Slavery in the United States became, more or less, self-sustaining by natural increase among the current slaves and their descendants. Maryland and Virginia viewed themselves as slave producers, seeing "producing slaves" as resembling animal husbandry.

Apr 25, 2024 · Slavery existed in the United States from its founding in 1776 and became the main cause behind the country's bloody Civil War.

Mar 21, 2017 · Though slavery in America has long since been illegal in the United States, the ramifications of the African slave trade that almost broke the new nation are still felt throughout American society, politics, and culture today.

Mar 23, 2025 · African Americans - Slavery, Resistance, Abolition: Enslaved people played a major, though unwilling and generally unrewarded, role in laying the economic foundations of the United States—especially in the South.

Slavery was finally ended throughout the entire country after the American Civil War (1861–1865), in which the U.S. government defeated a confederation of rebelling slave states that attempted to secede from the U.S. in order to preserve the institution of slavery.

Though the Union victory freed the nation's four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery influenced American history, from the chaotic years of Reconstruction (1865-77) to the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s.

Dec 18, 2008 · Many slaves escaped to the North in the early years of the war, and several Union generals established contraband policies in the southern land that they conquered. Congress passed laws permitting the seizure of slaves from rebellious southerners as the rules of war allow for the seizure of property and the United States considered slaves property.

Feb 14, 2025 · With the first 20 Africans brought to Virginia in 1619, the United States initiated a labor system characterized by extreme oppression and violence. But slavery was not just about labor and the economy—it permeated every aspect of the country’s political, social, religious, intellectual, and moral structures, values, and sentiments.

Slavery was practiced in the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and helped propel the United States into the Civil War. Learn more about slavery and its abolition in America.

1 day ago · A US Senator wants to replace Andrew Jackson, who kept scores of slaves at his Tennessee plantation, on the front of the $20 bill with abolitionist Harriet Tubman. But Jackson isn’t the only one ...