Other meanings of Slavery
American history
Slavery in the United States was a system of hereditary, racialized bondage that deprived millions of African Americans of liberty, family autonomy, legal personhood, and control over their labor. It developed in English North America during the seventeenth century, expanded with plantation agriculture, and was abolished nationally during the American Civil War through constitutional amendment.
Slavery became a durable institution in English North America during the seventeenth century, as colonial economies increasingly connected African labor, plantation agriculture, and hereditary status. Virginia laws enacted in the 1600s helped establish that enslaved status descended through the mother and that Africans and their descendants could be held permanently. 1 Enslaved labor spread from the tobacco colonies of the Chesapeake to rice and indigo plantations in the Lowcountry, and later to cotton-producing regions of the Deep South.
The transatlantic slave trade forcibly transported more than 12 million Africans to the Americas, though a smaller number arrived in what became the United States than in the Caribbean or Brazil. After the United States banned the international slave trade in 1808, domestic trafficking and the forced migration of enslaved people westward expanded rapidly. The invention and adoption of the cotton gin increased the profitability of short-staple cotton, tying slavery to national and international markets. 2
Enslaved people performed agricultural, domestic, skilled, industrial, and maritime labor, while owners and overseers enforced discipline through surveillance, violence, sale, and the threat of family separation. Enslaved communities nevertheless created enduring kinship networks, religious practices, oral traditions, and mutual forms of care despite laws that restricted movement, literacy, assembly, and testimony.
Resistance took many forms, including work slowdowns, theft, sabotage, escape, preservation of African cultural practices, and organized rebellion. The Underground Railroad was a decentralized network of fugitives, free Black communities, and antislavery allies rather than a literal railroad. Major uprisings associated with Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 and Denmark Vesey, whose alleged conspiracy was suppressed in Charleston in 1822, intensified white restrictions while also revealing the instability of the slave system. 3
Slavery became the central conflict in nineteenth-century American politics because its expansion challenged the balance of power between free and slave states and exposed incompatible claims about citizenship, labor, and federal authority. Abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and William Lloyd Garrison attacked slavery through speeches, newspapers, organizing, and escape assistance, while free Black conventions and churches supplied much of the movement’s leadership.
The Missouri Compromise, Compromise of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska Act, and Dred Scott v. Sandford each attempted, or failed, to contain sectional conflict. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 prompted secession by slaveholding states. During the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation declared freedom for enslaved people in areas under rebellion and authorized Black military service, while the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for crime after conviction. 45
Emancipation did not immediately produce equal freedom: formerly enslaved people faced displacement, violence, discriminatory laws, and economic dependence during Reconstruction. The Freedmen’s Bureau supported schools, labor negotiations, legal assistance, and relief, but its authority and resources were limited. Southern states later imposed Black Codes, and the retreat from federal Reconstruction enforcement enabled segregation, disfranchisement, and racial terror.
Slavery’s legacy also appears in less visible records and places: plantation account books, runaway advertisements, court petitions, burial grounds, African American cemeteries, and the testimony collected from formerly enslaved people in the 1930s. Historians use these sources alongside census schedules and merchant records to reconstruct lives often distorted or omitted by enslavers’ documents. Modern debates over reparations, memorials, genealogy, and racial inequality continue to draw on this history. 16
Dates and population figures refer to the territory and legal framework of the United States as they developed; slavery also existed in diverse forms among Indigenous nations and in other parts of North America, which are outside this article’s specific scope.
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