The Downward Spiral

Volume 1: THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL

Program One covers the period from 1619 through 1739 and shows the origins of slavery in America, focusing on Dutch New Amsterdam. This installment shows how slavery in its early days was a labor source, in which Africans and others of mixed race and mixed culture had some legal rights, could take their masters to court and could even earn wages as they undertook the labor involved in building a new nation. They endured clearing land, constructing roads, and unloading ships. But further south, the story of John Punch evolved. Captured after attempting to escape his tobacco plantation, he received a sentence far harsher than the two white men who ran with him. In the Carolinas, where the enslaved were teaching struggling white planters how to grow the lucrative crop rice, the labor system was already progressing towards the absolute control, dehumanizing oppression and 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.

Volume 2: LIBERTY IN THE AIR

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.

Volume 3: SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION

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.

Leading Southerners