The final hour follows the life of Robert Smalls, a South Carolina slavea, s it takes viewers through the Civil War, Reconstruction and beyond.

The series' final hour follows the life of Robert Smalls as it takes viewers through the Civil War, Reconstruction and beyond. Smalls was 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 long, successful career in politics. Another major element of this hour is 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. In 1865, with the South defeated, the nation adopted the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution (respectively ending slavery, declaring all African Americans citizens and granting all African-American males the right to vote). The Reconstruction period that followed offered 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. With Smalls as framework, this final installment looks at the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and militant opposition to black rights, the end of Reconstruction and its replacement with a whole new kind of legalized oppression.