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10% Plan
Lincoln issues a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which comes to be known as his 10 Percent Plan. -
Military gives 40 Acres of Land
General William T. Sherman issues Special Field Order 15, setting aside confiscated plantation land in the Sea Islands and along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia for black families to settle in 40-acre plots. Some 40,000 freedmen and women are living on the land by June. -
13th Amendment
Congress proposes the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude everywhere in the United States. -
Freedmen's Bureau
Congress establishes Freedmen's Bureau in March to provide assistance to the emancipated slaves. -
Assination of LIncoln
Assassination of President Lincoln, April 15. Vice President Andrew Johnson becomes president. -
Klu Klux Klan Organized
An organization primarily composed of Confederate Army veterans founds the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a terrorist group formed to intimidate blacks and other ethnic and religious minorities. It first meets in Pulaski, Tennessee. The Klan is the first of many secret terrorist organizations organized in the South for the purpose of reestablishing white authority. -
Civil Rights Bill
Congress passes the Civil Rights Bill over Johnson's veto. Johnson objects to the Bill on the grounds that blacks did not deserve to become citizens, and that doing so would discriminate against the white race. He also thought that both the Civil Rights Bill and the Freedmen's Bureau Bill would centralize power at the federal level, thus depriving states of the authority to govern their own affairs (a typical prewar philosophy of government). -
Tenure of Office Act
Johnson intentionally violates the Tenure of Office Act when he suspends Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and replaces him with General Ulysses S. Grant during a congressional recess. The Senate refuses to confirm the action, Grant returns the office to Stanton, but the President names Gen. Lorenzo Thomas to the post instead. Impeachment proceedings follow in 1868. -
The 14th Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment is ratified: it revokes the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution and creates a new federal category of citizenship. It is quite possibly the most important constitutional amendment ever ratified. -
Black Officials Ousted
Black elected officials are ousted from the Georgia state legislature; "The Negro is unfit to rule the State," the Atlanta Constitution declares. The black legislators appeal to President Grant to intervene to get them readmitted, which takes a year.