed at the KKK. -
15th Amendment adopted
The 15th Amendment states: "The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It passed Congress in February 1869 and was ratified by the requisite two-thirds states one year later. -
Georgia rejoins the Union (11th readmission)
Georgia was the last of the former Confederate states to fulfill the criteria for readmission to the Union (as laid out in the Reconstruction Act of 1867). -
North Carolina passes new divorce statute
During its 1871-1872 legislative session, the state legislature for North Carolina changed its divorce law to make it easier for men (but not women) to get a divorce. Previously, judges in that state would only grant a divorce only if there was evidence of both adultery and abandonment on the part of either the husband or wife. The new statute kept this same standard for women seeking divorces, but men could get a divorce if their wives only committed adultery; abandonment was not required. -
Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871
The Ku Klux Klan Act (the more common name for the third iteration of the Enforcement Act) reiterated the policies of the Enforcement Act but also gave the federal government wide-ranging powers to arrest and prosecute individual people who violated the law. Under this act, the federal government arrested and prosecuted hundreds of Klansmen. -
Tax-payers' Convention held in Columbia, SC
After the state legislature passed a new tax, white South Carolinians -- including many prominent political, economic, and cultural leaders -- formed a Tax-payers' Convention to protest the tax. The Convention met for four days and produced a report outlining their grievances, which included taxes that were too high, budget deficients that were too large, and corruption within the state legislature. -
Susan B. Anthony delivers "Is It A Crime?" speech
After being arrested and charged with the federal crime of voting illegally, Anthony gave this speech ("Is It a Crime") twenty-nine times in the county in New York where her trial was set to be held. -
Page Law of 1875
The Page Law forbid any Asian woman from immigrating to the U.S. if she was a prostitute or deemed likely to become a prostitute. This law effectively prevented all Chinese women from immigrating; its enforcement was effectively a form of Chinese exclusion. -
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Blanche Bruce serves in the Senate
Bruce was one of the first black men to serve in Congress. He represented Mississippi in the Senate for six years. -
James T. Rapier delivers speech in Congress
Rapier, a black member of the House representing Alabama, delivered a speech on the floor of Congress in February 1875 as Congress was debating a new Civil Rights Bill. (We read this speech in class in lecture 11.2.) -
Great Sioux War
Between 1876 and 1877, the Lakota Sioux fought the U.S. Army to retain control of the Black Hills in South Dakota -- land the Lakota had been promised to control in perpetuity in an 1868 treaty. In 1877, after months of war and hundreds of deaths on both sides, the Lakota surrendered and were transported to Indian reservations, and the U.S. annexed their land. -
Nez Perce War
The Nez Perce lived in the pacific northwest (around Oregon and Washington). After a group of Nez Perce men killed more than twenty white people in the region, the U.S. Army (led by Oliver Otis Howard) were sent in to stop the attacks. The Nez Perce tried to flee to Canada, but the U.S. troops chased them until October 1877, when the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph surrendered after the Battle of Bear Paw. More than 400 Nez Perce were moved to a reservation in Idaho. -
Workingmen's Party of California founded
The WPC was an organization of white working men from SF. Their main focus was both stopping Chinese immigration and deporting Chinese people who had already immigrated to the U.S. -
New Orleans passes Ordinance #5046
New Orleans passed its "ugly law" in 1879. -
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
The Chinese Exclusion Act forbid Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States. Supporters frequently framed the law as an anti-slavery measure. -
Dependent Pension Act of 1890
This Act dramatically expanded who was able to get a pension from the federal government. Any veteran who had served at least 90 days in the Union military, even if they had never seen combat or been injury, could apply for a pension if, later in life, they became disabled (which meant unable to perform manual labor). This meant that even simply “getting old” counted as a form of disability. These pensions were also available to the dependents (widows and orphans) of eligible veterans. -
Harriet Tubman's pension is increased to $20 per month
In 1890 Tubman was awarded a small pension of $8 per month as a widow of a Union soldier. After petitioning Congress to increase her pension to reflect her own wartime service as a nurse, cook, and spy, Congress finally did increase her pension to $20 per month -- but did not officially acknowledge her role as anything other than a widow.