Slavery in America

Chattel slavery treated enslaved people as movable property that could be bought, sold, mortgaged, and inherited. In the American colonies and the United States, it became tied to race: by law, the children of enslaved mothers were enslaved for life, and Africans and their descendants were presumed to be slaves.

Origins. The first documented Africans in English Virginia arrived in 1619, captured from a Portuguese slave ship. Their status was at first unsettled, but over the seventeenth century colonial laws made slavery lifelong, hereditary, and racial. Slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies, North and South. Of the roughly 12.5 million Africans forced onto ships for the Middle Passage between 1517 and 1867, about 388,000 landed in North America; most enslaved Americans in later generations were born in the United States.

The founding. The Revolution’s language of liberty inspired the Northern states to adopt gradual emancipation laws, but the Constitution protected slavery through the three-fifths clause, a twenty-year guarantee for the slave trade, and the fugitive slave clause. Congress banned the international slave trade in 1808.

The cotton South. In the nineteenth century slavery spread west with cotton, onto land opened by Indian removal. By 1860, about one in five families in the slave states owned enslaved people — nearly half in Mississippi and South Carolina — and enslaved families were routinely broken apart by sale.

Resistance. Enslaved people resisted every day — slowing work, preserving family ties and culture, learning to read, and escaping. Freedom seekers fled by the thousands, aided by the networks known as the Underground Railroad. Black and white abolitionists, among them Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, made slavery a national moral issue.

Crisis and abolition. Disputes over slavery’s expansion — in the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott decision — split the nation and led to secession and civil war. The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) ended slavery.

• Virginia’s tobacco plantations, which turned to enslaved labor in the 1600s.
• New York’s gradual emancipation, under which Sojourner Truth was not legally freed until 1827.
• The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required free states to help capture people who had escaped.
• The slaveholding presidents of the early republic, including Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson.