The legal institution of chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was found throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, children were born into slavery, and an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery persisted in about half of the U.S. states until its abolition after the civil war between the North and the South in 1865. Issues involving slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social customs. In the decades after Reconstruction ended in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing. Involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime remains legal.
By the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), enslaved people had been institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry. During and immediately after the Revolution, abolitionist laws passed in most Northern states and a movement developed to abolish slavery. The role of slavery under the United States Constitution (1789) was highly contentious during its drafting. The Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution inflated slave states' political power, while the Fugitive Slave Clause provided that, if a slave escaped to another state, the other state could not prevent the slave's return to the person claiming to be their owner. All Northern states had abolished slavery to some degree by 1805, sometimes with completion at a future date, and sometimes with an intermediary status of unpaid indentured servitude.
Abolition was, in many cases, gradual. Some slave owners, primarily in the Upper South, freed their slaves. Charitable groups bought and freed others. Individual states began to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade during the American Revolution, and Congress banned it in 1808. Nevertheless, smuggling was common thereafter, and the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service (Coast Guard) began to enforce the ban on the high seas.Chronology of U.S. Coast Guard history on the USCG official history website. Before 1820, most serving congressmen owned slaves, and about 30% of congressmen born before 1840 (the last of whom, Rebecca Latimer Felton, served in the 1920s) owned slaves at some time in their lives.
The cotton industry's rapid expansion in the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin greatly increased demand for slave labor, and the Southern states remained slave societies. The U.S., divided into slave and free states, became ever more polarized over slavery. Driven by labor demands from new cotton plantations in the Deep South, the Upper South sold more than a million slaves who were taken to the Deep South. The total slave population in the South eventually reached four million.Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and David Eltis, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. Based on "records for 27,233 voyages that set out to obtain slaves for the Americas". Introduction – Social Aspects of the Civil War , National Park Service. As the U.S. expanded, the Southern states attempted to extend slavery into the new Western territories to allow pro-slavery forces to maintain power in Congress. The new territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession were the subject of major political crises and compromises."In 1854, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act ... overturned the policy of containment [of slavery] and effectively unlocked the gates of the Western territories (including both the old Louisiana Purchase lands and the Mexican Cession) to the legal expansion of slavery...." Guelzo, Allen C., Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press (2009), p. 80. Slavery was defended in the South as a "positive good", and the largest religious denominations split over slavery into regional organizations of the North and South.
By 1850, the newly rich, cotton-growing South threatened to secede from the Union. Bloody fighting broke out over slavery in the Kansas Territory. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery, slave states seceded to form the Confederacy. Shortly afterward, the Civil War began when Confederate forces attacked the U.S. Army's Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. During the war some jurisdictions abolished slavery and, due to Union measures such as the Confiscation Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation, the war effectively ended slavery in most places. After the war, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on December 6, 1865, prohibiting "slavery [and] involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime."
Background
During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all the colonies. People enslaved in the North typically worked as house servants, artisans, laborers, and craftsmen, mostly in cities. Many men worked on the docks and in shipping. In 1703, more than 42% of New York City households held enslaved people in bondage, the second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies, behind only Charleston, South Carolina."Slavery in New York" , The Nation, November 7, 2005 Enslaved people were also used as agricultural workers in farm communities, especially in the South, but also in upstate New York and Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. By 1770, there were 397,924 black people out of a population of 2.17 million in what soon became the United States. The slaves of the colonial era were unevenly distributed from north to south: 14,867 lived in New England, where they were 3% of the population; 34,679 lived in the Middle Colonies, where they were 6% of the population; and 347,378 in the five Southern Colonies, where they were 31% of the population.Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, 2003.
The South developed an agricultural economy dependent on commodity crops. Its planters rapidly acquired a significantly higher number and proportion of enslaved people, as its commodity crops were labor-intensive."The First Black Americans" , Hashaw, Tim; U.S. News & World Report, 1/21/07 Early on, enslaved people in the South worked primarily on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco (cotton did not become a major crop until after the 1790s). In 1720, about 65% of South Carolina's population was enslaved. Planters (defined by historians in the Upper South as those who held 20 or more slaves) used enslaved workers to cultivate commodity crops. They also worked in the artisanal trades on large plantations and in many Southern port cities. The 18th-century wave of settlers who settled along the Appalachian Mountains and backcountry were backwoods subsistence farmers, and they seldom held enslaved people.
In the second half of the 18th century, a debate emerged over the continued importation of African slaves to the American colonies. Many in the colonies, including the Southern slavocracy, opposed further importation of slaves due to fears that it would destabilize colonies and lead to further slave rebellions. In 1772, prominent Virginians submitted a petition to the Crown requesting that the slave trade to Virginia be abolished; it was rejected. Rhode Island forbade the importation of slaves in 1774. The influential revolutionary Fairfax Resolves called for an end to the "wicked, cruel and unnatural" Atlantic slave trade. All the colonies banned slave importations during the Revolutionary War.Morison and Commager: Growth of the American Republic, pp. 212–220.
Slavery in the American Revolution and early republic
Slavery had existed for thousands of years, all around the world. In British colonies and many parts of the world it was legal, and in many societies it had become socially and economically entrenched. The ideals and principles promoted in the Enlightenment and the American Revolution helped put slavery and the desire for its abolition on the political agenda. Historian Christopher L. Brown wrote that slavery "had never been on the agenda in a serious way before" but the American Revolution "forced it to be a public question from there forward".Brown, Christopher. PBS Video "Liberty! The American Revolution", Episode 6, "Are We to be a Nation?", Twin Cities Public Television, Inc., 1997.Brown, Christopher Leslie (2006). Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, pp. 105–106, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. .Mackaman, Tom. "An Interview with Historian Gordon Wood on the New York Times "1619 Project," World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org, November 28, 2019.Bailyn, Bernard. Faces of the Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence, pp. 221-4, Vintage Books, New York, New York, 1992. .Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution, pp. 3-8, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, New York, 1992. .
After the new country's independence was secure, slavery was a topic of contention at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were plantation owners who owned large numbers of enslaved laborers; the original Constitution preserved their right to own slaves, and they gained a political advantage in owning slaves: although the enslaved of the early Republic were considered sentient property, were not permitted to vote, and had no rights to speak of, they were to be enumerated in population censuses and counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation in the national legislature, the U.S. Congress.
Slaves and free blacks who supported the Continental Army
The rebels began to offer freedom as an incentive to motivate slaves to fight on their side. Washington authorized slaves to be freed who fought with the American Continental Army. Rhode Island started enlisting slaves in 1778, and promised compensation to owners whose slaves enlisted and survived to gain freedom. During the course of the war, about one-fifth of the Northern army was black.Liberty! The American Revolution (Documentary), Episode II:Blows Must Decide: 1774–1776. 1997 Twin Cities Public Television, Inc. In 1781, Baron Closen, a German officer in the French Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment at the Battle of Yorktown, estimated the American army to be about one-quarter black. These men included both former slaves and free-born blacks. Thousands of free blacks in the Northern states fought in the state militias and Continental Army. In the South, both sides offered freedom to slaves who would perform military service. Roughly 20,000 slaves fought in the American Revolution.Hoock, Holger. Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth, pp. 95, 300–303, 305, 308–310, Crown Publishing Group, New York, 2017. .O'Reilly, Bill and Dugard, Martin. Killing England: The Brutal Struggle for American Independence, pp. 96, 308, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2017. .Ayres, Edward. "African Americans and the American Revolution" , Jamestown Settlement and American Revolution Museum at Yorktown website. Retrieved October 21, 2020.
Black Loyalists