The Civil War ended in April 1865, with the battered and starving armies of the South laying down their arms in Virginia and North Carolina. Slavery came to a constitutional end with the passage and ratification of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments in 1865. The Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery throughout the United States; the Fourteenth Amendment granted full citizenship to all persons, black or white, born within the United States and extended voting rights to all former male slaves. The amendment also turned the "three-fifths" African American into a whole person for the purposes of congressional representation, and set down the doctrines of "due process" and "equal protection," by which all citizens of the United States may assert their civil rights when subjected to arrest and trial.

The legacy of slavery in the South comprised many decades of conflict between former slaves and white Southerners determined to...