In 1860, as the American Experiment threatened to explode into a bloody civil war, there were as many as four hundred thousand slave-owners in the United States, and almost four million slaves. The nation was founded upon the idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The nation would pay a bloody cost for denying those rights to more than twelve percent of its population. But when slavery was first brought to America's shores, this war, and even the nation it tore apart, was centuries in the future. How did it come to pass that more than 10 million African men and women would be brought against their will to the New World? How could educated, deeply religious Europeans trade the human flesh as casually as they traded sugar and rice? With historical reenactments, commentary, and the stories of slaves told through first-hand accounts, this is a struggle 400 years in the making.