The Federal government confiscates the Arlington estate of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and turns it into a war cemetery

William Tecumseh Sherman captures Atlanta, the first important southern city to fall into Union hands

President Lincoln is re-elected for a second term, thanks largely to recent Union successes on the Civil War battlefields

William T. Sherman reaches the coast and captures Savannah, after his violently destructive 'march to the sea'

The Confederate government abandons Richmond, and Lee begins a retreat to the west

Lincoln visits the Confederate capital at Richmond and is greeted by a jubilant crowd of freed slaves

Lee surrenders to Grant at the Appomattox Court House, and is offered conciliatory terms

Samuel Clemens, writing under the pseudonym Mark Twain, has immediate success with The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

On a visit to a Washington theatre, Lincoln is assassinated in his box by John Wilkes Booth

Vice-president Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, becomes president on the death of Republican Abraham Lincoln

The southern states pass new Black Codes, designed to limit the freedom granted to African-Americans by the victorious north

The Plains Indians are threatened by settlers pressing west, building railways and slaughtering buffalo

The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits slavery or any 'involuntary servitude' in the USA

The first branch of the Ku Klux Klan is founded at Pulaski, in Tennessee, on Christmas Eve

A Civil Rights Act is passed by the US Congress, guaranteeing the legal rights of African-Americans

The Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution (not ratified till 1868) assures equal rights as citizens to all born or naturalized in the USA

Walt Whitman laments the assassinated President Lincoln in his poem 'O Captain! My Captain!', published in Sequel to Drum-Taps

US painter Winslow Homer makes his name with the exhibition of a Civil War subject, Prisoners from the Front

Recovery from serious injury convinces Mary Baker Eddy that sickness and health are spiritually based, and provides her with the impulse to found Christian Science

Secretary of state William Seward negotiates a price of $7.2 million for the purchase of Alaska from Russia, in a deal that some consider 'Seward's Folly'

The US Congress passes Reconstruction Acts, dividing the defeated South into military districts and insisting on elections by universal male suffrage

The invention of barbed wire is patented in the USA by Lucien Smith, designed to fence in cattle but also a protection for the wheat fields of the midwest plains

William Cody earns his nickname Buffalo Bill by killing thousands of the animals to feed construction workers on the Union Pacific Railroad

The first collection of 'Negro Spirituals' is published in book form in the US as Slave Songs of the United States

US president Andrew Johnson escapes impeachment (for dismissing his secretary of war) by a single voite