From the beginning of the American republic, slaves argued that they, too, were included in the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.” Sectional division over the “peculiar institution” of American slavery would plague the nation until at last it culminated in a civil war that cost more than six hundred thousand lives. But out of that war came a constitutional amendment resolving, once and for all, that slavery could not exist in a government created by “we the people.”