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.S. 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.S. 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.S., 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.S. 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.S. 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."

Background

thumb|Image marketing 18th-century tobacco produced by enslaved laborers in the [[Colony of Virginia (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)]]

During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all the colonies. People enslaved in the North typically worked as house servants, artisans, laborers, and craftsmen, mostly in cities. Many men worked on the docks and in shipping. In 1703, more than 42% of New York City households held enslaved people in bondage, the second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies, behind only Charleston, South Carolina. Enslaved people were also used as agricultural workers in farm communities, especially in the South, but also in upstate New York and Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. By 1770, there were 397,924 black people out of a population of 2.17 million in what soon became the United States. The slaves of the colonial era were unevenly distributed from north to south: 14,867 lived in New England, where they were 3% of the population; 34,679 lived in the Middle Colonies, where they were 6% of the population; and 347,378 in the five Southern Colonies, where they were 31% of the population.

The South developed an agricultural economy dependent on commodity crops. Its planters rapidly acquired a significantly higher number and proportion of enslaved people, as its commodity crops were labor-intensive. Early on, enslaved people in the South worked primarily on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco (cotton did not become a major crop until after the 1790s). In 1720, about 65% of South Carolina's population was enslaved. Planters (defined by historians in the Upper South as those who held 20 or more slaves) used enslaved workers to cultivate commodity crops. They also worked in the artisanal trades on large plantations and in many Southern port cities. The 18th-century wave of settlers who settled along the Appalachian Mountains and backcountry were backwoods subsistence farmers, and they seldom held enslaved people.

thumb|"Entered at the Custom-House Charleston for the week of the 28th instant...From AfricaNew Negroes, 371. Rum, 7 punch. Ivory, small quantity" (Charleston Daily Courier, December 30, 1805)

In the second half of the 18th century, a debate emerged over the continued importation of African slaves to the American colonies. Many in the colonies, including the Southern slavocracy, opposed further importation of slaves due to fears that it would destabilize colonies and lead to further slave rebellions. In 1772, prominent Virginians submitted a petition to the Crown requesting that the slave trade to Virginia be abolished; it was rejected. Rhode Island forbade the importation of slaves in 1774. The influential revolutionary Fairfax Resolves called for an end to the "wicked, cruel and unnatural" Atlantic slave trade. All the colonies banned slave importations during the Revolutionary War.

Slavery in the American Revolution and early republic

thumb|[[The Old Plantation, watercolor attributed to John Rose, possibly painted 1785–1795 in the Beaufort District of South Carolina (Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum) ]]

thumb|A map of the [[Thirteen Colonies in 1770, showing number of slaves in each colony and percentage of colony's total population held as slaves]]

Slavery had existed for thousands of years, all around the world. In the United States and many parts of the world it was legal, and in many societies it had become socially and economically entrenched. The ideals and principles promoted in the Enlightenment and the American Revolution helped put slavery and the desire for its abolition on the political agenda. Historian Christopher L. Brown wrote that slavery "had never been on the agenda in a serious way before" but the American Revolution "forced it to be a public question from there forward".

After the new country's independence was secure, slavery was a topic of contention at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were plantation owners who owned large numbers of enslaved laborers; the original Constitution preserved their right to own slaves, and they gained a political advantage in owning slaves: although the enslaved of the early Republic were considered sentient property, were not permitted to vote, and had no rights to speak of, they were to be enumerated in population censuses and counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation in the national legislature, the U.S. Congress.

Slaves and free blacks who supported the Continental Army

thumb|200px|This postage stamp, which was created at the time of the Bicentennial, honors [[Salem Poor, who was an enslaved African-American man who purchased his freedom, became a soldier, and rose to fame as a war hero during the Battle of Bunker Hill.]]

