Slavery

Slavery in the United States was a form of slave labor which continued mostly in the South until the Thirteenth Amendment was created. The first English colony in North America, Virginia, brought over their first slaves in 1819 from a ship that carried about 20 Africans. The practice established in the Spanish colonies as early as the 1560s was expanded into English North America. One thing that most people dont know is slavery was not confined to merely people of black ethnicity. In fact there are many different ethnic classes of slaves.Over decades, many slaves in the Upper South were born of mixed race with white fathers; because of generations of white fathers, by the early nineteenth century, some mixed-race slaves would qualify as legally white under state laws. Some Native Americans and free blacks also held African-descended slaves. even Europeans also held some Native Americans as slaves, including some of African descent. Slave labor was in demand in the areas where there was good-quality soil and climate for large plantations of high-value cash crops with labor-intensive cultivation, such as tobacco, cotton, sugar, and coffee. By the early decades of the 19th century, the overwhelming majority of slaveholders and slaves were in the southern United States. Before the widespread establishment of slavery much work was organized under a system of bonded labor known as indentured servitude. People paid with their labor for the costs of transport to the colonies. They contracted for such arrangements because of poor economies in their home countries. Between 1680 and 1700, as fewer Europeans migrated to the colonies, planters began to import more Africans as slaves. Recognizing the importance of slavery, the House of Burgesses in Virginia enacted a new slave code in 1705; it brought together a variety of legislation and added new provisions that embedded the principles of white supremacy in the law.[7][8] By the early 18th century, colonial courts and legislatures had racialized slavery, essentially creating a caste system in which slavery applied nearly exclusively to Black Africans and people of African descent, and occasionally to Native Americans. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, an estimated 12 million Africans were shipped as slaves to the Americas.(see Slavery in the Americas)[9][10] Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States.[11] By the 1860 United States Census, the slave population in the United States had grown to four million.[12] Slaveholders and the commodities of the South had a strong influence on United States politics: "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."[13] Slavery was a contentious issue in the politics of the United States from the 1770s through the 1860s, becoming a topic of debate in the drafting of the Constitution (with the slave trade protected for 20 years and slaves being counted toward Congressional apportionment); a subject of Federal legislation, such as the ban on the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808 and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; and a subject of landmark US Supreme Court cases, such as the Dred Scott decision of 1855. Slaves resisted the institution through rebellions and non-compliance, and escaped it through travel to non-slave states and Canada, facilitated by the Underground Railroad. Advocates of abolitionism engaged in moral and political debates, and encouraged the creation of Free Soil states as Western expansion proceeded. Slavery was a principal issue leading to the American Civil War. After the Union prevailed in the war, slavery was made illegal throughout the United States with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[14] A few instances of enslavement of Indians by other Indians persisted in the following years. In the South, practices of slavery shaped the institutions of convict leasing, sharecropping, and Jim Crow laws to enforce racial segregation, white supremacy and legal disfranchisement that persisted into the mid-1960s.