American Slavery, 1619–1865: A Historical Overview

In late August 1619, an English privateer flying Dutch colours, the White Lion, sailed into Point Comfort at the mouth of the James River in the colony of Virginia. Aboard her were “20 and odd Negroes” — Africans the ship had taken from a Portuguese slaver bound for Veracruz. The colony’s secretary, John Rolfe, reported the sale of the captives to the Virginia governor and the colony’s “cape merchant” in exchange for provisions. The date is the conventional starting point of African slavery in what would become the United States. By the time slavery legally ended on December 18, 1865, with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, roughly four million people had lived as the property of other people in the United States. This is the historical outline.

1619–1700: Establishment

The first generation of African arrivals in seventeenth-century Virginia did not occupy a clearly defined legal status. Some served as indentured servants alongside English and Irish ones and earned their freedom; Anthony Johnson, who arrived in Virginia in 1621, eventually became a landowner and slaveholder himself. The hardening of African slavery into a hereditary, race-based legal institution happened gradually over the next sixty years through colonial statute.

The crucial Virginia law was passed in 1662: partus sequitur ventrem — the doctrine that a child’s legal status followed the mother’s, reversing English common law. This meant that the children of enslaved women were enslaved at birth, and it meant that the children of white slaveholders by enslaved women were also enslaved. By 1705, Virginia had consolidated its evolving practices into a comprehensive Slave Code that defined enslaved people as real estate (chattel personal), forbade enslaved testimony against white people, prescribed punishments for “outlying slaves,” and criminalised teaching enslaved people to read. The other Southern colonies followed similar trajectories. Massachusetts had legalised slavery somewhat earlier, in 1641, in the colony’s Body of Liberties.

1700–1776: The Plantation System

Through the eighteenth century, the demand for enslaved labour in the British colonies grew with the spread of staple-crop agriculture: tobacco in the Chesapeake, rice and indigo in the Carolina Lowcountry, and increasingly cotton — though cotton would not become the dominant crop until after Eli Whitney’s gin in 1793. By 1750 South Carolina was a majority-enslaved colony. Charleston was the largest port for the importation of enslaved people in mainland North America; recent estimates suggest about 40 percent of all enslaved Africans brought to what is now the United States entered through Charleston Harbor between 1700 and 1808.

Resistance was continuous. The Stono Rebellion of September 9, 1739, in South Carolina, was the largest slave uprising in the British mainland colonies before the Revolution: roughly 20 enslaved people, led by an Angolan literate in Portuguese and possibly a Catholic convert known as Jemmy, marched south toward Spanish Florida (which offered freedom to escaped enslaved people from British colonies). They killed about 25 white colonists before being defeated by the South Carolina militia. The colony’s legislative response was the Negro Act of 1740, which tightened restrictions further.

1776–1808: The Founding

The American Revolution produced contradictions the new nation would not resolve. Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence included a passage denouncing King George III for forcing the slave trade on the colonies; it was struck from the final version at the insistence of delegates from South Carolina and Georgia. The Northern states began to abolish slavery within their own borders during and after the Revolution — Vermont in 1777, Pennsylvania in 1780, Massachusetts by judicial decision in 1783. The federal Constitution of 1787 made three explicit accommodations to slavery: the Three-Fifths Clause (Article I, Section 2), which counted three-fifths of an enslaved population for purposes of congressional representation; the Slave Trade Clause (Article I, Section 9), which prohibited Congress from banning the international slave trade until 1808; and the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2), which required free states to return escapees.

Congress used the first available opportunity, in 1807, to outlaw the international slave trade effective January 1, 1808. The law was widely evaded — an estimated 50,000 enslaved Africans were smuggled into the United States illegally between 1808 and the Civil War — but it shifted the dynamic of the system from importation to internal reproduction and the domestic slave trade, which moved people from the Upper South (Virginia, Maryland) to the cotton states of the Deep South in large numbers.