The rebels began to offer freedom as an incentive to motivate slaves to fight on their side. Washington authorized slaves to be freed who fought with the American Continental Army. Rhode Island started enlisting slaves in 1778, and promised compensation to owners whose slaves enlisted and survived to gain freedom. During the course of the war, about one-fifth of the Northern army was black. In 1781, Baron Closen, a German officer in the French Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment at the Battle of Yorktown, estimated the American army to be about one-quarter black. These men included both former slaves and free-born blacks. Thousands of free blacks in the Northern states fought in the state militias and Continental Army. In the South, both sides offered freedom to slaves who would perform military service. Roughly 20,000 slaves fought in the American Revolution.

Black Loyalists

After the Revolutionary War broke out, the British realized they lacked the manpower necessary to prosecute the war. In response, British commanders began issuing proclamations to Patriot-owned slaves, offering freedom if they fled to British lines and assisted the British war effort. Such proclamations were repeatedly issued over the course of the conflict, which resulted in up to 100,000 American slaves fleeing to British lines. Self-emancipated slaves who reached British lines were organized into a variety of military units, which served in all theaters of the war. Formerly enslaved women and children, in lieu of military service, worked instead as laborers and domestic servants. At the end of the war, freed slaves in British lines either evacuated to other British colonies or to Britain itself, were re-enslaved by the victorious Americans, or fled into the countryside.

thumb|Memorial to Lord Dunmore's [[Ethiopian Regiment of Black Loyalists who wore clothing inscribed with the words "Liberty to Slaves"]]

In early 1775, the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth of his intention to free slaves owned by American Patriots in case they staged a rebellion. On November 7, 1775, Dunmore issued Dunmore's Proclamation, which promised freedom to any slaves of American patriots who would leave their masters and join the British forces. Historians agree that the proclamation was chiefly designed for practical rather than moral reasons, and slaves owned by American Loyalists were unaffected by the proclamation. About 1,500 slaves owned by patriots escaped and joined Dunmore's forces. A total of 18 slaves fled George Washington's plantation, one of whom, Harry, served in Dunmore's all-black loyalist regiment called "the Black Pioneers". Most died of disease before they could do any fighting, but three hundred of these freed slaves made it to freedom in Britain. Historian Jill Lepore writes that "between eighty and a hundred thousand (nearly one in five black slaves) left their homes ... betting on British victory", but Cassandra Pybus states that between 20,000 and 30,000 is a more realistic number of slaves who defected to the British side during the war.

Many slaves took advantage of the disruption of war to escape from their plantations to British lines or to fade into the general population. Upon their first sight of British vessels, thousands of slaves in Maryland and Virginia fled from their owners. Throughout the South, losses of slaves were high, with many due to escapes. Slaves also escaped throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic, with many joining the British who had occupied New York. Washington hired a slave catcher during the war, and at its end he pressed the British to return the slaves to their masters.

No Southern state abolished slavery, but some individual owners, more than a handful, freed their slaves by personal decision, often providing for manumission in wills but sometimes filing deeds or court papers to free individuals. Numerous slaveholders who freed their slaves cited revolutionary ideals in their documents; others freed slaves as a promised reward for service. From 1790 to 1810, the proportion of blacks free in the United States increased from 8% to 13.5%, and in the Upper South from less than 1% to nearly 10% as a result of these actions.

Starting in 1777, the states outlawed the importation of slaves one by one. They all acted to end the international trade, but, after the war, it was reopened in North Carolina (opened until 1794) and Georgia (opened until 1798) and South Carolina (opened until 1787, and then reopened again in 1803.) In 1807, the United States Congress acted on President Thomas Jefferson's advice and, without controversy, made importing slaves from abroad a federal crime, effective the first day that the United States Constitution permitted this prohibition: January 1, 1808.

