According to what I’ve read in Wikipedia, Slavery in the United States was a form of slave labor which existed as a legal institution in North America for more than a century before the founding of the United States in 1776, and continued mostly in the South until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865 following the American Civil War.[1] The first English colony in North America, Virginia, acquired its first Africans in 1619, after a ship arrived, unsolicited, carrying a cargo of about 20 Africans.[2][3] Thus, a practice established in the Spanish colonies as early as the 1560s was expanded into English North America.[4] Most slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native Americans and free blacks also held slaves; there were a small number of white slaves as well.

[1] Not only to African-Americans were held captive in the cramped slave ship on the way to the South of the US, sickness and disease were constant companions to both slaves and crew. Mortality amongst both was high, from disease, mistreatment, accident and suicide according to this article in http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/slavery-ships-and-sickness.

[2] Rich in cash crops, such as good-quality soil for large plantations of high-value cash crops, such as tobacco, cotton, sugar, and coffee.

[3] The slaves did the manual labor involved in raising and harvesting these crops. By the early decades of the 19th century, the majority of slaveholders and slaves were in the southern United States, where most slaves were engaged in a work-gang system of agriculture on large plantations, especially devoted to cotton and sugar cane. Such large groups of slaves were thought to work more efficiently if directed by a managerial class called overseers, usually white men.

[4] Slaves were chained together and marched to the coast. Sometimes this could take many days or weeks. (According to the article “Black Peoples of America - Effects of Slavery on Africa” in Historyonthenet.com.

[5] I understand that even children were even captured and sold to slavery as well.

[6] Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, and imprisonment. Punishment was most often meted in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was carried out simply to re-assert the dominance of the master or overseer over the slave. The law provided slaves with virtually no protection from their masters. On large plantations this power was delegated to overseers. These men were under considerable pressure from the plantation owners to maximize profits. They did this by bullying the slaves into increasing productivity.

[7] Prayer is the only means of hope to deal with and ask the Lord’s help to find means to escape slavery.

[8] John Brown (May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859) was an American revolutionary abolitionist, who in the 1850s advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to abolish slavery in the United States.