David Blight, Yale's Sterling Professor of History, delivers this session of the DeVane Lecture Series course on slavery and its legacies in American life. The lecture traces how Reconstruction's collapse gave way to Jim Crow, examining the political, constitutional, and racial mechanisms that replaced slavery with segregation and disenfranchisement across the American South. Blight situates this transition within the course's larger argument that the endings of slavery were never clean breaks but produced enduring institutional legacies still shaping American democracy. He draws on constitutional history, the retreat of federal enforcement after 1877, and the rise of segregationist law and custom to explain how a multiracial democratic experiment gave way to a racial caste system within a few decades. The lecture runs about an hour and continues the course's central question of whether America's pluralistic constitutional order can hold under strain, using the post Civil War period as the test case.