Slavery in the United States facts for kids

Simon Legree and Uncle Tom: A scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin, the famous 1851 abolitionist novel that galvanized Northern opinion against slavery.

The history of slavery in the United States began soon after Europeans first settled in what became the United States. All slaves were freed by 1865 during the Civil War, most by Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation but finally and completely by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

From about the 1640s until 1865, people of African descent were legally enslaved within the boundaries of the present United States by whites and also by Indians and free blacks. Some Indians were also held as slaves.

About 585,000 slaves were imported into the U.S., or 5% of the 12 million slaves brought across from Africa. The great majority went to sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil, where life expectancy was short and the numbers had to be continually replenished. Life expectancy was much higher in the U.S. (because of better food, less disease, lighter work loads, and better medical care) so the numbers grew rapidly by excesses of births over deaths, reaching 4 million by the 1860 Census. From 1770 until 1860, the rate of natural growth of North American slaves was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that of England.

Images for kids

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  An animation showing when United States territories and states forbade or allowed slavery, 1789–1861

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  Slave auction block, Green Hill Plantation, Campbell County, Virginia, Historic American Buildings Survey

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  Slaves processing tobacco in 17th-century Virginia

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  Slaves on a South Carolina plantation (The Old Plantation, c. 1790)

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  Ledger of sale of 118 slaves, Charleston, South Carolina, c. 1754

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  Prince Estabrook memorial in front of Buckman Tavern on Lexington Green in Lexington, Massachusetts. Prince Estabrook, who was wounded in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, was the first black casualty of the Revolutionary War.

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  Continental soldiers at Yorktown. On the left, an African American soldier of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment.

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  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.

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

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  Confederate $100 bill, 1862–63, showing slaves farming. John C. Calhoun is at left, Columbia at right.

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  This portrait of Judge Samuel Sewall by John Smibert is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Massachusetts.

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  Establishing the Northwest Territory as free soil – no slavery – by Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam proved to be crucial to the outcome of the Civil War.

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  Statue of abolitionist and crusading minister Theodore Parker in front of the Theodore Parker Church in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

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  Statue of prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the Highland Park Bowl in Rochester, New York. Douglass was a great admirer of Theodore Parker.

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  Benjamin Kent, Old Burying Ground, Halifax, Nova Scotia

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  Henry Clay (1777–1852), one of three founders of the American Colonization Society, which assisted free blacks in moving to Africa. Liberia was a result.

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  Movement of slaves between 1790 and 1860

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  Slaves Waiting for Sale: Richmond, Virginia. Painting by Eyre Crowe

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  Ashley's Sack is a cloth that recounts a slave sale separating a mother and her daughter. The sack belonged to a nine-year-old girl Ashley and was a parting gift from her mother, Rose, after Ashley had been sold. Rose filled the sack with a dress, braid of her hair, pecans, and "my love always"

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  Slave trader's business in Atlanta, Georgia, 1864

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  Slave sale, Charleston, 1856

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  U.S. brig Perry confronting the slave ship Martha off Ambriz on June 6, 1850

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  Eastman Johnson's 1863 painting "The Lord is My Shepherd"

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  Illustration from History of American conspiracies – a record of treason, insurrection, rebellion and c., in the United States of America, from 1760 to 1860 (1863)

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  James Hopkinson's Plantation. Planting sweet potatoes. ca. 1862/63

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  Slaves for sale, a scene in New Orleans, 1861

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  Mixed-race slave girls of predominant European ancestry, New Orleans, 1863 (see also white slave propaganda).

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  A slave auction, 1853

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  Five-dollar banknote showing a plantation scene with enslaved people in South Carolina. Issued by the Planters Bank, Winnsboro, 1853. On display at the British Museum in London.

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  Eastman Johnson (American, 1824–1906). A Ride for Liberty – The Fugitive Slaves (recto), ca. 1862. Oil on paperboard. Brooklyn Museum

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  Uncle Marian, a slave of great notoriety, of North Carolina. Daguerreotype of elderly North Carolina slave, circa 1850.

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  Slaves on J. J. Smith's cotton plantation near Beaufort, South Carolina, photographed by Timothy O'Sullivan standing before their quarters in 1862

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  Escaped slaves, ca. 1862, at the headquarters of General Lafayette

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  Four generations of a slave family, Smith's Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862

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  Abraham Lincoln presents the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. Painted by Francis Bicknell Carpenter in 1864

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  Many Native Americans were enslaved during the California Genocide by American settlers.

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  Percentage of slaves in each county of the slave states in 1860

See also

In Spanish: Esclavitud en los Estados Unidos para niños