Slavery and the Making of America

Seeds of Destruction/The Challenge of Freedom -- WGBH Programs: "In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves under the control of the Confederate government. In 1865, with the South defeated, the nation adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the US Constitution (respectively ending slavery, declaring all African Americans citizens, and granting all African American males the right to vote).

By the 1876 presidential election, the North had tired of dealing with civil rights and decided to leave the issue of the treatment of the freed slaves to the Southern states. Robert Smalls, a South Carolina slave who rode a stolen Confederate ship to freedom, became a sailor in the Union Navy, bought the mansion in which he had been enslaved, and went on to a successful career in politics. This episode also looks at the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and militant opposition to black rights, the end of Reconstruction, and its replacement with a new kind of legalized oppression. "