Timeline (1860-1897)

1860--Tax-supported school system established; South Carolina secedes

1861--Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln; Fort Sumter fired upon; Battle of Bull Run

1862--Monitor v. Merrimac sea battle; Seven Days' Campaign; Battle at Antietam; Battle at Fredericksburg

1863--Emancipation Proclamation; New York City draft riots; Homestead Act; Battle at Gettysburg; Battle at Vicksburg; Lincoln introduces his Ten-Percent Plan

1864--General Grant begins a war of attrition; Wade-Davis Bill; General Sherman marches to the sea; Union Pacific and Central Pacific

1865--Freedmen's Bureau established; Thirteenth Amendment ratified; Union capture of Richmond, VA; General Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox Court House; Lincoln assassinated by John Wilkes Boothe; Special Field Order 15

1865-67--Presidential Reconstruction

1866--Ex parte Milligan ruling; Civil Rights Bill; Ku Klux Klan established

1867--Reconstruction Act; Tenure of Office Act

1867-77--Radical Reconstruction

1868--Impeachment of President Johnson; Fourteenth Amendment ratified

1869--Women's feminist organization splits into two groups; inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant

1870--Hiram Revels becomes the first black Senator; Fifteenth Amendment ratified

1872--Liberal Republicans established

1873--National economic depression begins; Slaughterhouse cases

1875--Civil Rights Act of 1875; Charles Stewart Parnell begins movement for Irish independence

1876--United States v. Cruikshank

1877--Bargain of 1877; inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes

1879--Women lawyers permitted to argue cases before the Supreme Court; Thomas Edison invents incandescent light bulb

1881--Inauguration of James Garfield; inauguration of Chester Arthur

1883--Civil Service established; Maxim invents machine gun

1885--Inauguration of Grover Cleveland

1886--Geronimo surrenders after 15 years of war; Haymarket Square labor riots in Chicago leads to eleven people dead

1889--Inauguration of Benjamin Harrison

1890--Sherman Antitrust Act; massacre at Wounded Knee, SD

1892--Ellis Island opens on New Years Day; strike at Carnegie steel results in ten deaths

1886--Supreme Court rules "separate but equal" legal

1897--Inauguration of William McKinley