DUKE OF YORK represents an accurately vivid depiction of American slavery. It presents detailed first-hand accounts-Stories-of slaves' suffering. The Stories, derived from slave narratives of the mid-1800s, enable slaves and former slaves to speak in their own words directly to you today. Abolitionists supplemented the Stories. The Stories portray slave's daily lives and the slave society's sadism. The society callously mutilated slaves and branded them as farm animals. More than half a century after the Declaration of Independence, the society burned slaves alive and chopped off rebellious slaves' heads for posting along roads. The slave society destroyed slaves' families, as slave traders routinely forced a million victims-women, men, children-in rags, often shoeless, to march chained 1,000 miles from Washington to New Orleans auctions, openly from town to town in a massive migration to the cotton South.

Beginning in the 1660s, King Charles II, and his brother, the Duke of York, aggressively promoted the brutal form of American slavery and incentivized slave purchases. They sought governmental profit-taxes on slave commodities and slave-trading revenues for their governmental monopoly, the Royal African Company. The Duke shipped more than 100,000 captives under appalling conditions, branding many with his initials, "DY.