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This article traces the history of slavery in America from its introduction in the colonial period through its legal abolition and immediate aftermath. For the ongoing debate over slavery's relationship to the founding of the United States, see American Revolution - Slavery Debate. For treatment of the philosophical tensions embedded in founding-era documents, see Declaration of Independence - Founding Contradiction Viewpoint. Related articles: Slavery - History, Reconstruction - History, Civil War - History.

In August 1619, a Portuguese-flagged vessel arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, carrying approximately twenty to thirty captive Africans who had been seized from a Spanish slave ship in the Gulf of Mexico. These individuals were sold or exchanged to English colonists of the Virginia Company. While the precise legal status of these first Africans in English North America remains debated, the event marks the earliest documented arrival of enslaved or semi-enslaved Africans in what would become the United States.

Through the mid-seventeenth century, the legal boundary between indentured servitude and lifetime chattel slavery remained fluid in Virginia and Maryland. African laborers occupied ambiguous positions, with some acquiring freedom, land, and even servants of their own. John Punch became the subject of a 1640 Virginia court ruling that sentenced him, an escaped African servant, to lifetime servitude-one of the earliest recorded legal distinctions drawn along racial lines in the English colonies.

Virginia's legislature began codifying racial slavery systematically in the 1660s. The Virginia Act of 1662 established that the status of a child followed the condition of the mother (partus sequitur ventrem), departing from English common law and ensuring that children born of enslaved women would themselves be enslaved regardless of the father's status. The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 consolidated earlier piecemeal legislation into a comprehensive legal structure defining enslaved Africans and their descendants as property.

Maryland, the Carolinas, and other colonies followed with comparable statutes. South Carolina's Slave Code of 1696, modeled on Barbados precedents, was among the most elaborate in the mainland colonies, regulating movement, punishment, and the conditions of manumission.

By 1700, enslaved Africans were present in all English North American colonies, though their numbers and economic centrality varied considerably by region.

The eighteenth century saw an acceleration of the transatlantic slave trade to Britain's North American colonies. The Royal African Company's monopoly on the English slave trade had ended in 1698, opening the trade to private merchants and spurring dramatic increases in importations. Between 1700 and 1775, an estimated 280,000 to 300,000 enslaved Africans were imported directly to the colonies that would become the United States, the large majority entering through the ports of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Chesapeake region.

The rice economy of coastal South Carolina and Georgia became heavily dependent on enslaved labor, drawing particularly on the skills of West Africans from regions such as the Windward Coast and Sierra Leone, where wet-rice cultivation was practiced. Planters in the Lowcountry actively sought enslaved people from specific African regions for their agricultural expertise.

In the Chesapeake colonies, the tobacco economy relied on large enslaved workforces on plantations. By mid-century, slavery was the dominant labor system across the southern colonies. In the northern colonies-New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania-slavery was practiced on a smaller scale, concentrated in domestic service, maritime trades, and artisan work, though northern merchants participated extensively in financing and supplying the trade.

Slave revolts and conspiracies occurred throughout the colonial period. The Stono Rebellion of September 1739 in South Carolina was the largest slave uprising in colonial British America. Led by an enslaved man known as Jemmy, a group of approximately twenty enslaved Africans marched south toward Spanish Florida, killing some twenty white colonists before being suppressed by the colonial militia. The rebellion prompted South Carolina to enact harsher provisions in its slave code and to impose a temporary moratorium on slave imports.

The New York Conspiracy of 1741, also called the “Great Negro Plot,” resulted in the execution of thirty-four people-seventeen of them black and thirteen white-after authorities suspected a coordinated arson and uprising plot. Historians have subsequently disputed both the scale of the alleged conspiracy and the reliability of the confessions obtained.

Enlightenment thought and the emergence of evangelical Protestant movements, particularly among Quakers, introduced new arguments against slavery in the mid-eighteenth century. Quakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey produced some of the earliest organized antislavery protests in the Atlantic world; John Woolman's Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754) and Anthony Benezet's writings circulated widely. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting formally condemned slaveholding among its members in 1776.

The revolutionary period brought the tension between slavery and the colonists' stated principles of liberty into public discourse. Enslaved people, free blacks, and a number of white colonial thinkers noted the contradiction between declarations of natural rights and the continued practice of chattel slavery.

In 1773 and 1774, enslaved Africans in Massachusetts submitted petitions to the colonial legislature requesting freedom, invoking natural rights language parallel to that used by white patriots. Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved poet in Boston, published verse that engaged themes of liberty and captivity. Lord Dunmore's Proclamation of November 1775 offered freedom to enslaved men owned by rebel colonists who escaped and joined British forces; an estimated 800 to 2,000 enslaved people responded by fleeing to British lines in Virginia alone.

Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence (1776) included a passage condemning King George III for fostering the slave trade. The Continental Congress deleted this passage before adoption. The Declaration as ratified proclaimed that “all men are created equal” and possessed unalienable rights, language that abolitionists would cite repeatedly in subsequent decades. For discussion of the interpretive debate over the Declaration's relationship to slavery, see Declaration of Independence - Founding Contradiction Viewpoint.

Several northern states moved toward abolition during and immediately after the Revolution. Vermont's constitution of 1777 prohibited slavery. Pennsylvania passed a gradual emancipation law in 1780. Massachusetts courts interpreted the state's 1780 constitution as prohibiting slavery, effectively ending the practice there by the mid-1780s. Connecticut and Rhode Island passed gradual emancipation statutes in 1784. New York and New Jersey delayed comparable legislation until 1799 and 1804, respectively.

In the southern states, no general emancipation occurred. Some slaveholders voluntarily manumitted enslaved people during and after the war, including George Washington, who provided for the freedom of enslaved people at Mount Vernon in his 1799 will. The number of free black people in the upper South increased substantially in the 1780s and 1790s, partly from such individual manumissions.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 addressed slavery in several provisions without naming it explicitly. The Three-Fifths Clause (Article I, Section 2) counted three-fifths of the enslaved population for purposes of apportioning congressional representation and direct taxes. The Slave Trade Clause (Article I, Section 9) prohibited Congress from banning the importation of enslaved people before 1808. The Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2) required that persons “held to Service or Labour” who escaped to free states be returned to their owners. For debate over the constitutional settlement and its long-term consequences, see American Revolution - Slavery Debate.

The new federal government operated within the constitutional framework that protected slavery. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, establishing a legal mechanism for the return of escaped enslaved people across state lines.

In 1793, Eli Whitney developed the cotton gin, a mechanical device that dramatically reduced the labor required to separate cotton fiber from seed. The invention accelerated the spread of cotton cultivation across the Deep South and increased demand for enslaved labor. Cotton production rose from roughly 1.5 million pounds in 1790 to over 85 million pounds by 1810.

Congress acted on the constitutional provision permitting it and passed legislation in 1807 (effective January 1, 1808) prohibiting the importation of enslaved people from Africa. The internal domestic slave trade continued and expanded. Slave-trading firms based in Virginia, Maryland, and the upper South transported an estimated one million enslaved people to the Deep South between 1790 and 1860, disrupting existing enslaved communities and family structures across the region.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 represented the first major congressional negotiation over the geographic limits of slavery's expansion. Missouri was admitted as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the Senate balance. Slavery was prohibited in the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36°30' latitude. The compromise deferred but did not resolve the political conflict over slavery's westward extension.

Gabriel's Conspiracy (1800) in Virginia and the German Coast Uprising (1811) in Louisiana were among the largest planned or executed slave revolts of the period. Gabriel, an enslaved blacksmith near Richmond, organized a large-scale insurrection that was betrayed before it could be executed; he and approximately twenty-five co-conspirators were executed. The 1811 German Coast uprising, led by Charles Deslondes, involved several hundred enslaved people and was suppressed by militia and federal troops, with dozens killed in the fighting and subsequent executions.

Nat Turner's Rebellion of August 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia, was the deadliest slave insurrection in United States history. Turner, an enslaved preacher, led a group that killed approximately fifty-five white men, women, and children before being suppressed. Turner was captured, tried, and hanged. Virginia's legislature subsequently debated and narrowly rejected gradual emancipation, instead tightening restrictions on enslaved and free black people. The rebellion intensified white southern defensiveness about slavery and accelerated the development of a proslavery intellectual and political position.

William Lloyd Garrison founded the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in January 1831 and helped establish the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. The society and its auxiliaries organized petition campaigns, lecture circuits, and publishing efforts to demand immediate emancipation. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped enslavement in Maryland in 1838, became the most prominent African-American voice in the movement, publishing his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845 and founding the antislavery newspaper The North Star in 1847.

The Underground Railroad-a network of routes, safe houses, and individuals who assisted escaped enslaved people in reaching free states or Canada-operated throughout the antebellum period. Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in 1849 and subsequently made approximately thirteen missions back into the South, assisting an estimated seventy enslaved people to freedom. Estimates of the total number of enslaved people who reached freedom via the network vary considerably among historians.

Southern apologists for slavery elaborated a positive defense of the institution in the 1830s through the 1850s. John C. Calhoun declared in the Senate in 1837 that slavery was “a good-a positive good.” George Fitzhugh's Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857) argued that enslaved Africans in the South fared better than nominally free industrial laborers in the North. These arguments supplemented earlier biblical and paternalist defenses of the institution.

