1865
Appomattox
In the parlor of a red-brick house in central Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant. The terms were generous; the rebels were to go home on parole and keep their horses for the spring plowing. A war that had killed seven hundred thousand Americans was, in practice, over.
Mendel's Peas
An Augustinian friar named Gregor Mendel read a paper to a local scientific society in Brno, describing a decade of patient experiments on pea plants and deriving, from ratios of yellow and green seeds, the mathematical laws of inheritance. No one paid attention. The paper sat on library shelves for thirty-five years.
Russia Takes Tashkent
A Russian detachment under Chernyayev, acting beyond his orders, stormed Tashkent and added the largest city of Central Asia to the tsar's empire. The Great Game between Britain and Russia now had a new front. Over the next fifteen years the khanates of Khiva, Bukhara, and Khokand would fall to Russian bayonets.
Lincoln Assassinated
In a box at Ford's Theatre in Washington, an actor named John Wilkes Booth shot the president in the back of the head during a comedy. Lincoln died the next morning. A vengeful North went into a mourning so deep Walt Whitman wrote three of the best elegies in English. Reconstruction lost its most patient architect.
Thirteenth Amendment
The amendment that abolished slavery throughout the United States - including in the border states that had stayed loyal - was ratified when Georgia, of all places, supplied the twenty-seventh state. Four million enslaved people were, at last, formally free. The constitutional achievement of Lincoln's war had been accomplished. Lincoln himself did not live to see ratification; he had been assassinated eight months earlier at Ford's Theatre.
Ku Klux Klan Founded
In Pulaski, Tennessee, six former Confederate officers founded a fraternal social club they called the Ku Klux Klan. Within two years it had become an instrument of terror against freedmen and Republican voters across the South. It was not the last such organization. It was merely the one that made the name synonymous with American domestic terror.
Alice in Wonderland Published
A shy Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson, writing as Lewis Carroll, published a book about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole. It mocked logic, Latin, and Victorian dignity; children loved it. The absurdity it licensed may have done more for children's literature than anything else of the century.