Story idea: American Slavery: An Adventure

Tell the story of slavery in the U.S. as a multi-generational adventure with protagonists from one family spanning the centuries. Invaders to Africa, helped by natives who betrayed their own, are abducted and taken across the ocean. There, they are sold into slavery to people who claim Divine Right to own human beings. Their children are subjected to the same lifelong, inherited condition.

There are people in the new land who argue against their enslavement, but they are stymied by the sheer number of people who refuse to relent.

The bloodiest war in American history is fought over the issue, finally freeing millions—and, perversely, leaving many of them lost and afraid, victims of generational Stockholm Syndrome and infantilization. Well-meaning laws create lasting animosity that result in a compensatory set of laws that perpetuate a lesser condition for these people. Free, with more and better opportunities than their parents, still they struggle in the face of a hostile and self-styled superior people.

It is another one hundred years before the terrible laws are struck down, opening even more opportunities for these people, but lingering resentment, stoked by yet more well-intentioned laws, continue to challenge these childrend of abduction as they work bit by geteration bit to relinquish the hold that those who would continue to trade shackles for an ever-lighter set of fetters, always seeming to try to avoid the day when all restraints fall away, and the children of abduction can stand beside those others as equals without the coercion of laws that made acrimony into a cultural more.