Who were the first slave owners in North America? Not Europeans, but several Native American tribes. The Klamath, Pawnee, Yurok, Creek, Mandan, and Comanche all had small numbers of slaves. The Shoshone woman Sacajawea—now famous for guiding the Lewis and Clark Expedition—had been captured as a slave and sold to the Mandan.

But white European-Americans created the institution of slavery that we are familiar with. Many people from northern states profited from the slave trade by shipping thousands of Africans to the Americas as slaves. Over time, most of these enslaved Africans went to the plantations of the American South. By 1860, there were nearly four million slaves in the country.

Why Africans? Europeans began enslaving Africans in the 1400s. For nearly a century, African slaves and European indentured servants lived similar lives of drudgery. But servants earned their freedom in exchange for several years of work. Slaves were forced into a lifetime of servitude.

Gradually, slaves lost their rights until they became mere property. The law gave masters total power over slaves, including the right to kill their slaves. Also, white slave owners thought they were superior to black people, which increased the gap between slave and free.

The American Civil War was fought, in part, over slavery. During the war, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in rebel states. The North's victory in 1865 brought the end of slavery throughout the United States.