May 2, 1865 - President Johnson offers $100,000 reward for capture of Jefferson Davis.

July 5, 1865 - Secret Service began operating under the Treasury Department.

July 5, 1865 - President Andrew Johnson signs an executive order that confirms the military conviction of a group of people who had conspired to kill the late President Abraham Lincoln, then commander in chief of the U.S. Army. With his signature, Johnson ordered four of the guilty to be executed. Confederate sympathizers David E. Herold, G. A. Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, Mary E. Surratt, Michael O'Laughlin, Edward Spangler, Samuel Arnold and Samuel A. Mudd were arraigned on May 9 and convicted for "maliciously, unlawfully, and traitorously" conspiring with several others, including John Wilkes Booth, who had assassinated President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. Mary Surratt and Edward Spangler had helped John Wilkes Booth gain entrance to the theater box in which Lincoln sat at the time of his murder. Spangler then "hindered" efforts to save Lincoln. Herold helped Booth escape through military lines. For his part, Payne attempted to kill Lincoln’s secretary of war, William H. Seward, at Seward’s home on the same night that Lincoln was shot. Seward suffered knife wounds to the face and throat from the attack, but survived. Atzerodt had apparently lain in wait for Vice President Johnson on the night of April 14; the report did not specify where. Finally, O’Laughlin was charged with lying in wait to murder Grant. The others were convicted of giving aid or support to Booth at various times before and after Lincoln’s assassination. Herold, Atzerodt, Payne and Surratt were sentenced to death by hanging. Spangler, O’Laughlin, Mudd and Arnold were given life in prison with hard labor.

July 20, 1865 - Patent Act of 1865 directs that the Commissioner of Patents turn over patent fees to the Treasury and meet expenses through Congressional appropriations.

December 18, 1865 -  Slavery ended in the United States as the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was declared in effect (246 years after the first shipload of captive Africans landed at Jamestown, Virginia, and were bought as slaves); ensured that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude... shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

December 24, 1865 - A group of Confederate verterans convened in Pulaski, TN to form a secret society called the "Ku Klux Klan" (derive from Greek word "kyklos" - circle); grew from social fraternity into para-military group with a philosophy of racial superiority bent on reversing federal government's progressive Reconstruction Era efforts in the South, especially policies that elevated the rights of the local African American population.

March 27, 1866 - President Johnson vetoes civil rights bill; it later becomes 14th amendment.

April 2, 1866 - President Johnson ends war in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

April 9, 1866 - The Civil Rights Bill of 1866 was passed by Congress over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, granted blacks the rights and privileges of American citizenship. It formed the basis for the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

May 5, 1866 - Memorial Day first celebrated, community-wide event; businesses closed, residents decorated the graves of soldiers with flowers and flags).

July 24, 1866 - Tennessee became the first state to be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.

July 28, 1866 - Metric system becomes a legal measurement system in U.S.

August 20, 1866 - President Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War over, even though the fighting had stopped months earlier.

1867 - Diamonds and gold discovered in the colony of South Africa, made conflict between the Boer states and Britain inevitable.

January 8, 1867 - Congress overrides (by a vote of 29 to 10 in the Senate and by a vote of 112 to 38 in the House of Representatives) President Andrew Johnson's veto of a bill granting all adult male citizens of the District of Columbia the right to vote, and the bill becomes law; first law in American history that granted African-American men the right to vote; 1870 - 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, prohibiting all states from discriminating against potential male voters because of race or previous condition of servitude.

March 1, 1867 - Nebraska became the 37th state.

March 2, 1867 - U.S. Congress creates the Department of Education.

March 2, 1867 - Senate and House passed the Tenure of Office Act over President Andrew Johnson's veto; required officeholders confirmed by the Senate to remain in place until the Senate approved their successors.

March 2, 1867 - Republican-dominated Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, over President Andrew Johnson's veto, dividing the South into five military districts and outlining how new governments based on universal manhood suffrage were to be established.

March 29, 1867 - The British Parliament passed the British North America Act to create the Dominion of Canada.

March 30, 1867 - Secretary of State William H. Seward reached agreement with Russia to purchase the territory of Alaska for $7.2 million (roughly two cents an acre), a deal roundly ridiculed as ''Seward's Folly''; April 9, 1867 - Senate ratified the treaty by a margin of just one vote; 1898 - discovery of gold brought a rapid influx of people to the territory; President Johnson placed Alaska's economic activities under the charge of the Treasury Department (regulated the fur and fish trades); created a government monopoly and planted the seeds for conflict.

May 1, 1867 - Reconstruction of South began, black voter registration.

June 20, 1867 - President Andrew Johnson announces purchase of Alaska.

July 1, 1867 - Great Britain officially recognized the autonomous Dominion of Canada, a confederation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the future provinces of Ontario and Quebec as a self-governing entity within the British Empire, with the passage of the British North America Act.

July 19, 1867 - Congress passed third Reconstruction Act over President Andrew Johnson's veto.

August 12, 1867 - President Andrew Johnson makes a brash executive decision and fires Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (believed Stanton was a tool of the Radicals who wanted to establish a military dictatorship in the South). The War Department, which Stanton headed, was the federal agency responsible for carrying out reconstruction programs in the post-Civil War southern states. The move caused an uproar in the House of Representatives and led to impeachment proceedings against Johnson, which commenced the following February. He was the first president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. February 1868 - the House charged Johnson with 11 articles of impeachment for vaguely defined "high crimes and misdemeanors," including Stanton’s sacking, which was in violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The House also accused the president of publicly hurling "inflammatory and scandalous harangues" against Congressional members. February 24 - all 11 articles of impeachment passed and the process moved to the Senate.

October 18, 1867 - The United States formally takes possession of Alaska from Russia (tsar and his ministers chose instead to sell to the Americans instead of heavily subsidize the Russian-American Company's interests there); William H. Seward, President Andrew Johnson's secretary of state, moved to arrange the purchase of Alaska (called "Seward's Folly" by some critics); agreed to pay a mere $7 million for some 591,000 square miles of land-a territory twice the size of Texas and equal to nearly a fifth of the continental United States; secured the purchase of Alaska at the ridiculously low rate per acre.

October 21, 1867 - More than 7,000 Southern Plains Indians gather near Medicine Lodge Creek, Kansas, as their leaders sign one of the most important treaties in the history of U.S.-Indian relations. With the treaties signed on October 21 and 28, the old idea of a giant continuous Great Plains reservation was abandoned forever and replaced with a new system in which the Plains Tribes were required to relocate to a clearly bounded reservation in Western Oklahoma. Any tribal member living outside of the reservation would thereafter be in violation of the treaty, and the U.S. would be justified in using whatever means necessary to force them onto the reservation. Likewise, the new policy of "civilizing the tribes" meant that the U.S. would no longer allow the Indians to preserve their traditional ways, but would instead use schools and agricultural education programs to try and eradicate the old customs and assimilate Indians into white culture. Although most of the major Plains Indian chiefs agreed to the treaty provisions, they did not necessarily speak for all of their people. The authority of chiefs was always highly provisional, and many bands of Plains Indians considered themselves free to accept or reject such treaties regardless of the wishes of their chiefs. When the full import of the Medicine Lodge Treaty became clear to them, some of these bands refused to abandon their hunting grounds and traditional ways, causing decades of violent conflict all across the West.

January 3, 1868 - In an event that heralds the birth of modern Japan, Meiji Restoration re-established the authority of Japan's emperor and heralded the fall of the military rulers known as shoguns. Patriotic samurai from Japan's outlying domains join with anti-shogunate nobles in restoring the emperor to power after 700 years. The impetus for the coup was a fear by many Japanese that the nation's feudal leaders were ill equipped to resist the threat of foreign domination. Soon after seizing power, the young Emperor Meiji and his ministers moved the royal court from Kyoto to Tokyo, dismantled feudalism, and enacted widespread reforms along Western models. The newly unified Japanese government also set off on a path of rapid industrialization and militarization, building Japan into a major world power by the early 20th century.