Slavery as an institution predates the founding of any European colony in North America by millennia. African slavery in particular had been practiced by African kingdoms, Arab traders, and European powers for centuries before English settlement of the Americas. Portugal began importing enslaved Africans to Europe in the mid-15th century, and the transatlantic slave trade to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas began in earnest in the early 16th century.

English colonists in the Americas initially relied on indentured servitude — a system of contracted labor in which poor Europeans worked for a fixed term in exchange for passage and eventual freedom. This system was legally distinct from chattel slavery.

In August 1619, a Dutch privateer ship arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, carrying approximately 20 Africans who had been seized from a Portuguese slave vessel. These individuals were sold to English colonists. Their precise legal status — whether enslaved for life or indentured — remains a matter of historical dispute. See: 1619 and the Origins of American Slavery - Viewpoint.

Through the mid-17th century, Africans in Virginia occupied an ambiguous legal position. Some acquired land and freedom after periods of service. Anthony Johnson, an African who had arrived in Virginia as a servant around 1621, later owned land and, by some historical accounts, at least one enslaved African himself. Johnson is one of the more documented cases from this period. See: 1619 and the Origins of American Slavery - Viewpoint.

Virginia began codifying racial distinctions into law in the 1640s. In 1640, a Virginia court sentenced John Punch, a runaway African servant, to lifetime servitude — the first documented legal imposition of permanent, race-based enslavement in English North America.

In 1662, Virginia passed a law establishing that the status of a child followed the status of the mother (partus sequitur ventrem), departing from English common law and ensuring that children born to enslaved women would themselves be enslaved, regardless of the father's status. This law transformed slavery into a self-reproducing institution.

By the 1670s and 1680s, colonial legislatures were systematically closing the legal pathways to freedom for Africans and their descendants. Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, in which indentured servants and enslaved Africans joined forces against the colonial government, accelerated elite planters' preference for enslaved African labor over indentured white labor, as enslaved workers could not eventually demand land or rights.

Virginia's Slave Codes of 1705 consolidated prior legislation into a comprehensive legal framework defining enslaved Africans and their descendants as property with no legal personhood.

By 1700, slavery was legally established in all English mainland colonies, though it was most economically central in the Chesapeake (tobacco) and Carolina (rice and indigo) colonies. The northern colonies also participated in slavery, though on a smaller scale, and played significant roles in the slave trade itself — particularly Rhode Island merchants.

The transatlantic slave trade to the colonies grew substantially through the 18th century. Historians estimate that roughly 400,000 Africans were imported directly to what became the United States over the course of the slave trade, out of an estimated 12 million transported across the Atlantic to the Americas overall.

South Carolina's colony became one of the most heavily enslaved societies in North America. By the 1720s, enslaved Africans outnumbered white colonists in South Carolina. The Stono Rebellion of 1739, in which a group of enslaved people near Charleston killed approximately 25 white colonists before being suppressed, prompted severe tightening of the colony's slave codes.

Enlightenment philosophy circulating in the colonies and Britain began generating arguments against slavery on natural-rights grounds. Quakers in Pennsylvania issued some of the earliest formal antislavery statements, with the Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery dating to 1688. By the mid-18th century, Quaker abolitionist John Woolman was traveling through the colonies urging Friends to manumit their enslaved workers.

The American Revolution produced pronounced ideological tensions with the institution of slavery. The Declaration of Independence's assertion that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” was widely noted — by both supporters and opponents of slavery — as standing in direct contradiction to chattel slavery. See: The Founding Ideals and Slavery - Viewpoint.

Several northern states moved to abolish slavery during and immediately after the Revolution. Vermont's 1777 constitution prohibited slavery outright. Pennsylvania passed a gradual emancipation law in 1780. Massachusetts courts effectively ended slavery there through litigation by 1783, based on the state's constitution. By 1804, every state north of Delaware had passed some form of gradual emancipation legislation.

In the South, no such movement gained traction. Slavery was too deeply embedded in the plantation economy. Some individual slaveholders, including George Washington and later Robert Carter III, provided for the manumission of their enslaved workers — Washington doing so by will, effective upon his wife's death. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote extensively against slavery in the abstract, did not manumit his enslaved workers during his lifetime and only freed a handful upon his death. See: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery - Viewpoint.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 produced several provisions directly concerning slavery, though the document never used the word. The Three-Fifths Compromise counted enslaved persons as three-fifths of a free person for purposes of congressional apportionment, giving slaveholding states greater representation than their free population alone would have warranted. Article I prohibited Congress from banning the importation of enslaved people before 1808. Article IV included a fugitive slave clause requiring the return of escaped enslaved persons across state lines.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River, establishing an early geographic line between slave and free territory.

Congress banned American participation in the international slave trade in 1807, effective January 1, 1808 — the earliest date the Constitution permitted. The domestic slave trade, however, was unaffected, and continued to grow substantially.

The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney (working model 1793, patented 1794) dramatically increased the profitability of short-staple cotton cultivation, which spread rapidly across the Deep South and enormously increased demand for enslaved labor. Between 1790 and 1860, the enslaved population of the United States grew from approximately 700,000 to nearly four million.

The internal slave trade became one of the largest forced migrations in American history. As the tobacco economy of the Upper South declined relative to the cotton economy of the Deep South, enslaved people were sold in large numbers from Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Historians estimate that approximately one million enslaved people were sold south in this manner between 1790 and 1860, frequently separating families.

The admission of new states to the union generated repeated sectional crises over whether slavery would be permitted in new territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, while prohibiting slavery north of the 36°30' parallel in the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory.

Organized antislavery activity grew substantially in the 1830s. William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator in 1831 and the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, advocating for immediate, uncompensated emancipation. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped enslavement in Maryland, became the most prominent antislavery orator and writer of the era, publishing his Narrative in 1845. See: Abolitionism: Tactics and Internal Debates - Viewpoint.

Nat Turner's rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831 — in which Turner and a group of enslaved men killed approximately 55 white Virginians before being suppressed — prompted severe restrictions on the movement, assembly, and education of enslaved and free Black people across the slave states, and accelerated legislative crackdowns on antislavery activity in the South.

In the same decade, proslavery ideology shifted from a defensive posture — apologizing for slavery as a necessary evil — to an aggressive one, with Southern politicians and intellectuals such as John C. Calhoun arguing that slavery was a “positive good” for both races and the foundation of republican freedom for white men. See: Proslavery Ideology - Viewpoint.

The Underground Railroad — an informal network of people and safe houses assisting freedom seekers in escaping north — operated throughout the antebellum period. Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery in Maryland in 1849, made approximately 13 return missions to the South, guiding an estimated 70 enslaved people to freedom.

The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state but included a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act requiring citizens of free states to assist in the capture and return of escaped enslaved people, and denying accused individuals the right to testify or receive a jury trial. The law generated widespread opposition in the North and contributed to the growth of antislavery sentiment.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise and established the principle of “popular sovereignty” — allowing the settlers of new territories to vote on whether to permit slavery. The act triggered violent conflict in Kansas between pro- and antislavery settlers and accelerated the collapse of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republican Party, organized primarily on a platform of opposing slavery's extension into new territories.

The Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) held that no person of African descent could be a citizen of the United States, that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories, and that enslaved people were property protected by the Fifth Amendment. The decision met with widespread opposition in the North and approval in the South. See: Dred Scott v. Sandford - Viewpoint.

John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859, intended to spark a slave uprising, was suppressed by federal forces under Robert E. Lee. Brown was tried and executed. His raid intensified Southern concerns about Northern abolitionist violence and deepened sectional distrust.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 — a Republican who opposed slavery's extension but did not campaign on immediate abolition — prompted the secession of South Carolina, followed by six more Deep South states, before his inauguration. The Confederate States of America was formed in February 1861. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, in his “Cornerstone Speech” of March 1861, stated explicitly that slavery and the inequality of the races were the foundation of the Confederate government.

The Civil War began with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861. Lincoln initially framed the war as one for Union preservation rather than emancipation, in part to retain the loyalty of slave-holding border states that had not seceded. See: Lincoln's Views on Slavery and Emancipation - Viewpoint.

As the war progressed, enslaved people increasingly fled to Union lines, creating what Union General Benjamin Butler termed “contraband of war” — a legal designation that prevented their return to enslavers and put them to work for the Union Army. This mass self-liberation complicated any policy of limited war aims.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring enslaved people in Confederate-controlled territory free. The proclamation did not apply to border states or Union-controlled areas of the South, and its practical effect in Confederate-controlled territory remains a matter of historiographical debate. See: Lincoln's Views on Slavery and Emancipation - Viewpoint. It transformed the Union war aim to include emancipation, authorized the enlistment of Black men in the Union Army, and complicated any European recognition of the Confederacy. Approximately 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army and 18,000 in the Navy before the war's end.

As Union forces advanced, the Proclamation's effect expanded. By the war's end in April 1865, slavery had been effectively destroyed across the South. The last enslaved people in Texas were informed of their freedom on June 19, 1865 — an event commemorated as Juneteenth.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery throughout the United States except as punishment for a crime, was ratified in December 1865.

The abolition of slavery did not resolve the legal, economic, or social status of four million formerly enslaved people. The period of Reconstruction (1865–1877) saw the federal government attempt to reintegrate the former Confederate states and define the civil status of freedpeople.

The Freedmen's Bureau, established in 1865, provided food, medical care, and some legal assistance to formerly enslaved people and poor white Southerners, and oversaw labor contracts. It also established schools — a priority of freedpeople who had been legally prohibited from literacy under slavery.

Southern state governments under presidential Reconstruction (under Andrew Johnson) quickly passed “Black Codes” — laws restricting the movement, labor, and legal rights of freedpeople in ways that approximated the conditions of slavery. See: Black Codes and Neo-Slavery - Viewpoint.

Congressional Reconstruction imposed military oversight on the South and produced the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), granting citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and guaranteeing equal protection of the laws, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), prohibiting denial of the vote on the basis of race. Black men voted and held office throughout the South during Reconstruction.

Reconstruction ended through a combination of political compromise, Southern white violence against Black voters and officeholders, and Northern exhaustion with Southern affairs. The Compromise of 1877, which resolved the disputed 1876 presidential election, effectively ended federal enforcement of Black civil rights in the South. The Reconstruction amendments remained in the Constitution but were rendered largely inoperative in the South through a combination of violence, fraud, and legal mechanisms including poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses.

• Transatlantic Slave Trade - History
• Reconstruction - History
• Jim Crow - History
• Civil Rights Movement - History
• Abolitionism - History
• American Civil War - History
• Freedmen's Bureau - History
• Confederate States of America - History
• Indentured Servitude in Colonial America - History
• Slavery in Africa and the Arab World - History
• Reparations - History