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The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United
States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in
the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in
what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that
formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in
about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and
social custom.[1] In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877,
many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.

By the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the status of enslaved people had been institutionalized as a racial caste associated
with African ancestry.[2] During and immediately following the Revolution, abolitionist laws were passed in most Northern states and a movement
developed to abolish slavery. The role of slavery under the United States Constitution (1789) was the most contentious issue during its drafting. Although the creators of the Constitution never used the word "slavery",
the final document, through the three-fifths clause, gave slave owners disproportionate political power by augmenting the congressional
representation and the Electoral College votes of slaveholding states.[3]
The Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution—Article IV, Section 2,
Clause 3—provided that, if a slave escaped to another state, the other
state had to return the slave to his or her master. This clause was
implemented by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, passed by Congress. All
Northern states had abolished slavery in some way by 1805; sometimes,
abolition was a gradual process, a few hundred people were enslaved in the Northern states as late as the 1840 census. Some slaveowners, primarily in
the Upper South, freed their slaves, and philanthropists and charitable
groups bought and freed others. The Atlantic slave trade was outlawed by individual states beginning during the American Revolution. The import
trade was banned by Congress in 1808, although smuggling was common thereafter.[4][5] It has been estimated that about 30% of congressmen who
were born before 1840 were, at some time in their lives, owners of
slaves.[6]

The rapid expansion of the cotton industry in the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin greatly increased demand for slave labor, and
the Southern states continued as slave societies. The United States became
ever more polarized over the issue of slavery, split into slave and free states. Driven by labor demands from new cotton plantations in the Deep
South, the Upper South sold more than a million slaves who were taken to
the Deep South. The total slave population in the South eventually reached
four million.[7][8] As the United States expanded, the Southern states attempted to extend slavery into the new western territories to allow proslavery forces to maintain their power in the country. The new
territories acquired by the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession
were the subject of major political crises and compromises.[9] By 1850,
the newly rich, cotton-growing South was threatening to secede from the
Union, and tensions continued to rise. Bloody fighting broke out over
slavery in the Kansas Territory. Slavery was defended in the South as a "positive good", and the largest religious denominations split over the
slavery issue into regional organizations of the North and South. An
animation showing when United States territories and states forbade or
allowed slavery, 1789–1861

When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery, seven slave states seceded to form the Confederacy. Shortly afterward, on April 12, 1861, the Civil War began when Confederate forces attacked the U.S. Army's Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina.
Four additional slave states then joined the Confederacy after Lincoln, on April 15, called forth in response called up the militia to suppress the rebellion.[10] During the war some jurisdictions abolished slavery and,
due to Union measures such as the Confiscation Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation, the war effectively ended slavery in most places. After the
Union victory, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
was ratified on December 6, 1865, prohibiting "slavery [and] involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime."[11] Background
Main articles: Slavery in the colonial history of the United States,
Slavery among Native Americans in the United States, and History of unfree labor in the United States Further information: Atlantic slave trade;
Slavery in New France; and Timeline of events leading to the American
Civil War § Colonial period, 1607–1775 For the related topic of indentured servitude in the United States, see Indentured servitude in British
America, Indentured servitude in Pennsylvania, Indentured servitude in Virginia, and Engagé system in Louisiana. Image marketing 18th-century
tobacco produced by enslaved laborers in the Colony of Virginia (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

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. Many
men worked on the docks and in shipping. In 1703, more than 42 percent of
New York City households held enslaved people in bondage, the
second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies, behind only
Charleston, South Carolina.[12] Enslaved people were also used as
agricultural workers in farm communities, especially in the South, but
also in upstate New York and Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. By
1770, there were 397,924 blacks out of a population of 2.17 million in
what would soon become the United States. The slaves of the colonial era
were unevenly distributed: 14,867 lived in New England, where they were
three percent of the population; 34,679 lived in the mid-Atlantic
colonies, where they were six percent of the population; and 347,378 in
the five Southern Colonies, where they were 31 percent of the
population.[13]

The South developed an agricultural economy dependent on commodity crops.
Its planters rapidly acquired a significantly higher number and proportion
of enslaved people in the population overall, as its commodity crops were labor-intensive.[14] Early on, enslaved people in the South worked
primarily on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice and tobacco
(cotton did not become a major crop until after the 1790s). In 1720, about
65 percent of South Carolina's population was enslaved.[15] Planters
(defined by historians in the Upper South as those who held 20 or more
slaves) used enslaved workers to cultivate commodity crops. They also
worked in the artisanal trades on large plantations and in many Southern
port cities.

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