- Congress passed “An Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees”.

- The act was meant to provide food, shelter, clothing, medical services, and land to displaced Southerners.

- This included newly freed African Americans.

- Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth with a gunshot to the head.

- He was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., and died the next morning.

- Andrew Johnson became the 17th President of the United States.

- Due to being Lincoln's vice president, he was appointed as president after Lincoln's assassination.

- Mississippi passed the first Black Codes, which criminalized unemployment and other activities, targeting freed Black people to control them.

- South Carolina followed Mississippi's example, passing their own codes aimed to restrict the freedom and economic independence of African Americans

- The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery, was ratified.

- This was an important amendment ensuring the permanent end of slavery throughout the United States.

- The Ku Klux Klan, KKK, is formed in Pulaski, Tennessee.

- They were an American Protestant-led Christian extremist, white supremacist, far-right hate group, and are sometimes seen as America's first terrorist group.

- The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was passed by Congress.

- Declared that all people born in the United States were U.S. citizens and granted them the right to make contracts, own property, sue in court, and receive the full protection of federal law.

- White mobs, including police officers, rampaged through Black neighborhoods, attacking and killing Black soldiers and civilians and destroying property.

- The 1866 Memphis Race Riot is sometimes referred to as the 1866 Memphis Massacre.

- Ignited by political and racial tensions during the early stages of the Reconstruction era.

- The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 were a series of laws passed by the U.S. Congress.

- The acts divided the former Confederate states into military districts under martial law

- The acts also demanded that they adopt new constitutions granting voting rights to Black men and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment.

- The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, after its proposal to Congress on June 13, 1866.

- Granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, including formerly enslaved people.

- Southern constitutional conventions, held under the 1867–68 Reconstruction Acts, included the participation of freedmen, or formerly enslaved people.

- These conventions worked to repeal discriminatory laws but faced opposition from "Redeemers" seeking to restore white supremacy. 

- The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

- Prohibits denying a citizen the right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude," formally granting voting rights to African American men.

- This was the last of the three "Reconstruction Amendments".

During the Election 1876

- A campaign of organized political violence and intimidation carried out by white Democrats.

- Attempted to regain control of the Mississippi government and suppress Black political power.

January 1877

- Also known as the Wormley Agreement, the Tilden-Hayes Compromise, the Bargain of 1877, or the Corrupt Bargain.

- The Compromise was a speculated unwritten political deal in the United States to settle the intense dispute over the results of the 1876 presidential election.