1865
| File:Decade.png ( 1860s: ) 1865 link | |
|---|---|
 President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. | |
| Year 1865 |
US Secret Service
- Full article: United States Secret Service
- Full article: United States Secret Service
Events
- January 4 – The New York Stock Exchange opens its first permanent headquarters at 10-12 Broad near Wall Street, in New York City.
- April 6 – German chemicals producer Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik (BASF) is founded in Mannheim.
- April 9 – American Civil War: Confederate States Army General Robert E. Lee surrenders to Union Army General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the American Civil War.
- April 14 – Assassination of Abraham Lincoln: President Abraham Lincoln is shot while attending an evening performance of the farce Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., by actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.
- April 14 – United States Secretary of State William H. Seward and his family are attacked in his home, by Lewis Powell.
- April 15 – President Lincoln dies early this morning from his gunshot wound, aged 56. Vice President Andrew Johnson becomes the 17th President of the United States, upon Lincoln's death. Johnson is sworn in later that morning.
- April 21 – German Chemicals producer BASF moves its headquarters and factories from Mannheim, to the Hemshof District of Ludwigshafen.
- April 26 – Union cavalry corner John Wilkes Booth in a Virginia barn, and cavalryman Boston Corbett fatally shoots the assassin.
- May 1 – The Triple Alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay against Paraguay is formally signed; the Paraguayan War has already begun.
- May 10 – American Civil War: Jefferson Davis is captured by the Union Army near Irwinville, Georgia.
- May 17 – The International Telegraph Union is founded.
- May 29 – American Civil War: President of the United States Andrew Johnson issues a proclamation of general amnesty for most citizens of the former Confederacy.
- June–August – English polymath Francis Galton formulates eugenics.[1]
- June 2 – American Civil War: Confederate forces west of the Mississippi River under General Edmund Kirby Smith surrender at Galveston, Texas, under terms negotiated on May 26, becoming the last to do so.
- June 25 – James Hudson Taylor founds the China Inland Mission at Brighton, England.
- July 7 – Following Abraham Lincoln's assassination on April 14, the four conspirators condemned to death during the trial are hanged, including David Herold, George Atzerodt, Lewis Powell and Mary Surratt. Her son, John Surratt, escapes execution by fleeing to Canada, and ultimately to Egypt.
- July 23 – The SS Great Eastern departs on a voyage to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable.
- November 11 – Duar War between Britain and Bhutan ends with the Treaty of Sinchula, in which Bhutan cedes control of its southern passes to Britain in return for an annual subsidy.
- December 11 – The United States Congress creates the United States House Committee on Appropriations and the Committee on Banking and Commerce, reducing the tasks of the House Committee on Ways and Means.
- December 17 – Leopold II becomes King of the Belgians, following the death (on December 10) of his father, King Leopold I.
- December 18 – Secretary Seward declares the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution ratified by three-quarters of the states (including those in secession) as of December 6; slavery is legally outlawed in the last two slave states of Kentucky and Delaware, and the remaining 45,000 slaves are freed.
- December 24 – Jonathan Shank and Barry Ownby form the Ku Klux Klan in the American South, to resist Reconstruction and intimidate carpetbaggers and scalawags, as well as to repress the freedpeople.