January 31 - Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War.
April 9 - Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to Union General William T. Sherman in North Carolina, marking the formal end of the Civil War.
April 14 - President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, and died the following day.
April 15 - Andrew Johnson was sworn in as the 17th President of the United States after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
May 26 - General Edmund Kirby Smith, the last Confederate army commander to surrender, signed an agreement with Union forces in Galveston, Texas.
June 7 - The Confederate government officially dissolved itself with the surrender of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America.
December 18 - The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, abolishing slavery, was ratified.
December 24 - The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist organization, was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee.