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| 1867–83 |
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| The federal government began a concerted policy to destroy the buffalo, the main means of food and shelter for Native Americans on the Great Plains. | 1 |
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| 1868, Feb. 24–May 26 |
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| Impeachment and trial of Andrew Johnson. Johnson and the Congress had disagreed over Reconstruction policy. The immediate occasion for the impeachment proceedings was Johnson's alleged violation of the Tenure-of-Office Act. He was acquitted by a vote of 35 to 19; 36 votes (two-thirds of the senate) were required for conviction. | 2 |
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| 1861–68 |
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| New territories. In the years just before the war, the discovery of precious metals in the Pike's Peak country and in the Washoe Mountains led to mining rushes to those regions, with the result that the territories of Colorado and Nevada were organized in 1861. Mining rushes elsewhere in the years of the war resulted in the organization of the territories of Arizona (1863), Idaho (1863), and Montana (1864). Wyoming was made a territory in 1868. | 3 |
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| 1869, Feb. 26 |
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| The Fifteenth Amendment was adopted by Congress. The radicals, fearing that southern whites might obtain power in their states and repeal the provisions of their state constitutions granting suffrage to African Americans, sponsored this amendment, providing that the right to vote shall not be abridged because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was declared ratified on March 30, 1870. Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia were forced to ratify this amendment as a condition of restoration to the Union. Because the amendment allowed states to continue to deny women the vote, its passage split the suffrage movement into two camps. One camp, including Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass and later led by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, supported the Republican Party as the best means of gaining female suffrage. The second camp, led by Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, developed a program independent of any political party. | 4 |
| Congress created the Board of Indian Commissioners to supervise all government expenditures for the Indians. | 5 |
| African Americans formed the National (Negro) Labor Union and sought affiliation with organized white labor without much success. | 6 |
| Uriah Stephens (1821–82) formed the Knights of Labor, which attempted to combine all labor, skilled and unskilled, organized and unorganized, into one union. | 7 |
| Serious and recurring epidemics of smallpox, typhus, typhoid, cholera, scarlet fever, and yellow fever in Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Baltimore, Washington, D. C., Memphis, and New Orleans led to the realization of the need for improved sanitation. In 1866 a municipal board of health was created in New York City, and in 1869 a state board of health was established in Massachusetts. | 8 |
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| March 4–1877, March 4 |
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| ULYSSES S. GRANT, 18th president. | 9 |
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