Descent-based slavery describes a situation where people are born into slavery because their ancestors were captured into slavery and their families have 'belonged' to the slave-owning families ever since. Slave status is passed down the maternal line.

About 600,000 slaves were transported to America, or 5% of the 12 million slaves taken from Africa. About 310,000 of these persons were imported into the Thirteen Colonies before 1776: 40% directly and the rest from the Caribbean. Slaves transported to America: 1620–1700.....21,000.

Weekly food rations -- usually corn meal, lard, some meat, molasses, peas, greens, and flour -- were distributed every Saturday. Vegetable patches or gardens, if permitted by the owner, supplied fresh produce to add to the rations. Morning meals were prepared and consumed at daybreak in the slaves' cabins.

Some say that children were forced to perform field labor duties as young as the age of six. It is argued that in some areas children were put to "regular work in the antebellum South" and it "was a time when slaves began to learn work routines, but also work discipline and related punishment".

Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, rape, and imprisonment. Punishment was often meted out in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was performed to re-assert the dominance of the master (or overseer) over the slave.

In some African-American communities, marrying couples will end their ceremony by jumping over a broomstick, either together or separately. This practice is well attested for as a marriage ceremony for slaves in the Southern United States in the 1840s and 1850s who were often not permitted to wed legally.

President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Emancipation Act on April 16, 1862, freeing the district’s 3,100 slaves. The legislation was hint of slavery’s coming death in the United States — only 8 1/2 months later Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. The United States of America abolished slavery in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

At the close of the Civil War, 4 million people in the United States were slaves. More than one million were children under the age of sixteen. When slavery was finally abolished on January 31, 1865, the system had endured for about 235 years. Over that period of time, millions of children, taken away from Africa or born in America, had been forced to live under a barbaric system.

The children who grew up in slavery were denied the most basic human rights, such as freedom, safety, protection from degrading and cruel treatment, compensation for work done, education, equality and the right to freely move around. They worked for no pay and were property that could be bought, sold, maimed or killed. In the eyes of their families, however, they were children like any others, who needed love, protection, happiness, and education. But the enslaved parents had no say in their children´s fate. All they could do was give them as much physical and moral comfort as possible, and provide them with skills to help them survive.