During the Revolution and in the following years, all states north of Maryland ( the Mason–Dixon line) took steps towards abolishing slavery. In 1777, the independent Vermont Republic passed a state constitution prohibiting slavery. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society, led in part by Benjamin Franklin, was founded in 1775, and Pennsylvania began gradual abolition in 1780. In 1783, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled in Commonwealth v. Jennison that slavery was unconstitutional under the state's new 1780 constitution. New Hampshire began gradual emancipation in 1783, while Connecticut and Rhode Island followed suit in 1784. The New York Manumission Society, which was led by John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr, was founded in 1785. New York state began gradual emancipation in 1799, and New Jersey did the same in 1804.

In 1787, the Northwest Territory was established by the Continental Congress, and it excluded slavery. It became the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, as well as part of Minnesota. It doubled the size of the United States. As each new state wrote its constitution, slavery was prohibited, although Illinois allowed the presence of slaves temporarily brought in by their owners.

Constitution of the United States

thumb|Advertisement in [[Pennsylvania Gazette, May 24, 1796, seeking the return of Oney Judge, a fugitive slave who had escaped from the household of George Washington]]

Slavery was a contentious issue in the writing and approval of the Constitution of the United States. The words "slave" and "slavery" did not appear in the Constitution as originally adopted, although several provisions clearly referred to slaves and slavery. Until the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865, the Constitution did not prohibit slavery.

Section 9 of Article I forbade the federal government from prohibiting the importation of slaves, described as "such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit", for twenty years after the Constitution's ratification (until January 1, 1808). The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Thomas Jefferson (who had called for its enactment in his 1806 State of the Union address), went into effect on January 1, 1808, the earliest date on which the importation of slaves could be prohibited under the Constitution.

The delegates approved the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution (Article IV, section 2, clause 3), which prohibited states from freeing those "held to Service or Labour" (meaning slaves, indentures, and apprentices) who fled to them from another state and required that they be returned to their owners. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave effect to the Fugitive Slave Clause. Salmon P. Chase considered the Fugitive Slave Acts unconstitutional because "The Fugitive Slave Clause was a compact among the states, not a grant of power to the federal government".

Three-fifths Compromise

thumb|right|[[John Trumbull's 1780 portrait George Washington also depicts a man believed to be Washington's enslaved valet William Lee (Metropolitan Museum of Art 24.109.88)]]

In a section negotiated by James Madison of Virginia, Section 2 of Article I designated "other persons" (slaves) to be added to the total of the state's free population, at the rate of three-fifths of their total number, to establish the state's official population for the purposes of apportionment of congressional representation and federal taxation. The "Three-Fifths Compromise" was reached after a debate in which delegates from Southern (slave-holding) states argued that slaves should be counted in the census just as all other persons were while delegates from Northern (free) states countered that slaves should not be counted at all. The compromise strengthened the political power of Southern states, as three-fifths of the (non-voting) slave population was counted for congressional apportionment and in the Electoral College, although it did not strengthen Southern states as much as it would have had the Constitution provided for counting all persons, whether slave or free, equally.

In addition, many parts of the country were tied to the Southern economy. As the historian James Oliver Horton noted, prominent slaveholder politicians and the commodity crops of the South had a strong influence on United States politics and economy. Horton said,

<blockquote>in the 72 years between the election of George Washington and the election of Abraham Lincoln, 50 of those years [had] a slaveholder as president of the United States, and, for that whole period of time, there was never a person elected to a second term who was not a slaveholder. One result was that most of the justices appointed to the Supreme Court were slave owners. The planter elite dominated the Southern congressional delegations and the United States presidency for nearly fifty years. Slaves were the labor force of the South, but slave ownership (and the dispossession and expulsion of Native Americans from their lands) was also the foundation upon which American white supremacy was constructed. Historian Walter Johnson argues that "one of the many miraculous things a slave could do was make a household white...", meaning that the value of whiteness in America was in some ways measured by the ability to purchase and maintain black slaves. The enslaved labor force of the United States, while stereotypically drawn as field labor for the production of cash crops like sugar and cotton, performed nearly every type of skilled labor sought by the economy. An examination of 1200 runaway slave ads published in Tennessee found 25 blacksmiths, 18 carpenters, and 13 shoemakers, as well as barbers, boat builders, bricklayers, a "conjurer or fortune teller," cooks, coopers, cotton mill engineers, dressmakers (often called mantuamakers), hack drivers, iron furnace engineers, milliners, millwrights, ministers, musicians (most commonly of the fiddle/violin), a racehorse trainer, ostlers, plasterers, painters, seamstresses, stonemasons, tanners, a "turner and tin-plate workman," wagoners, waiters, and weavers. Complex as it was, historians do know, however, that slavery in the United States was not a "deferred-compensation trade school opportunity." Harriet Beecher Stowe summarized slavery in the United States in 1853:

