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Election of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. He was the 16th president. He was not excepted by the Southern States. He was the first Republican president -
Secession of Southern States
The Southern states seceded from the Northern States because Lincoln became president. There were 10 states that seceded. They became known as the Confederate states. -
Civil War
The Civil War was a war fought between the North and the South. It took place from April 12th, 1861- May 9th,1865. The North won the Southern states back into the Union. -
Emancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in January 1863, by Abraham Lincoln. This said that all states in the Confederate states were no considered free. -
Radical Reconstruction
The Union victory in the Civil War in 1865 may have given some 4 million slaves their freedom, but the process of rebuilding the South during the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) introduced a new set of significant challenges. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “black codes” to control the labor and behavior of former slaves and other African Americans. -
Sharecropping
Sharecropping is an agricultural system which developed in the Southern states during the Civil War.The former planters, even those activly engged in rebellion, for the most part still had their land, but no slaves or money to pay wages. The former slaves on the other hand did not have jobs or land and because they had been denied education, had few options -
Freedmen's Bureau
The U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, popularly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established in 1865 by Congress to help former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War.The Freedmen’s Bureau provided food, housing and medical aid, established schools and offered legal assistance. -
Reconstruction
The Union victory in the Civil War in 1865 may have given some 4 million slaves their freedom, but the process of rebuilding the South during the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) introduced a new set of significant challenges. -
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C on April 14th. 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. -
13th Amendment
The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution officially abolished slavery in America, and was ratified on December 6, 1865, after the conclusion of the American Civil War. The amendment states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” -
14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on July 9, 1868, and granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included former slaves recently freed. It forbids states from denying any person "life, liberty or property, without due process of law" or to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” -
15th Amendment
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution 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."Although ratified on February 3, 1870, the promise of the 15th Amendment would not be fully realized for almost a century. -
1st African American to be elected to Congress during Reconstruction
Hiram Rhoades Revels, a Republican from Natchez, Mississippi, is sworn into the U.S. Senate, becoming the first African American ever to sit in Congress.During the Civil War, Revels, a college-educated minister, helped form African American army regiments for the Union cause, started a school for freed men, and served as a chaplain for the Union army. -
Civil Rights Act of 1875
On this date, the House passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by a vote of 162 to 99. First introduced by one of Congress’s greatest advocates for black civil rights, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, in 1870, the original bill outlawed racial discrimination in juries, schools, transportation, and public accommodations.
