Until the nineteenth century and the end of the Civil War, the United States had a long history of slavery. During the African Diaspora, beginning in 1619, approximately 12 to 13 million Africans were taken from their homes and sold into slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean. The majority of the slaves who survived the voyage were sent to Brazil. By the beginning of the American Civil War, nearly 240 years after the first slaves arrived in the American colonies, four million people were held as slaves, principally in the South, where slave ownership was legal and was a main source of labor for agriculture.