On the evening of April 14th, 1865 President Lincoln and the First Lady attended the play Our American Cousin, just five days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Also in attendance was General Ulysses S. Grant, who went ahead with his plan to join the President despite a desire to visit his children in New Jersey.

At 10:14 pm, John Wilkes Booth entered the back of the Presidential box. As he prepared to draw his gun Booth was spotted by Grant who rose to confront the assassin, only to be shot in the chest by Booth's derringer. As Booth fled, General Grant was taken across the street to the Petersen House only for doctors Charles Leale, Charles Sabin Taft, and Albert Freeman Africanus King to pronounce the General dead. President Lincoln would be the one to actually tell the small crowd outside that the General had passed.

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The Assassination of General Grant shocked the nation, and while Booth’s co-conspirators all failed to kill their other targets, their actions forced Lincoln to reassess his plans for Reconstruction. Secretary of War Edward M. Stanton and Attorney General James Speed pushed Lincoln to broaden the scope of the trial of the conspirators. Lincoln ultimately decided to try Booth and his associates in a civilian court, but ordered Secretary of Stanton to proceed with rounding up Confederate leaders for arrest and trial for high treason. On September 30th, 1865 the Fort McNair Trials began, and over the course of 13 months the military tribunal found guilty and hanged most of the Confederate leadership, including Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. While the trial was being carried out, a separate legal battle was brought before the courts by southern lawyers seeking to save their leaders from the gallows, hoping that by establishing the legality of secession, the Confederate leadership could then not be convicted. The court ultimately ruled that Secession was unconstitutional.

The execution of the Confederate leaders, and Lincoln's decision to uphold General Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15, gave rise to militant groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which attempted to raid patrols of occupying Union troops, capture arms, and ultimately restart the war. Lincoln leaned heavily on his Commanding General of the Army, William Tecumseh Sherman to stamp out these white supremacist terrorist groups, transitioning the Army to the role of a peacetime gendarmerie. Those close to the President remarked on the weariness at which he approached each day, and he relied more and more on his generals and political allies to craft and execute the business of Reconstruction. Just three years after leaving office Abraham Lincoln died of a stroke at the age of 63.

Shortly after the Inauguration Day celebrations of 1869, a group of neo-confederate troops attempted to take control of a US Army armory in Texas shortly before its readmission to the Union. The failed attack on Tyler Arsenal ultimately spelled the end for the Neo-Confederate movement, as it prompted Congress to push through the Third Enforcement Act which empowered President Salmon P. Chase to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat Neo-Confederate and other white supremacist terrorist organizations.

After the readmission of Texas to the Union in 1870, many conservative Republicans and Democrats had hoped to conclude the Reconstruction-era, but Chase and his more Radical allies in Congress would spend much of the early 1870s pushing Industrial Reconstruction. The Chase administration incentivized Southerners by making low-rate government backed business loans available to states that had met their Reconstruction requirements. Once more, these loans were to be given out regardless of race, leading to many of the new black farmers being on equal footing with their white neighbors.

Chase's policies gave rise to a short economic boom, but after his death in 1873, the country would enter a constitutional crisis and the worst Depression it had yet seen. Vice President Schuyler Colfax had declined to serve another term as Chase's Vice President, leading to Senator Henry Wilson receiving the Republican Party's nomination for Vice President. As Chase had died before being sworn in in 1873, it was unclear who would succeed the President, as Colfax was the sitting VP. Ultimately the Supreme Court held that Vice President-elect Henry Wilson would ascend to the Presidency, while the US Senate returned the Vice Presidency to Schuyler Colfax who agreed to serve for another two years. However, in 1875, President Henry Wilson died from a stroke, which elevated Colfax to the Presidency, and forced Congress to draft the 16th amendment, establishing the formal succession of the President and procedures for removing an incapacitated executive from office.

