Slavery in the United States lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. It had its origins with the first English colonization of North America in Virginia in 1607, although African slaves were brought to Spanish Florida as early as the 1560s. Most slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native Americans and free blacks also held slaves; there was a small number of white slaves as well. Slaves were spread to the areas where there was good quality soil for large plantations of high value cash crops, such as cotton, sugar, and coffee. The majority of slaveholders were in the southern United States, where most slaves were engaged in an efficient machine-like gang system of agriculture, with farms of fifteen or more slaves proving to be far more productive than farms without slaves. Also, these large groups of slaves were thought to work more efficiently if guarded by a managerial class called overseers to ensure that the slaves did not waste a second of movement.

From 1654 until 1865, slavery for life was legal within the boundaries of much of the present United States. Before the widespread establishment of chattel slavery (outright ownership of the slave), much labor was organized under a system of bonded labor known as indentured servitude. This typically lasted for several years for white and black alike, and it was a means of using labor to pay the costs of transporting people to the colonies. By the 18th century, court rulings established the racial basis of the American incarnation of slavery to apply chiefly to Black Africans and people of African descent, and occasionally to Native Americans. In part because of the success of tobacco as a cash crop in the Southern colonies, its labor-intensive character caused planters to import more slaves for labor by the end of the 17th century than did the northern colonies. The South had a significantly high number and proportion of slaves in the population.

Twelve million Africans were shipped to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States. The largest number were shipped to Brazil (see slavery in Brazil). The slave population in the United States had grown to four million by the 1860 Census.

Slavery was one of the principal issues leading to the American Civil War. After the Union prevailed in the war, slavery was abolished throughout the United States with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Colonial America

Main article: Slavery in Colonial United States

The first record of African slavery in Colonial America was made in 1619. A British pirate ship under the Dutch flag, the White Lion , had captured 20 Angolan slaves in a battle with a Portuguese ship, the São João Baptista, bound for Veracruz, Mexico. The Angolans were from the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, and spoke languages of the Bantu group. The White Lion had been damaged first by the battle and then more severely in a great storm during the late summer when it came ashore at Old Point Comfort, site of present day Fort Monroe in Virginia. Though the colony was in the middle of a period later known as "The Great Migration" (1618-1623), during which its population grew from 450 to 4,000 residents, extremely high mortality rates from disease, malnutrition, and war with Native Americans kept the population of able-bodied laborers low. With the Dutch ship being in severe need of repairs and supplies and the colonists being in need of able-bodied workers, the human cargo was traded for food and services.

In addition to African slaves, Europeans, mostly Irish, Scottish, English, and Germans, were brought over in substantial numbers as indentured servants, particularly in the British Thirteen Colonies. Over half of all white immigrants to the English colonies of North America during the 17th and 18th centuries might have been indentured servants. In the 18th century numerous Europeans traveled to the colonies as redemptioners. The white citizens of Virginia, who had arrived from Britain, decided to treat the first Africans in Virginia as indentured servants. As with European indentured servants, the Africans were freed after a stated period and given the use of land and supplies by their former owners. Anthony Johnson, a former indentured servant from Africa, became a landowner on the Eastern Shore and a slave-owner. The major problem with indentured servants was that, in time, they would be freed, but they were unlikely to become prosperous. The best lands in the tidewater regions were already in the hands of wealthy plantation families by 1650, and the former servants became an underclass. Bacon's Rebellion showed that the poor laborers and farmers could prove a dangerous element to the wealthy landowners. By switching to pure chattel slavery, new white laborers and small farmers were mostly limited to those who could afford to immigrate and support themselves. In addition, improving economic conditions in England meant that fewer laborers wanted to migrate to the colonies as indentured servants, so the planters needed to find new sources of labor.

The transformation from indentured servitude to racial slavery happened gradually. There were no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia's history. However, by 1640, the Virginia courts had sentenced at least one black servant to slavery.

In 1654, John Casor, a black man, became the first legally recognized slave in the present United States. A court in Northampton County ruled against Casor, declaring him property for life, "owned" by the black colonist Anthony Johnson. Since persons with African origins were not English citizens by birth, they were not necessarily covered by English Common Law. Elizabeth Key Grinstead successfully gained her freedom in the Virginia courts in 1656 by making her case as the baptized Christian daughter of free Englishman Thomas Key.

Shortly after the Elizabeth Key trial, in 1662 Virginia passed a law on partus , stating that any children of an enslaved mother would follow her status and automatically be slaves, no matter if the father was a freeborn Englishman. This institutionalized the power relationships and confined the possible scandal of mixed-race children to within the slave quarters. The Virginia Slave codes of 1705 further defined as slaves those people imported from nations that were not Christian, as well as Native Americans who were sold to colonists by other Native Americans.

In 1735, the trustees of the colony of Georgia passed a law to prohibit slavery, which was then legal in the 12 other colonies. It was meant to eliminate the risk of slave rebellions and make Georgia better able to defend against attacks from the Spanish to the south. It also supported the vision of Georgia's original charter - to turn some of England's poor into hardworking small farmers.

The protestant scottish highlanders who settled what is now Darien GA added a moral anti-slavery argument, which was rare at the time, in their 1739 "Petition of the Inhabitants of New Inverness":

It is shocking to human Nature, that any Race of Mankind and their Posterity should be sentanc'd to perpetual

Slavery; nor in Justice can we think otherwise of it, that they are thrown amongst us to be our Scourge one Day or other for our Sins: And as Freedom must be as dear to them as it is to us, what a Scene of Horror must it bring about! And the longer it is unexecuted, the bloody Scene must be the greater.

Inhabitants of New Inverness, 

But there was popular support for slavery and skillful lobbying by the colonists, and in 1750 slavery again became legal in Georgia.

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, with the greater number in cities. Early on, slaves in the South worked primarily in agriculture, on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton became a major crop after the 1790s. Tobacco was very labor intensive, as was rice cultivation. In South Carolina in 1720 about 65% of the population consisted of slaves. Slaves were used by rich farmers and plantation owners who cultivate crops for commercial export operations. Backwoods subsistence farmers, a later wave of settlers, seldom owned slaves.

Some of the British colonies attempted to abolish the international slave trade, fearing that the importation of new Africans would be disruptive. Virginia bills to that effect were vetoed by the British Privy Council; Rhode Island forbade the import of slaves in 1774. All of the colonies except Georgia had banned or limited the African slave trade by 1786; Georgia did so in 1798 - although some of these laws were later repealed.

The British West Africa Squadron's slave trade suppression activities were assisted by forces from the United States Navy, starting in 1820 with the USS Cyane . Initially, this consisted of a few ships. With the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, the relationship was formalised and they jointly ran the Africa Squadron.

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