Here the historical roots of “America’s original sin” are presented to show how slavery came about in a country that was designed from the outset to be a country of free people. Slavery is traced from its inception as wartime spoils through its colonial adoption as a raced-based commodity which, by the mid-nineteenth 19th century, reached its apotheosis in the southern states in America, and ultimately provoked civil war. By the late-1400s, slavery by wartime captives was abandoned, and instead, Africans were kidnapped and sold; thus slavery evolved from a caste system based upon war spoils to one based upon skin -color. Virtually from the beginning of the slave trade, the moral discordance between freedom and slavery required justification, which was provided through biological and religious explanations. In both explanations, slaves were determined to be inferior and, in effect, sub-human, a determination that opened the door to sub-human treatment of them. Capitalism intensified and accelerated the system. In short, four relatively recent events powered slavery in the United States: the transatlantic slave trade, colonization by Western European nations, 19th century capitalism, and a rigid of caste system.