That this particular assertion was wrong, and that it was eventually accepted as wrong, was not a consequence of any protection William had. It was a consequence of the woman being mistaken and accepting that she was mistaken. If she had been less certain of her error — if William had looked a little more like Ned, if the conductor had been less inclined to accept William’s explanation — the incident might have had a different end.
## The Legal Architecture After the Civil War
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865. For the Crafts, who had been legally classified as property until that amendment passed, the change was fundamental. But it was not the end of the legal architecture that had been built to enforce racial hierarchy.
The Black Codes that Southern states passed in the months after the Civil War were designed to restore, through different legal mechanisms, many of the practical constraints that slavery had imposed. They required Black workers to sign long-term labor contracts or be arrested for vagrancy. They prohibited Black people from owning firearms or testifying against white people in court. They established a system of convict leasing that would allow the state to re-enslave people through the criminal justice system. The codes were partly blocked by the Republican Congress and the Reconstruction amendments, but the impulse they expressed did not disappear.
The organized racial violence of the Reconstruction era — the Klan, the rifle clubs, the red-shirt paramilitary organizations that operated openly in some parts of the South — operated alongside and partly through the legal system. The people who burned schools and intimidated voters were sometimes the same people who held local offices and controlled local courts. The violence was not extra-legal in the sense of being outside the effective reach of authority; it was frequently performed with the tacit support of local authority.