Schuyler Colfax entered office as the most unwilling President in US history, and under perhaps the worst circumstances of any President. Marred by a corruption scandal just a few months prior to taking office after the death of not one, but two of his predecessors which had hindered any attempt to curb the Long Depression, Colfax worked to rally his party to provide economic relief. Colfax relied heavily on Treasury Secretary John Sherman for policy advice, while leveraging his connections in Congress to pass legislation. Colfax would prove to be an able administrator, balancing the need for a strong national currency with the responsibilities of Reconstruction, despite calls from conservative Republicans to end the practice in the face of the Depression.

When Colfax took office, the US Army's occupation of the former states of the Confederacy had forced the military to take on civilian law enforcement responsibilities that it was never designed for. Conservative Republicans and Democrats were routinely calling on Army officers to testify on how overextended the Army was to try and rally national support for ending Reconstruction all together. However, Black members of Congress like Senator P. B. S. Pinchback with their white Radical allies were able to kill attempts to defund the Army’s occupation role.

In 1878 on the advice of former Minister to France Elihu B. Washburne, then Senator James G. Blaine introduced the Posse Comitatus Act to create a military branch purely for civilian law enforcement. Pushed by President Schuyler Colfax as a compromise that would formally end military reconstruction, it established the United States Gendarmerie under the Justice Department, with Allan Pinkerton as its first Chief of Staff. General Pinkerton secured the reputation of the new agency through the creation of its investigating arm, the National Intelligence Service (NIS), which successfully identified neo-Confederate terrorist groups, most famously leading to the arrest of the remaining members of the White League in 1879. By 1881 the Gendarmerie had subsumed all responsibilities of Reconstruction previously given to the US Army.

In the South, the Chase-administration’s loan program went from being a minor incentive to one of the region's few sources of economic security, and states pushed to accelerate Reconstruction to gain access to financial assistance. The Colfax administration would solidify this system through the National Bank Act of 1876, which created the system by which the Federal Government would have more flexibility in the issuing of new currency and controlling interest rates. By the time Colfax had left office in 1881, the industrial revolution was in full swing in the South. The Colfax administration's success led to James G. Blaine winning one of the biggest landslides in electoral history. The Democrats failed to regain ground in Congress despite them railing against the rampant corruption in the National Banking system.

By the end of the 1870s Midwestern farmers formed the Grange Movement to pressure state governments to establish fair railroad rates and warehouse charges. The National Bank loans and strong currency policies that defined the Colfax administration had inadvertently created the conditions for railroads to move in quickly and monopolize warehouse infrastructure in the South, which in turn led to southern farmers allying with their northern counterparts to form the Farmers' Alliance. The short term goal of the Alliance was to extend the scope of the National Bank system to allow farmers to use grain stored in government warehouses as collateral so as to gain access to new loans, thereby allowing them to not be beholden to tycoons and banks.

By 1892 the Farmers' Alliance grew to form a new political party, the People's Party or Populists as they were often called. Holding their first convention in 1892 from Omaha, the Populists ran Congressman James B. Weaver as their candidate against John Sherman and the Republicans who by this point had enjoyed 32 years of control of the White House and Congress. Sherman did not take Weaver's campaign seriously, and did not really campaign, but Weaver managed to narrowly beat Sherman as the first Populist elected in the country's history. Weaver's victory also served as the death blow to the Democrats, who by this point had dwindled to a largely regional party in the Northeast. The Democratic party would formally dissolve during the election of 1900.

Despite Weaver's surprise victory his Presidency was not particularly successful, as the Populists could not control the House and Senate without a coalition with Democrats, who seldom backed the Populists' proposals. Democrats and Republicans had particular disdain for Weaver's more progressive proposals such as government ownership of the railroads. Weaver's administration also didn't have much luck in offering anything more than temporary relief to the Panic of 1892 and would be faced with another recession in 1895 that ultimately doomed his Presidency. Weaver would be defeated by Ohio Governor William McKinley in the 1896 elections, but his party would endure. Most historians mark Weaver’s election as the unofficial end of Reconstruction, and the start of the Progressive-era and the Fourth Party System in which black voters went from being reliable Republicans to swing voters split more by class.