Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of chattel slavery, under which enslaved people - primarily of African descent, and in some colonies of Native American descent - were held as property, bought and sold, and compelled to labor without compensation. The institution existed in the British colonies of North America from at least 1619 and persisted in the United States until ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on 6 December 1865. At its peak, the enslaved population numbered approximately four million people. The institution shaped the economic, social, legal, and political development of the country and remains a subject of active scholarly debate and public controversy.

Slavery in the Americas emerged within a broader Atlantic context of European colonization, the African slave trade, and plantation agriculture. The first documented arrival of enslaved Africans in English North America occurred at Point Comfort, Virginia, in August 1619. Over the following century, colonial legislatures formalized the legal status of enslaved persons, distinguishing chattel slavery from indentured servitude and establishing hereditary, race-based enslavement in law. By the time of American independence, slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies, though its economic centrality varied by region. The northern states moved toward gradual abolition during and after the Revolutionary era, while the institution expanded dramatically in the South following the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the rise of plantation cotton agriculture. For a fuller treatment, see Slavery in the United States - History.

The domestic slave trade was one of the largest forced migrations in American history. Between 1790 and 1860, an estimated one million enslaved people were transported from the upper South to the lower South, frequently severing family ties. Enslaved people performed agricultural labor on large plantations producing cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, and indigo, as well as domestic service, skilled trades, and industrial labor. Legal codes across the slaveholding states - collectively called slave codes - restricted the movement, literacy, assembly, and legal standing of enslaved people. Resistance to enslavement took many forms, including self-liberation, rebellion, sabotage, and cultural preservation. Major documented rebellions include those led by Gabriel Prosser (1800), Denmark Vesey (1822), and Nat Turner (1831).

Opposition to slavery organized under the abolitionist movement, which grew in visibility and urgency from the 1830s onward, drawing on religious, natural-rights, and humanitarian arguments. The legal and political conflict over slavery's expansion into new territories dominated American politics through the 1850s. The secession of eleven southern states and the Civil War (1861-1865) produced the conditions under which emancipation became federal policy. President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863 declared enslaved people in Confederate-held territory free. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified on 6 December 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States, with the exception of court-ordered criminal punishment. Reconstruction-era legislation further defined the citizenship and civil rights of formerly enslaved people, though these gains were substantially curtailed in subsequent decades. See American Civil War for the military and political conflict.

Historians, economists, legal scholars, and public intellectuals continue to debate numerous aspects of slavery's legacy and interpretation. Points of active scholarly and public dispute include the centrality of slavery to early American capitalism; the moral and material responsibility borne by contemporary institutions and individuals; the appropriate scope and form of reparations; the accuracy and framing of contested historical narratives such as those in the 1619 Project; and the role of slavery in motivating secession relative to other political and economic factors. These disputes reflect genuine disagreement about causation, moral philosophy, and the relationship between historical injustice and present-day policy. See Slavery in the United States - Debate for structured treatment of these questions.

There is broad consensus among historians that slavery was a central institution in early American economic and political development, that it was race-based and hereditary, and that it ended through constitutional amendment in 1865. Consensus among economists on the precise contribution of slave-produced commodities to national wealth, and among legal scholars on the scope of institutional liability, is narrower and more contested. See Slavery in the United States - Historical Consensus and Slavery in the United States - Economic Consensus.

• Reparations Required - The view that the United States government and/or private institutions bear ongoing material obligation to the descendants of enslaved people.
• Reparations Opposed - The view that reparations are impractical, unjust, or counterproductive, on grounds ranging from attribution difficulty to individual-rights objections.
• Slavery and Capitalism Thesis - The view, associated with the “New History of Capitalism,” that American slavery was constitutive of, rather than peripheral to, modern capitalist development.
• Critique of the Slavery-Capitalism Thesis - The view that the capitalism thesis overstates slavery's role and relies on contested methodology.
• 1619 Project Framing - The view that 1619 rather than 1776 should be understood as a founding moment of American history, with slavery placed at the center of the national narrative.
• Critique of the 1619 Project - The view that the 1619 Project contains historical errors and imposes an ideological frame that distorts the historical record.
• Lost Cause Framing - The view, originating in post-Civil War southern apologetics, that minimizes slavery as a cause of secession and the war, emphasizing instead states' rights, regional culture, and the honor of Confederate soldiers.
• Critique of the Lost Cause - The view that Lost Cause narratives are historically inaccurate and function ideologically to rehabilitate the Confederacy and obscure slavery's central role.

• Slavery in the United States - History
• Slavery in the United States - Debate
• Slavery in the United States - Historical Consensus
• Slavery in the United States - Economic Consensus
• American Civil War
• Reconstruction
• Abolitionist Movement
• Thirteenth Amendment
• Reparations - Debate
• 1619 Project

1. Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Harvard University Press, 1998.
2. Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2014.
3. Fogel, Robert William, and Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Little, Brown, 1974.
4. Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Harvard University Press, 1999.
5. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press, 1988.
6. Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. W. W. Norton, 2013.
7. Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Harvard University Press, 2007.
8. U.S. National Archives. “13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” Ratified 6 December 1865.