The annexation of Texas (1845), the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), and the acquisition of vast western territories sharpened political conflict over slavery's expansion. The Wilmot Proviso, introduced in 1846, would have banned slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico; it passed the House but failed in the Senate. The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state, organized the remaining territory without an immediate determination of slavery's status, and enacted a more stringent Fugitive Slave Act requiring northern citizens to assist in the return of escaped enslaved people.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, authored by Senator Stephen Douglas, repealed the 36°30' line established by the Missouri Compromise and provided that settlers in the new territories would determine the question of slavery through popular sovereignty. The act produced violent conflict in Kansas Territory between proslavery and antislavery settlers (“Bleeding Kansas”) and accelerated the collapse of the Whig Party and the formation of the Republican Party, which was organized on a platform opposing slavery's extension into the territories.

The Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, held that Congress had no constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in the territories, that the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional, and that persons of African descent-whether enslaved or free-were not citizens of the United States and had no standing to bring suit in federal court. The decision was widely condemned in the North and celebrated in the South.

John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859 was intended to precipitate a general slave insurrection. Brown and his small party were captured by federal troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee; Brown was tried for treason and executed in December 1859. The raid deepened southern fears of northern-sponsored slave rebellions.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 on a platform opposing slavery's expansion prompted the secession of South Carolina in December 1860, followed by six other Deep South states by February 1861. The Confederate States of America, formed in Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861, adopted a constitution that explicitly protected slavery. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared in his “Cornerstone Speech” of March 1861 that slavery was the “cornerstone” of the new government and the “great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”

The Civil War began with Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861. Lincoln initially framed the war as a contest to preserve the Union rather than to abolish slavery. As the war progressed, however, the status of enslaved people became a central military and political question. Enslaved people in Confederate states fled in large numbers toward Union lines; military commanders adopted varying policies toward them, and Congress passed Confiscation Acts in 1861 and 1862 that moved toward treating freedom as a war measure.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring enslaved people in Confederate states in rebellion to be “thenceforward, and forever free.” The Proclamation did not apply to enslaved people in border states remaining in the Union or in portions of the Confederacy already under Union control. It authorized the enlistment of formerly enslaved men in the Union Army; approximately 180,000 black men served in the United States Colored Troops by the war's end.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress in January 1865 and ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States except as punishment for crime.

The period immediately following legal emancipation involved the transformation of formerly enslaved people's legal status and the reorganization of southern labor. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen's Bureau), established in March 1865, provided food, clothing, medical care, legal adjudication, and educational support to formerly enslaved people and white refugees in the South.

The former Confederate states enacted Black Codes beginning in 1865, laws that restricted the movement, labor, and legal rights of formerly enslaved people. Mississippi's and South Carolina's codes, among the most restrictive, required black workers to sign annual labor contracts with white employers and subjected those who did not to arrest for vagrancy.

Congressional Reconstruction, initiated in 1867, placed the former Confederate states under military administration and conditioned readmission to the Union on ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which defined all persons born or naturalized in the United States as citizens and guaranteed equal protection of the laws, and subsequently the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), which prohibited denial of the vote on grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The withdrawal of federal troops from the South following the Compromise of 1877 and the end of Reconstruction left the legal and social arrangements governing the formerly enslaved population and their descendants to be determined primarily by the governments of the former Confederate states. The history of those subsequent arrangements falls under Reconstruction - History and Jim Crow - History.

The relative weight of economic interest, political ideology, and racial beliefs as causes of the Civil War remains a subject of contested historical interpretation; see civil-war-causes-controversy.

Whether the Constitutional Convention's accommodation of slavery was a pragmatic compromise necessary for Union or a fundamental corruption of the founding is debated among historians and constitutional scholars; see American Revolution - Slavery Debate and Declaration of Independence - Founding Contradiction Viewpoint.

The degree to which enslaved people's resistance-from day-to-day acts to organized rebellion-shaped the pace and character of emancipation is disputed among historians of slavery; see slavery-resistance-agency-controversy.

Some historians argue that the Emancipation Proclamation was primarily a military and diplomatic measure rather than a humanitarian one, while others emphasize its transformative legal and moral significance; see emancipation-proclamation-interpretation-controversy.

The extent of northern complicity in the slave economy-through textile manufacturing, finance, and the domestic slave trade-and its implications for historical responsibility is a contested question among economic historians; see slavery-northern-complicity-controversy.

1. John Thornton, “The African Experience of the '20. and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia in 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1998): 421-434. 2. Warren M. Billings, “The Cases of Fernando and Elizabeth Key: A Note on the Status of Blacks in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1973): 467-474. 3. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). 4. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 5. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974). 6. Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 2005). 7. Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005). 8. Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 9. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 10. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 11. Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 12. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). 13. Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). 14. Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015). 15. Drew Gilpin Faust, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). 16. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 17. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 18. Ira Berlin et al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, series 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982-1993). 19. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). 20. Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979).