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Lincoln is Elected President
Abraham Lincoln, who had declared "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free..." is elected president. Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States. Lincoln led the Union to victory in the Civil War and ended slavery in America. Lincoln maintained a moderate stance on the emancipation of slaves, never vowing in his campaigns to abolish slavery. -
Texas Secedes from the Union
On this day in 1861, Texas becomes the seventh state to secede from the Union when a state convention votes 166 to 8 in favor of the measure. Texas was the seventh state to secede and the last to secede before the firing at Fort Sumter signaled the start of the Civil War and forced citizens of the upper South to choose between fighting against or with their Southern brethren. Some Texans were slow to accept secession, however, or never accepted it. -
Battle at Fort Sumter
General P.G.T. Beauregard, in command of the Confederate forces around Charleston Harbor, opened fire on the Union garrison holding Fort Sumter. At 2:30pm on April 13 Major Robert Anderson, garrison commander, surrendered the fort and was evacuated the next day. No men were killed, wounded, or captured in the battle. The Civil War had begun! -
Battle of Galveston
Commander William B. Renshaw led his squadron of eight ships into Galveston harbor to demand surrender of the most important Texas port on October 4, 1862. Brig. Gen. Paul O. Hébert had removed most of the heavy artillery from Galveston Island, which he believed to be indefensible. The Fort Point garrison fired on the federal ships, which responded by dismounting the Confederate cannon with return shots. The Union ships held the harbor, but 264 men of the Forty-second Massachusetts Infantry, -
Battle of Sabine Pass
A Union flotilla of four gunboats and seven troop transports steamed into Sabine Pass and up the Sabine River with the intention of reducing Fort Griffin and landing troops to begin occupying Texas. About 315 men captured and 28 killed. -
Red River Campaign
At the time of the Red River Campaign in April 1864, the outcome of the Civil War appeared to be decided. The agricultural South had fought long and hard against the industrial North, but the zeal and military prowess of the Confederates was not enough to prevail against the vast resources of the North. The Red River Campaign, which included the largest combined army-navy operation of the war, was the last decisive Confederate victory of the war. -
End of the Civil War
Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, signs the surrender terms offered by Union negotiators. With Smith’s surrender, the last Confederate army ceased to exist, bringing a formal end to the bloodiest four years in U.S. history. -
Battle of Palmito Ranch
Since March 1865, a gentleman’s agreement precluded fighting between Union and Confederate forces on the Rio Grande. In spite of this agreement, Col. Theodore H. Barrett, commanding forces at Brazos Santiago, Texas, dispatched an expedition, composed of 250 men of the 62nd U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment and 50 men of the 2nd Texas Cavalry Regiment under the command of Lt. Col. David Branson, to the mainland, on May 11, 1865, to attack reported Rebel outposts and camps. -
Juneteenth
Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating 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 had little impact on the Texans -
Reconstruction Ends
The Union victory in the Civil War in 1865 may have given some 4 million slaves their freedom, but the process of rebuilding the South during the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) introduced a new set of significant challenges. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “black codes” to control the labor and behavior of former slaves and other African Americans. Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for
