Follows the life of Robert Smalls through the Civil War, the Reconstruction and beyond. A South Carolina slave who rode a stolen confederate ship to freedom, Smalls became a sailor in the Union Navy, bought the mansion in which he had been enslaved, and went on to a long, successful career in politics. Follows the transformation of the Civil War from a conflict intended to restore the Union to a conflict over slavery. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves under the control of the Confederate government. The Reconstruction period that followed offered much promise to the newly freed slaves, but 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, where many former Confederate leaders had taken the helm of government. Looks at the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and militant opposition to black rights, the end of the Reconstruction and its replacement with a whole new kind of legalized oppression.