Program One covers the period from 1619 through 1739 and spotlights the origins of slavery in America, focusing on Dutch New Amsterdam (later New York City). This installment shows how slavery in its early days was a loosely defined labor source similar to indentured servitude, in which Africans and others of mixed race and/or mixed culture had some legal rights, could take their masters to court and could even earn wages as they undertook the backbreaking labor involved in building a new nation - clearing land, constructing roads, unloading ships. But further south, the story of John Punch served as an omen of things to come. Captured after attempting to escape his tobacco plantation, he received a sentence far harsher than the two white men who ran with him. Indeed, in the Carolinas, where the enslaved were teaching struggling white planters how to grow the wildly lucrative crop "oryza" (rice), the labor system was already progressing towards the absolute control, dehumanizing oppression and sheer racism we today most commonly associate with slavery. The first hour culminates with the bloody Stono rebellion in South Carolina, which led to the passage of "black codes," regulating virtually every aspect of slaves' lives.

Spanning from the 1740s through the 1830s, the series' second hour explores the continued expansion of slavery in the colonies, the evolution of a distinct African American culture and the roots of the emancipation movement. The episode reveals the many ways the enslaved resisted their oppression, their role on both sides of the Revolutionary War and the strength and inspiration many of them found in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, despite the inherent contradictions that lay in what those Downloadable docss expressed and what this country practiced.

The film's third program looks at the period from 1800 through the start of the Civil War, during which slavery saw an enormous expansion and entered its final decades. As the nation expanded west, the question of slavery became the overriding political issue of the time. These years saw an increasingly militant abolitionist movement and a widening rift between the North - which had largely outlawed slavery but continued to reap the vast economic benefits of the system - and the South, now home to millions of enslaved black men, women and children. This is the period of slavery most commonly depicted in history books and captured by dramas. Leading Southerners such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had been convinced slavery was nearing its end. But the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War brought vast new territories into the United States, and the battle between those for and against slavery intensified. By 1860, every attempt at striking an agreement - the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, a draconian federal fugitive slave law - had failed, splitting apart the Union.

The series' fourth program follows the life of Robert Smalls as it takes viewers through the Civil War, the Reconstruction and beyond. A South Carolina slave who rode a stolen Confederate ship to freedom, Smalls 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. The program follows 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. The Reconstruction period that followed offered much 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 the Reconstruction and its replacement with a whole new kind of legalized oppression.