Justifications in the South

thumb|One of the many defenses of American slavery was that the imagined "[[Paternalism#Paternalism and slavery|benevolent paternalism" of planters was beneficial or necessary (Detail, Anti-Slavery Almanac, 1840)]]

American slavery as "a necessary evil"

In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the institution as a "necessary evil". At that time, it was feared that emancipation of black slaves would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the continuation of slavery. On April 22, 1820, Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, wrote in a letter to John Holmes, that with slavery,

In his influential Democracy in America (1835), the French writer and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville expressed opposition to slavery while observing its effects on American society. He felt that a multiracial society without slavery was untenable, as he believed that prejudice against blacks increased as they were granted more rights (for example, in Northern states). He believed that white Southerners' attitudes, and the concentration of the black population in the South, were bringing the white and black populations to a state of equilibrium and were a danger to both races. Because of the racial differences between master and slave, he believed the latter could not be emancipated.

In a letter to his wife dated December 27, 1856, in reaction to a message from President Franklin Pierce, Robert E. Lee wrote,

American slavery as "a positive good"

thumb|Confederate $100 bill, 1862–63, showing slaves farming; there were over 125 carefully wrought etchings of laboring slaves made for currency issued by 19th-century Southern banks and the Confederate States, images that provided reassurance that slavery "was protected both by law and by tradition." In 1860, Southern slaveholders held slaves as personal property collectively valued at more than $3 billion (about $97 billion in 2022) ([[National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History)]]

thumb|Slave shackle found while digging in a property on [[Baronne Street in New Orleans; donated to the Kid Ory Historic House museum]]

As the abolitionist movement's agitation increased and the area developed for plantations expanded, apologies for slavery became fainter in the South. Leaders then described slavery as a beneficial scheme of labor management. In a famous 1837 Senate speech, John C. Calhoun declared that slavery was "instead of an evil, a good—a positive good". Calhoun supported his view with the following reasoning: in every civilized society one portion of the community must live on the labor of another; learning, science, and the arts are built upon leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his master and mistress and looked after in his old age, is better off than the free laborers of Europe; and under the slave system conflicts between capital and labor are avoided. The advantages of slavery in this respect, he concluded, "will become more and more manifest, if left undisturbed by interference from without, as the country advances in wealth and numbers".

thumb|Newspaper listings for [[New Orleans slave market|New Orleans slave depots at Barrone and Gravier Street, and at 54, 58, 68, and 78 Barrone represented but a slim fraction of the trade in the city (New Orleans Crescent, January 10, 1861)]]

South Carolina army officer, planter, and railroad executive James Gadsden called slavery "a social blessing" and abolitionists "the greatest curse of the nation". Gadsden supported South Carolina's secession in 1850 and led efforts to split California into two states, one slave and one free.

Southern writers James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh also began to portray slavery as a positive good. They presented several arguments to defend the practice. Like Calhoun, Hammond argued that slavery was needed to build the rest of society. In a speech to the Senate on March 4, 1858, Hammond developed his "Mudsill Theory", saying: "Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill." Hammond said that, in every class, one group must accomplish all the menial duties, because without them society's leaders could not progress. Without the South, "He [a slave] would become an insufferable burden to society" and "Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery."