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Andrew Johnson, a self-taught former tailor from Tennessee, was the only Southern senator to stay loyal to the Union, served as military governor of Tennessee and joined Lincoln's 1864 ticket. After the assassination he issued broad amnesty, let former Confederates form new state governments, and vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau expansion and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which Congress passed over his vetoes. His 1866 speaking tour, the Swing Around the Circle, featured shouting matches with hecklers and calls to hang his opponents, and the midterms handed Radical Republicans veto-proof majorities.

Congress divided the South into five military districts and passed the Tenure of Office Act to protect Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson suspended Stanton, named Ulysses S. Grant interim secretary, then fired Stanton and appointed Lorenzo Thomas, while Stanton barricaded himself in his office and had Thomas arrested. The House impeached Johnson 126 to 47 on February 24, 1868, on 11 articles. With Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding, the Senate voted 35 to 19 on three articles, one vote short of the 36 needed to convict.

• Grant returned the office to Stanton, and Johnson accused him of breaking a promise.
• Article 10 charged Johnson with bringing Congress into disgrace, ridicule and contempt through his speeches.
• The Senate issued color-coded single-day tickets to manage crowds at the trial.
• Benjamin Butler allegedly told Senator Edmund Ross there was a bushel of money for a guilty vote, and Senator Samuel Pomeroy allegedly sought $40,000 to acquit.
• None of the seven Republicans who voted to acquit held elected office again, and the Tenure of Office Act was repealed in 1887.

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In April 1861 two live copperhead snakes tumbled out of a mailbag at a Washington post office, and Republicans soon used the name as a slur for Northern Democrats who opposed the war. The Peace Democrats answered by cutting Lady Liberty's head out of copper pennies and wearing them as pins. Their base lay in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois and among Irish and German Catholic immigrants and Midwestern merchants cut off from Mississippi River trade. Editors such as Marcus M. Pomeroy of the La Crosse Democrat and John Mullally of the Metropolitan Record attacked Lincoln and, after 1863, the draft.

The movement's leading figure, Ohio's Clement Vallandigham, defied General Ambrose Burnside's General Order No. 38, was tried by military commission, and was banished to the Confederacy by Lincoln. He reached Canada and ran for Ohio governor from Windsor, losing badly. Secret societies such as the Knights of the Golden Circle and the Order of the Sons of Liberty followed, along with Harrison H. Dodd's Northwest Conspiracy. Lambdin P. Milligan's case led the Supreme Court in 1866 to rule that civilians cannot be tried by military courts while civilian courts are open.

• Lincoln asked why he should shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts but not the wily agitator who induced him.
• The July 1863 New York City draft riots killed over 100 Black New Yorkers and burned an orphanage for Black children.
• The March 1864 Charleston, Illinois riot left six soldiers and two Copperheads dead.
• The 1864 Democratic convention adopted a peace platform but nominated General George B. McClellan.
• Historians Wood Gray, Frank Klement and Jennifer Weber reached different verdicts on how dangerous the Copperheads were.

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After about 50,000 Union casualties in the Overland Campaign, Ulysses S. Grant crossed the James River on a 2,000-foot pontoon bridge in mid-June 1864 and moved on Petersburg, the hub of five railroads feeding Richmond. On June 15, General William F. Baldy Smith broke through the Dimmock Line, where P.G.T. Beauregard's men stood about 10 feet apart, then halted for the night, and Winfield Scott Hancock deferred to him. Lee's reinforcements arrived, and on June 18 the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery lost 632 of 900 men in minutes. The fighting settled into trench lines that stretched over 30 miles.

Pennsylvania coal miners under Henry Pleasants dug a 500-foot tunnel, ventilated by a fire-driven updraft, and packed it with 8,000 pounds of powder. Meade and Grant replaced the trained United States Colored Troops division with an untrained white division under James Ledlie, and after the July 30 explosion troops poured into the crater, where William Mahone's men shot down at them, causing over 3,700 Union casualties. Grant then cut the Weldon Railroad, and Lee's failed attack on Fort Stedman in March 1865 led to the April 2 breakthrough and the evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond.

• Burnside's division commanders drew straws, and Ledlie was reported drinking in a bombproof during the attack.
• In September 1864 Wade Hampton's cavalry rustled about 2,500 head of Union cattle from behind Grant's lines.
• Black soldiers around Petersburg were organized into the 25th Corps and earned 15 Medals of Honor in the campaign.
• Starving Confederates at Fort Stedman stopped to eat captured Union rations.
• The campaign produced roughly 70,000 casualties, about 42,000 Union and 28,000 Confederate.

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One August night in 1864, a rifle shot startled Abraham Lincoln's horse as he rode alone toward his summer cottage; guards later found his stovepipe hat with a bullet hole through the crown, and Lincoln asked them to keep it quiet. In April 1865 he described recurring dreams of a fast vessel heading for a dark shore and a dream of a corpse lying in the East Room. John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor, had planned to kidnap Lincoln to force a resumption of prisoner exchanges, but after hearing Lincoln's April 11 speech supporting votes for Black Americans, he turned to murder.

On April 14 Booth assigned himself Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, Lewis Powell Secretary of State William Seward, and George Atzerodt Vice President Andrew Johnson. Ulysses and Julia Grant declined to attend, and guard John Frederick Parker left his post for the Star Saloon. Booth shot Lincoln during a laugh line, fought Major Henry Rathbone and broke his leg leaping to the stage. Lincoln died at the Petersen house the next morning, and Booth was shot in a burning tobacco barn at Garrett's Farm on April 26.

• Booth bored a peephole in the box door and wedged the outer door shut with a piece of wood.
• Dr. Charles Leale cleared a clot from the wound so Lincoln could breathe again.
• A metal and canvas jaw splint from a recent carriage accident deflected Powell's knife from Seward's throat.
• Atzerodt got drunk in his hotel bar and never attempted the attack on Johnson.
• Sergeant Boston Corbett shot Booth against orders, and Booth's last words were useless, useless.

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During the so-called Era of Good Feelings under President James Monroe, Missouri applied for statehood in 1819 with roughly 10,000 enslaved people already brought into the territory, largely to grow hemp. New York Representative James Tallmadge Jr. proposed an amendment barring further enslaved people from entering Missouri and gradually freeing enslaved children at age 25. The North held the House 105 to 81, even with the three-fifths clause inflating Southern seats, but the Senate stood at 11 free states and 11 slave states, so Southern members used it to block the restriction.

Northerners cited the Republican Guarantee Clause and the Northwest Ordinance; Southerners pointed to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase Treaty and argued a diffusion theory that spreading slavery west would ease emancipation. After the 15th Congress deadlocked, Maine's request for statehood opened a path: Senator Jesse B. Thomas proposed barring slavery north of the 36°30' parallel, and Speaker Henry Clay split the linked bills to move them through the House. A second compromise later in 1820 used ambiguous wording over Missouri's attempt to bar free Black residents.

• Northern critics blamed the three-fifths clause for the Virginia dynasty of Southern presidents.
• Former Federalist Rufus King was among the Northern restrictionists.
• Some Southern members warned of disunion, and some Northern members answered that they would accept civil war.
• Monroe and Jefferson suspected the crisis was a Federalist plot to revive a strong central government.
• Jefferson compared the line to a fire bell in the night, and it held until the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Dred Scott.

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Commanding General Winfield Scott opposed military medals as a European monarchical custom, but after his retirement Navy Secretary Gideon Welles pushed through a Navy medal that Lincoln signed in December 1861, with an Army version following in July 1862. As the only U.S. military decoration, it was awarded loosely for gallantry and other soldier-like qualities, including saving the flag and peacetime rescues. The surviving Andrews Raiders became the first recipients, though civilian James J. Andrews was not eligible. In 1863 Edwin Stanton offered the medal to 27th Maine men who reenlisted to guard Washington, and 864 were issued to the whole regiment.

In 1916 a board under retired General Nelson A. Miles reviewed every Army award, and in 1917 struck 911 names, including the 27th Maine, Lincoln's funeral guard, Buffalo Bill Cody and contract surgeon Mary Edwards Walker. The Navy instead created a combat-only Tiffany Cross in 1919, then gave it to Richard Byrd for flying over the North Pole, and retired it in 1942. A 1963 law set one combat standard for all services, and later reviews upgraded awards to Black, Hispanic and Jewish veterans passed over in earlier wars.

• Mary Edwards Walker kept wearing her medal until her death, and it was later restored.
• Byrd asked President Herbert Hoover in 1930 to swap his Tiffany Cross for the non-combat version.
• A 1993 Shaw University study led President Clinton to present the medal to seven World War II veterans in 1997, including Vernon Baker.
• The 2014 Valor 24 upgrades included Tibor Rubin, a Holocaust survivor and Korean War prisoner.
• The Pentagon denied Michael Blassie's family the medal from the Vietnam Unknown's tomb after DNA identified him in 1998.

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The building on 10th Street began in 1833 as the second meeting house of the First Baptist Church of Washington, led for nearly 30 years by Pastor Obadiah Bruen Brown. John T. Ford bought it in 1861 and opened Ford's Athenaeum, which burned in 1862 and was rebuilt as a modern theater. On April 14, 1865, five days after Appomattox, about 1,700 people watched Our American Cousin when John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the presidential box, slashed Major Henry Rathbone, leapt to the stage, broke a leg and stabbed orchestra leader William Withers Jr. on his way out.

Ford tried to reopen in July 1865 with The Octoroon, but public outrage led Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to send troops to close the building. Congress paid Ford $88,000 and barred it from public amusement. The interior was gutted into three floors for War Department records, the Surgeon General's library and the Army Medical Museum. On June 9, 1893, excavation for an electric plant undermined a pillar and the floors collapsed, killing 22 clerks and injuring 68. A Lincoln museum opened in 1932, and the restored theater was dedicated in 1968.

• Samuel J. Seymour, age five in the audience, lived until 1956 as the last witness.
• Lincoln was laid diagonally across a bed in William Petersen's boarding house and died at 7:22 a.m.
• Melvin D. Hildreth and Senator Milton Young pushed for the restoration starting in 1945.
• The museum holds Booth's diary, the derringer and the box door with Booth's peephole.
• The 1896 purchase of the Petersen House was the federal government's first purchase of a historic home.

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Wilmer McLean was a 47-year-old retired Virginia militia major and wholesale grocer living on the Yorkshire Plantation near Manassas Junction, where the Orange and Alexandria and Manassas Gap railroads met. In July 1861 the opening fighting of the war's first major land battle reached his property, and General P.G.T. Beauregard used his house as headquarters. A Union shell came down the kitchen chimney and destroyed the staff's dinner. McLean, who was also a sugar broker supplying the Confederate Army, moved his family about 120 miles south to Appomattox Court House in the spring of 1863.

On April 8, 1865, a messenger seeking a meeting place for Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant came to McLean's door, and on April 9 Lee surrendered in his parlor. Union officers then stripped the room of furniture and upholstery, pressing money on McLean as they left. The collapse of the Confederacy ended his business, he lost the Appomattox house to foreclosure in 1867, and from 1873 to 1876 he worked for the Internal Revenue Service before dying in Alexandria in 1882.

• Beauregard later remarked on the timing of the shell that wrecked his headquarters dinner.
• McLean reportedly tried to steer Lee's messenger toward other buildings.
• Major General Edward Ord paid $40 for the table Lee used to sign the terms.
• Philip Sheridan paid $20 in gold for Grant's table and handed it to George Armstrong Custer, who carried it off on horseback.
• That table is now in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

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George Gordon Meade was born in 1815 in Cadiz, Spain, to a merchant family ruined by its support of the Spanish government during the Peninsular War. Sent to West Point because it was free, he collected 168 demerits, graduated 19th of 56 in 1835, served in the Second Seminole War and resigned to work as a civil engineer. An 1842 law pushed him back into the Army's topographical engineers, where he built lighthouses including Barnegat, Absecon and Cape May in New Jersey and Sombrero Key in Florida, and designed a hydraulic lamp adopted nationwide.

Wounded at Glendale in 1862, Meade broke Stonewall Jackson's line at Fredericksburg through a swampy gap, then was awakened on June 28, 1863, and handed command of the Army of the Potomac three days before Gettysburg. His fishhook line used interior lines to shift troops, and his headquarters at the Leister house was battered during the barrage before Pickett's Charge. Afterward, Lincoln and Halleck faulted him for letting Lee cross the Potomac, Dan Sickles attacked him before Congress, and under Grant a press agreement credited Meade only with defeats.

• Meade's temper earned him the nickname Old Snapping Turtle.
• He received a gold-mounted sword from Philadelphia citizens for his actions at Monterrey.
• Sixteen horses tied outside the Leister house were killed in the July 3 barrage.
• He clashed with Philip Sheridan over using cavalry for scouting rather than independent raids.
• His face appeared on the 1890 $1,000 Treasury note known as the Grand Watermelon, and the head of his horse Old Baldy is preserved in Philadelphia.

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Black powder fouled rifled barrels so quickly that soldiers sometimes carried wooden mallets to hammer bullets down the bore, which is why most infantry kept fast but inaccurate smoothbore muskets. Henri-Gustave Delvigne and others tried bullets that were rammed until they deformed into the rifling, but the effort ruined their shape. In 1849 Claude-Étienne Minié introduced an undersized conical bullet with grease-filled grooves and a hollow base fitted with an iron plug, so it dropped freely down the barrel and expanded on firing to seal against the grooves.

At the Harpers Ferry Armory, James H. Burton removed the iron plug by deepening the cavity so the powder gas alone flared the skirt, producing a lighter, cheaper bullet that became the standard round of the Civil War. Trained soldiers could now fire about three aimed shots a minute. The episode then follows the medical cost: a heavy spinning wedge of lead that rarely stayed in the body, shattered bones into fragments, and left amputation as the usual treatment.

• The bullet's grease was forced outward on firing, scraping away fouling from the previous shot.
• The Minié design armed the Springfield Model 1861 and the British Pattern 1853 Enfield.
• Austria adopted Lorenz's compression bullet, while Britain rejected Wilkinson's version and used the Pritchett ball.
• Round musket balls often deflected off bone and lodged in tissue; the conical ball cut straight through.
• A private of the 53rd North Carolina, shot in the head during Jubal Early's July 1864 raid, seemed to recover before dying on the 16th day.