1860s

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is one of the most important and most frequently cited amendments in American jurisprudence, and its applicability, as well as its definition, have been shaped by a number of landmark cases. Ratified in 1868, after the conclusion of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to every individual born or naturalized in the United States and as well ...
Read More

Andrew Johnson exposes the Radical Republicans that were actually working to radicalize America. These radical republicans (illuminati agents) were not about to allow Johnson to expose them, so they began a smear campaign and a plan to impeach him. The third attempt was a charm - at least in the House of Representatives, but the Senate voted against impeachment. The smears were to make him appear ...
Read More

When Abraham Lincoln was elected the first Republican President in 1861 (along with the first ever Republican Congress), southern pro-slavery Democrats saw the handwriting on the wall. They left the Union and took their States with them, forming a brand new nation: the Confederate States of America, and their followers became known as Rebels. During the War, Lincoln implemented the first anti-slavery measures since the early ...
Read More

Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.  Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation ...
Read More

Abraham Lincoln’s White House was busy with citizens seeking favors for themselves and others, but on Oct, 29, 1864, he had a remarkable visitor. Sojourner Truth was the most renowned African-American woman of the 19th century, and she had come all the way from Battle Creek, Michigan, because she wanted to thank the president for emancipating the slaves. She had become well known in part for her ...
Read More

The Reconstruction era was the period in American history which lasted from 1863 to 1877. It was a significant chapter in the history of American civil rights. The term has two applications: the first applies to the complete history of the entire country from 1865 to 1877 following the American Civil War; the second, to the attempted transformation of the 11 former Confederate states from 1863 to 1877, as directed by Congress, and the role ...
Read More

Secretary of State William Seward wrote it and Abraham Lincoln issued it, but much of the credit for the proclamation should probably go to a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale. A prominent writer and editor, Hale had written the children’s poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” originally known as “Mary’s Lamb,” in 1830 and helped found the American Ladies Magazine, which she used a platform to ...
Read More

Sarah J. Hale, a writer and the editor of a popular women’s magazine, Godey’s Ladies Journal, was born on October 24th, 1788 in Newport, New Hampshire. Her parents Gordon Buell and Martha Whittlesay Buell believed in equal education for both genders, so Sarah was home-schooled by her mother. Later, Sarah became a local schoolteacher and in 1813 she married a lawyer, David Hale. Together, Sarah and her husband formed a small literary ...
Read More

See the full 1862 proclamation from Abraham Lincoln, below. A Proclamation Whereas, it has become necessary to call into service not only volunteers but also portions of the militia of the States by draft in order to suppress the insurrection existing in the United States, and disloyal persons are not adequately restrained by the ordinary processes of law from hindering this measure and from giving aid ...
Read More

Alice was published in 1865, three years after Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (pseudonym Lewis Carroll) and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed in a boat, on 4 July 1862 (this popular date of the "golden afternoon" might be a confusion or even another Alice-tale, for that particular day was cool, cloudy and rainy), up the Isis (Thames River) with the three young daughters of Henry Liddell (the Vice-Chancellor ...
Read More

June 18th 1861, Thaddeus Lowe ascended with a tethered balloon five hundred feet above the National Mall. He intended to demonstrate, amid the Civil War, practicality of observing enemy troop movements from the air. His audience was the Commander-in-Chief. A telegraph wire connected the basket with the White House. The scientist sent a message to the President Lincoln: This point of observation commands an area nearly ...
Read More

The discovery of a letter from newly inaugurated President Abraham Lincoln to the governor of Florida has generated renewed interest in Lincoln's views toward slavery. The letter, found at the Lehigh County Historical Society in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is a form letter from Lincoln to Governor Madison S. Perry transmitting "an authenticated copy of a Joint Resolution to amend the Constitution of the United States." On March ...
Read More