Episodes Around: 18661221

  1. Andrew Johnson Provokes the Radical Republicans
    date 1865 to 1867map Washington City, District of Columbiatags Government, Politics, Race Relations, Constitution

    Johnson was impeached for violating a number of laws, but was acquitted. He attempted to accomplish a number of things while trying to get former Confederate states back into the Union, but he did so in an improper manner. In 1868 the House of Representatives brought Andrew Johnson on trial for violating the Tenure of Office Act. According to The New York Times article, "The President's...

  2. Problematic Labor Contracts
    date February 17, 1865 to November 28, 1868map LAUDERDALE, Mississippitags African-Americans, Agriculture, Economy, Government, Race-Relations, Slavery

    When the Civil War ended in 1865, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people suddenly found themselves without an owner. With very little money or land of their own, they were often unsure of how or where to proceed next. A system of sharecropping thus evolved where the newly freedmen rented tracts of land from landowners and were expecting to give the landowners a portion of the profits made from...

  3. Jefferson Davis Finds a Friend in Prison
    date May, 1865 to December, 1866map MONROE, Virginiatags Civil War, prison, Reconstruction

    Around May 10 1865, federal troops captured Confederate President Jefferson Davis fleeing in Georgia and sent him to be confined in Fortress Monroe, Virginia. Davis was held prisoner for two years from May 1865 to May 1867, six months of the time confined in a casemate under heavy guard. According to a war memo excerpted in a New York Times article, he was not arraigned upon any indictment or formal...

  4. Ex-Confederates Move Way Down South
    date 1866map YOUNG TERRITORY, Texastags Civil War, The Confederate States of America, Urban-Life/Boosterism

    For some Confederates at the end of the war, defeat was too much to bear. By the 1870, the Census Bureau estimated that there was a net loss of more than 300,000 migrants in nine former Confederate states. The ones that left the United States altogether and went by way of Brazil and Mexico were known as "confederados" and built their homes in Santarem in the Amazon basin and Santa Barbara D'Oeste...

  5. South Carolina General Assembly Refuses to Ratify Fourteenth Amendment
    date December 1, 1866 to December 31, 1866map RICHLAND, South Carolinatags Law

    When South Carolina's legislature reconvened in December of 1866 the governing body was faced with the task of responding to two recent, significant national events: the radical Republicans domination of that year's Congressional election and the proposal of the Fourteenth Amendment. As South Carolinian leaders gathered in Columbia, they quickly tackled the Fourteenth Amendment decision....

  6. Supreme Court Publishes ex parte Milligan Decision
    date December 1, 1866 to December 31, 1866map Washington City, District of Columbiatags Crime/Violence

    With the publication of ex parte Milligan, the Supreme Court gave leverage to arguments that attacked the legality of Freedman's Bureau courts and military commissions during 1865 and 1866. In the decision, the Court reversed the wartime conviction of Lambdin P. Milligan, an Indiana resident, and declared that “no citizen, not in the military service, [could] be tried and sentenced by...

  7. Indian Massacre Stuns the Nation
    date December 21, 1866map DATOKA TERRITORY, Territorytags Government, Native-Americans, Politics, War

    "They were mutilated horribly, stripped naked, their bodies cut open and scalped, even to the beards from their faces," reported a New York Times correspondent from Fort Laramie, in what was then the Dakota Territory. On December 21, 1866, a detachment of 81 soldiers under the command of Captain William Fetterman was lured out of Fort Phil Kearny, ambushed by a coalition of Indians, and...