April 14, 1865: Abraham Lincoln is assassinated.

Five days after the surrender and deactivation of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House (the effective end of the war), Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth, a stage actor and Confederate sympathizer. The demise of the Confederacy pushed Booth, a strongly pro-South, anti-Lincoln Maryland native, over the edge, and he abandoned a kidnapping plot that he and co-conspirators Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, David Herold, Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen and John Surratt had been formulating since 1864 in favor of simple assassination.

On April 14, they learned that President Lincoln would be attending a performance of the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, D.C., later that evening. He and the conspirators gathered once more, and it was decided that Lewis Powell and David Herold would attack Secretary of State William Seward, that George Atzerodt would carry out an assassination attempt on Vice President Andrew Johnson, and that Booth himself would kill Lincoln. The only attack of these that resulted in a death was Booth’s. He entered the Lincolns’ private theatre box during a particularly humorous moment in the play and shot the President once in the head, before leaping onto the stage, where he yelled either the Virginia state motto - “Sic semper tyrannis” - or “the South is avenged!” Booth broke his leg sometime between the fall and his escape, and he went on the run before being shot outside a barn in Virginia on April 26.

Lincoln, meanwhile, was moved to a house across the street from the theatre; he was pronounced dead early the next morning, the day before Easter Sunday. Utterly divisive as a leader in life, Lincoln was nevertheless mourned by millions in both the North and South in death.

April 12, 1864: The Fort Pillow Massacre takes place.

The battle over Fort Pillow, a fort in Tennessee situated in a strategic position on the Mississippi, ended in its capture by Confederate forces and in a massacre of surrendered black Union troops. African-Americans had been serving in Union regiments since mid-1862, although these regiments were commanded by white officers, and opening military service to African-Americans did not do much to lessen the prejudice and racism that they faced in Northern society. Confederate policy toward these soldiers regarded them not as prisoners of war but as slaves in insurrection, and decreed that captured black soldiers be dealt with accordingly. Captured white officers were tried for “inciting servile insurrection” (for which the punishment was death), and their soldiers were to “be at once delivered over to the executive authorities of the respective States to which they belong, to be dealt with according to the law of said States”. This often involved returning freed/escaped slaves to slavery, although in some cases, Confederate officers chose instead to allow their soldiers to massacre surrendering troops rather than take them prisoner. Thus there always existed a dangerous uncertainty over what treatment black soldiers (and their white officers) might face if they were captured, or if they surrendered in Union uniform.

The Confederate force at Fort Pillow was under the command of Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest, later first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and they outnumbered the Union soldiers (made up of both black and white men) around 2,000 to 600. Even after the overwhelmed Union troops threw down their guns in surrender, Confederate soldiers indiscriminately slaughtered both black and white soldiers, though black soldiers made up a disproportionately large amount of those killed (which was around half the total force of 600) and a disproportionately small amount of those taken prisoner. An excerpt from a letter “from a naval officer’, reflecting on the aftermath of the battle:

I had some conversation with rebel officers, and they claim that our men would not surrender, and in some few cases they could not control their men, who seemed determined to shoot down every negro soldier, whether he surrendered or not.

In June of that year, Congress passed laws equalizing pay between black and white soldiers; while advocating equal pay, one Massachusetts senator claimed that he believed the Union’s treatment of African-Americans was nearly as bad as that of the Confederate soldiers who had carried out the massacre at Fort Pillow. 

March 6, 1820: The Missouri Compromise is ratified.

The issue of slavery was, in the early years of the United States, treated cautiously, handled warily, and often tip-toed around altogether. In the Constitution, slaves were only vaguely referred to - as “such Persons” and  ”other Persons”. Article one, section nine of the U.S. Constitution provided the earliest year Congress would be able to abolish the slave trade (1808) but was mum on the subject of slaves already living in the country and the countless thousands who would be born into bondage in the future. Therefore, responsibility for dealing with the future of slavery and the debate between slaveowners and northerners over the westward spread of slavery was shifted to the federal government, which fumbled with the subject as well for decades until its resolution by the Thirteenth Amendment. 

