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Election of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois. -
Secession of Southern States
Secession comprises the series of events that began on December 20 1860 and went to June 8 of the next year when eleven states in the Lower and Upper South severed their ties with the Union. After hostilities began at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, the border states of joined the new government, The Union was divided in two lines. Twenty-one northern and border states retained the style and title of the United States -
Civil War
America’s bloodiest clash, Civil War (1861-65) was a battle of the Union against the Confederate States of America and resulted in the death of more than 620,000, with millions more injured. The Union won the Civil War -
Emancipation Proclamation
When the American Civil War began, President Lincoln carefully framed the conflict as bringing back the south rather than the abolition of slavery. By mid 1862, when thousands of slaves fled to join North, Lincoln was convinced that abolition had become a good military strategy. On September 22, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. While the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a any slave, it was an important turning point in the war. -
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13th amendment
abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. In Congress, it was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865. -
Freedmen's Bureau
a U.S. federal government agency established in 1865 to aid freedmen (freed slaves) in the South during the Reconstruction era of the United States, which attempted to change society in the former Confederacy -
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War. -
Reconstruction
The period following the Civil War of rebuilding the United States. It was a time of great pain and endless questions. On what terms would the Confederacy be allowed back into the Union? Who would establish the terms, Congress or the President? -
Sharecroppiong
A system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on their portion of land. -
Radical Reconstruction
After northern voters rejected Johnson's policies in the congressional elections in late 1866, Republicans in Congress took firm hold of Reconstruction in the South. -
14th amendment
adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. The amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws, and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War. -
15th Amendment
granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." -
1st African American elected to Congress during Reconstruction
On February 25, 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels was seated as the first black member of the Senate, while Blanche Bruce, also of Mississippi, seated in 1875, was the second. Revels was the first black member of the Congress overall. -
Civil Rights Act of 1875
sometimes called Enforcement Act or Force Act, was a United States federal law enacted during the Reconstruction Era to guarantee African Americans equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation, and to prohibit exclusion from jury service.
