Slavery in the United States

The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America 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 U . states until abolition in 1865, and 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 . Revenue Cutter Service (Coast Guard) began to enforce the ban on the high seas. It has been estimated that before 1820 a majority of serving congressmen owned slaves, and that about 30% of congressmen who were 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 ., 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. As the U . 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 by the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession were the subject of major political crises and compromises. 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 . 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."