so Americans can have somebody do something for them instead of them doing it themselves.
throughout the 17th and 18th centuries people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. by the mid-nineteenth century, Americans West-Ward expansion and the abolition movement provided a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody civil war. Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the reconstruction era to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation.