Episode 1 of 2
Passage of the Amnesty Act
- When
- May 22, 1872
- Where
- United States
The 42nd Congress passed the Amnesty Act on May 22, 1872, removing most Fourteenth Amendment penalties on former Confederates.
The law cleared over 150,000 former Confederate troops. It removed office-holding disqualifications for most secessionists but excluded specific high-ranking officials from the 36th and 37th Congresses and various federal officers.
Sources
- Amnesty Act Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-16
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.