1808–1860: The Cotton Kingdom

Cotton transformed everything. The combination of Whitney’s gin (1793), the opening of new Gulf Coast lands by the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the Indian Removal Act (1830), and the expanding industrial textile demand of the British Midlands and New England made cotton the dominant US export by 1820 and the engine of the Southern economy by 1840. The enslaved population, which had stood at around 700,000 in 1790, reached 1.5 million by 1820, 2.5 million by 1840, and 3.95 million by 1860.

The major slave rebellions of the period — Gabriel’s Conspiracy in Virginia in 1800 (suppressed before it could begin), the Louisiana German Coast Uprising of January 1811 (the largest in US history by participation, with roughly 200–500 enslaved people marching toward New Orleans before being defeated), Denmark Vesey’s planned 1822 Charleston rising (betrayed and suppressed), and the Nat Turner Rebellion of August 21–22, 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia (about 60 white people killed before suppression) — produced increasingly harsh slave codes throughout the South. Turner’s rebellion led directly to Virginia’s last serious legislative debate over gradual emancipation in 1831–32 and the rejection of any such program; thereafter the white South closed ranks around the institution.

The federal political compromises that had held the union together — the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850 (which included a harsher Fugitive Slave Act), the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 — collapsed one after the other. The Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that Black Americans whether free or enslaved could not be US citizens and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories, accelerated the breakdown. Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 on the Republican Party’s anti-slavery-expansion platform precipitated the secession of South Carolina (December 20, 1860) and ten other slave states over the following six months.

1861–1865: Emancipation

The Civil War, which ran from April 12, 1861 (the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter) to April 9, 1865 (Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House), was at its core a war about slavery, as the Confederate states’ own secession declarations made plain (see our piece on the Lost Cause and Confederate memory). The federal government’s posture toward slavery during the war evolved rapidly. The First and Second Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862 freed enslaved people who escaped to Union lines or whose owners aided the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by Lincoln in preliminary form on September 22, 1862, and in final form on January 1, 1863, freed enslaved people in the Confederate states still in rebellion as of that date — though it did not cover slavery in the four loyal border states, in Tennessee (then under Union occupation), or in specific Union-controlled regions of Louisiana and Virginia.

The proclamation also opened US military service to Black Americans. By the war’s end, approximately 179,000 Black men had served in the US Colored Troops and another 19,000 in the Union Navy — about 10 percent of the federal armed forces. They suffered a mortality rate roughly 35 percent higher than white Union troops.

The Thirteenth Amendment, passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and the House on January 31, 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States — except as punishment for crime, a qualifier whose long-term significance would emerge in the convict-leasing systems of the post-Reconstruction South. The amendment was ratified by the required number of states on December 6, 1865, and proclaimed in effect on December 18.

The Aftermath: 1865–1877

The end of legal slavery did not produce the redistribution of land or wealth that many freed people and some Reconstruction politicians believed was necessary. The most famous attempt — General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15, issued at Savannah on January 16, 1865, after a meeting with twenty Black ministers led by Garrison Frazier — set aside coastal land in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida for the settlement of freed families in 40-acre plots, with the loan of army mules. Roughly 40,000 freed people had begun farming these lands when President Andrew Johnson, who had succeeded the assassinated Lincoln, rescinded the orders in the fall of 1865 and returned almost all of the land to its former Confederate owners.

The Reconstruction Amendments — the Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868, citizenship and equal protection), and Fifteenth (1870, voting rights regardless of race) — established the legal architecture of formal equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 added integration of public accommodations. The federal Freedmen’s Bureau, operating from 1865 to 1872, supported education, labour contracts, and family reunifications. Black Americans served in Congress, in state legislatures, and as lieutenant governor of Louisiana and acting governor for several days. The end of the federal occupation of the former Confederate states after the Compromise of 1877, however, allowed the systematic rollback of these gains through state-level disenfranchisement, segregation laws, and racial violence, culminating in the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 endorsing “separate but equal.”

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Three persistent misframings are worth correcting. The first is the implication that slavery was a peculiarly Southern problem and the North a free society. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts all had legal slavery into the early nineteenth century. Northern banks, insurers, and textile mills profited from slavery throughout the antebellum period. The institution was a national one.