The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 exacerbated the conflict. When Missouri requested admission to the Union as a slave state in 1819, the government was faced with an important decision regarding sectional balance, settled finally by the Missouri Compromise; this solution temporarily quieted debate until its terms were violated by the provisions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, but until then, it remained an inviolable and almost sacred resolution. The Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30´ latitude line except for Missouri, which was admitted as a slave state. At the same time, the state of Maine was also created and admitted to the Union, thereby maintaining a balance between slave and free states. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to popular sovereignty, through which residents rather than the federal government could decide the future of slavery in their respective territories despite the fact that the Missouri Compromise had closed Kansas to slavery. 

In 1857, the Taney Court ruled (on same day as the ratification of the 1820 Compromise) in Dred Scott v. Sandford  African-Americans were not permitted to sue in federal court, and also that the Missouri Compromise had never been constitutional in the first place, because slaves, like farm animals, were “property” that the federal government could not take away under the Fifth Amendment.

February 14, 1818: Frederick Douglass is born.

In actuality Douglass, like many slaves, did not know the exact date of his birthday (not even the year); instead, he chose to celebrate it on February 14. Douglass had been born a slave in Maryland to a slave woman and an unidentified white man, possibly one of the owners of the plantation on which he had been born. At a young age, he was sent to Baltimore to work for a new master, whose wife taught him to read until her husband put a stop to the lessons; still Douglass honed his reading skills by learning from white children living in his neighborhood. Literacy introduced Douglass to all manner of political writing and anti-slavery material. Later in his life he would write in his autobiography that “knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom”. After all, it had been his masters who, fearful that his education would lead to rebellion, had attempted to keep him (and the rest of his fellow slaves) illiterate. In the same book he quoted his master as saying, on the subject of educating slaves:

A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master-to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now… if you teach that nigger… how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.

Douglass’ autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which he wrote in 1845, eight years after escaping to freedom in New York, was so eloquently written that many readers were skeptical that a black man - and an ex-slave, at that - had actually written the book. Nevertheless, the work proved influential in the growing abolitionist movement, and Frederick Douglass cemented his place as one of the movement’s most important black activists. He believed that education would be the African-American’s most important tool in improving his or her station; he argued that the U.S. Constitution could not be interpreted as a pro-slavery document but, in fact, the opposite; he was for many years an ardent supporter of the women’s rights movement and was the only African-American, man or woman, present at the Seneca Falls Convention. A famously powerful orator, he vehemently criticized the hypocrisy of white American society in his Fourth of July speech, and by 1861 he was one of the most famous black men in the country, acquainted even with the president himself. He lived to see the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and during Reconstruction he was nominated (without his knowledge) as Vice President to the Equal Rights Party ticket in 1872. 

African-American workers collect the bones of soldiers killed at the Battle of Cold Harbor, April 1865.

Library of Congress

January 31, 1865: The Thirteenth Amendment is ratified.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was the first to be passed in sixty years, the first since the passage of Twelfth Amendment in 1804. The Amendment had two simple and short sections:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Its passage, however, was anything but. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that any enslaved person in any state in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free” - a more symbolic than practical gesture. Without a constitutional amendment, however, the Emancipation Proclamation could easily be swept aside as a wartime measure and a gross overreach of presidential powers, unnecessary in a postwar, reunited United States, and four million slaves would remain in bondage.

In January of 1864, Senator John B. Henderson, a Democrat representing the slave/border state of Missouri, proposed a ban on slavery via constitutional amendment. Less than a month later, Charles Sumner, a Radical Republican, proposed an amendment as well, though his version not only banned slavery but contained a guarantee of equality, a clause that never made it into the final amendment. The Senate passed the amendment in April of 1864 38 to 6, but the House of Representatives took another long grueling eight months to debate and discuss it; meanwhile, the Republican party adopted, as part of its official platform, support for an antislavery amendment. Finally, on January 31, the House of Representatives passed the amendment by a narrow margin - 119 to 56. 

The Thirteenth Amendment was not officially adopted until December of 1865, months after Lincoln’s assassination. The first state to ratify was Illinois, and the twenty-seventh state (out of thirty-six - a 3/4ths majority) was Georgia, while Kentucky and Mississippi rejected the initial proposals and failed to ratify the amendment until 1976 and 1995, respectively.