Slavery Through the Ages (An Introduction)  Many times, many
peoples  When we think of slavery, most Americans picture the
American South in the 1800s, before the Civil War. Our mental
image probably includes hundreds of black slaves on a
plantation, picking cotton in the hot sun under the watchful
eyes of their white masters. This vision is slavery in its
simplest form: one person owning another and forcing the slave
to work on the owner's behalf. This form of slavery is known as
chattel slavery. Chattel means property, capital, or livestock,
and it has been applied to slaves through the ages.  What may
surprise many of us is that this form of slavery is as ancient
as civilization itself, and it was alive and thriving in various
places in the world at the end of the twentieth century. Chattel
slavery is one of five traditional forms of slavery that the
United Nations (UN; an international organization including most
of the world's countries), in 1956, dedicated itself to ending.
The other four forms are serf