The second is the framing of emancipation as a gift from the federal government to enslaved people. The 179,000 Black soldiers who served in the US Army made emancipation operational; the more than 500,000 enslaved people who freed themselves by walking to Union lines during the war made it inevitable. Lincoln signed the documents.

The third is the assumption that the Thirteenth Amendment closed the historical question. Its “punishment for crime” exception was used after Reconstruction to underwrite convict leasing — a system that, in some Southern states, mortality rates exceeded antebellum slavery’s. The 1899 Alabama figures, for example, recorded a death rate among leased convicts of 4 to 10 percent per year. The constitutional question of forced labor was not finally settled.

Why It Still Matters

The legacy of American slavery is the subject of one of the most extensive bodies of modern historical scholarship in any field, and of the most active public debates about American history. The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened on the National Mall in Washington, DC, in September 2016; Juneteenth — commemorating the June 19, 1865, arrival of Union General Gordon Granger in Galveston, Texas, with the announcement that enslaved people in Texas were free — became a federal holiday on June 17, 2021. The most influential recent treatments of the long shadow of slavery include Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (2014), Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul (1999), and Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial (2010). The 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine in August 2019, returned the founding-date question to public discussion.

For more on related history, see our pieces on Black Americans in the Revolutionary War, Robert Smalls, and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did slavery begin in the United States?

The conventional starting point is August 1619, when an English privateer flying Dutch colours, the White Lion, sold “20 and odd Negroes” at Point Comfort in the colony of Virginia. African slavery as a hereditary legal institution was consolidated in colonial law over the following sixty years, particularly through Virginia’s 1662 statute making the child’s status follow the mother’s and the comprehensive slave code of 1705.

When was slavery abolished in the United States?

The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified December 6, 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States except as punishment for crime. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, had already freed enslaved people in the eleven Confederate states still in rebellion; the Thirteenth Amendment completed the legal abolition in the four loyal border states and Union-occupied areas not covered by the proclamation.

How many people were enslaved in the United States?

The 1860 US Census recorded 3,953,761 enslaved people in the United States, approximately 32 percent of the population of the fifteen slave states and about 12.6 percent of the national population. Across the entire history of US slavery, an estimated 10 to 12 million people lived as the property of others. The transatlantic slave trade transported approximately 12.5 million Africans to the Americas overall, of whom about 388,000 were brought directly to British North America and the early United States.

What was “forty acres and a mule”?

“Forty acres and a mule” refers to Special Field Orders No. 15, issued by General William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865, after a meeting in Savannah with twenty Black ministers led by the Reverend Garrison Frazier. The orders set aside coastal land in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida — the so-called “Sherman Reserve” — for resettlement of freed families in 40-acre plots, with surplus army mules available on loan. By summer 1865 roughly 40,000 freed people had begun farming these lands. President Andrew Johnson rescinded the orders in the fall and returned almost all the land to its former Confederate owners.

Did slavery exist only in the American South?

No. All thirteen British North American colonies had legal slavery at the time of the American Revolution. Vermont (1777), Pennsylvania (1780), Massachusetts (by judicial decision, 1783), and gradually the other Northern states abolished it during and after the Revolution. New York, however, did not complete its emancipation until 1827, and New Jersey not until 1846. Northern banks, insurance companies, and textile mills profited from Southern slavery throughout the antebellum period.

What was the legacy of the Thirteenth Amendment’s “except as punishment” clause?

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This exception was used in the post-Reconstruction South to underwrite convict leasing systems, in which state governments leased prisoners — overwhelmingly Black — to private corporations for forced labour. Mortality rates were extreme; Alabama’s convict-leasing system recorded 4–10 percent annual death rates in the late nineteenth century. The system continued in some Southern states into the 1920s.

Sources

1. Slave Voyages — The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
2. US National Archives — Emancipation Proclamation
3. US National Archives — Thirteenth Amendment
4. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard University Press, 1998)
5. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014)
6. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, 1999)
7. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (W. W. Norton, 2010)
8. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (Harper & Row, 1988)
9. Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth (Liveright, 2021)
10. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford University Press, 2006)