Slavery

Slavery was widely practiced throughout the ancient world, and the exploitation of enslaved Africans fueled the growth and economies of the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. After the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence promised liberty for all men, but did not end slavery. Conflict over the institution eventually drove the young nation into civil war.

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Historians and experts examine the American system of racialized slavery and the hypocrisy it relied on to function.

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Courtesy of the Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift from the Liljenquist Family Collection

Featured Overview

Historians and experts examine the American system of racialized slavery and the hypocrisy it relied on to function.

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Slave Ship diagram

From the role of women to its global scope, here are some lesser-known facts about the transport and enslavement of African people.

In navigating lives of privation and brutality, enslaved people haggled, often daily, for liberties small and large.

Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad

From elaborate disguises to communicating in code to fighting back, enslaved people found multiple paths to freedom.

David Wilmot (1814-1868) U.S. politician from Pennsylvania. One of the founders of the Republican Party; U.S. Senator 1861-1863.

Debate over the Wilmot Proviso inflamed North-South divisions ahead of the Civil War.

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman: Soldier/Spy

Harriet Tubman, former slave, is known for her role in the underground railroad, but did you know she served in the union army as a soldier and a spy?

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Slavery
Collage of three 19th-century Black women abolitionists: Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

These women reshaped the fight against slavery by suing for freedom, rescuing the enslaved and teaching the newly freed.

Thomas Jefferson. (Credit: VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)

The Founding Father's 38-year relationship with Hemings, a woman he enslaved at his Monticello estate, has raised controversy for two centuries.

Celebrating Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, but continuing that ritual wasn't always easy, especially for slaves in the New World.

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Slavery in America was the legal institution of enslaving human beings, mainly Africans and African Americans. Slavery existed in the United States from its founding in 1776 and became the main cause behind the country's bloody Civil War. Slavery officially ended in America with the passage of the 13th Amendment following the Civil War's end in 1865.

Slave Ship diagram

From the role of women to its global scope, here are some lesser-known facts about the transport and enslavement of African people.

David Wilmot (1814-1868) U.S. politician from Pennsylvania. One of the founders of the Republican Party; U.S. Senator 1861-1863.

Debate over the Wilmot Proviso inflamed North-South divisions ahead of the Civil War.

President James Buchanan, Secession

For this, historians consistently rank him as one of the worst US presidents.

Lincoln develops and enacts a permanent plan to abolish slavery, in this clip from Season 1, "Saving the Union."

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John Jordan Crittenden, 1857. Artist George Peter Alexander Healy.

The author of Crittenden Compromise argued his six amendments presented a good deal. But then-President-elect Lincoln drew a firm line.

Many find the Electoral College a frustrating system, and its history may force one to question whether it has a place in today's world.

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A daguerreotype of former slave Caesar taken in 1851 in Bethlehem, New York

'Cargo' was delivered to the southern states and the West Indies, but much of the shipping originated in New York City—in the abolitionist North.

What Was Christmas Like for America’s Enslaved People? Winter holidays in the Southern States, Christmas Eve, 1857

For some, it was a rare time of respite; for others, an opportunity for resistance.

This 1841 Rebellion at Sea Freed More Than 100 Enslaved People

Just two years after the famed Amistad revolt, a mutiny rerouted the slaving brig Creole into British territory, where human bondage was illegal.

The colony of Rhode Island once had the highest percentage of enslaved people in New England, and was a dominant player in the global slave trade.

Harriet Tubman is known for her legendary efforts to free slaves via the Underground Railroad. And nothing, even the Civil War, would get in the way.

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The Daring Disguise that Helped One Enslaved Couple Escape to Freedom, Ellen and William Craft

In 1848 William and Ellen Craft blurred the lines of race and gender in order to escape slavery.

Loved ones could be sold away at any time. Here's how married couples coped.

Slavery in Jamestown

The arrival of the first captives to the Jamestown Colony, in 1619, is often seen as the beginning of slavery in America—but enslaved Africans arrived in North America as early as the 1500s.

The Scourged Back

The widely circulated image of the enslaved man's wounds helped turn white Northerners against slavery.

From approximately 1525 to 1866, 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Middle Passage to serve as slaves in the New World. Life aboard slave ships was agonizing and dangerous; nearly 2 million slaves would perish on their journey across the Atlantic.

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Harriet Tubman, former slave, is known for her role in the underground railroad, but did you know she served in the union army as a soldier and a spy?

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The amendment, which officially abolished slavery in the United States in 1865, includes a loophole regarding involuntary servitude.

After Charles I of Spain signed an edict launching the transatlantic slave trade, human cargo on transatlantic voyages spiked nearly tenfold.

The story of the Clotilda and the people who built Africatown.

Cudjo Lewis, the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the U.S. (Credit: Erik Overbey Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama)

Zora Neale Hurston's searing book about Cudjo Lewis, brought to Alabama aboard the Clotilda—the last known US slave ship—took nearly 90 years to find a publisher.

Early 1900s postcard featuring slaves picking cotton. Bucolic images of slave life perpetuated the myth that blacks were better off under white people's oversight. (Credit: The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Why couldn't enslaved people have resisted—or pulled themselves up from their bootstraps after Emancipation?

Historians and experts discuss the importance of the family unit in the lives of enslaved people.

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The slave auction was the epitome of the system's dehumanization.

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Historians and experts examine the American system of racialized slavery and the hypocrisy it relied on to function.

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Under threat of punishment, enslaved families found small ways to rebel against an oppressive system.

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Matthew Pinsker gives a crash course on the Compromise of 1850, the resolution to a dispute over slavery in territory gained after the Mexican-American War.

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Explore 10 surprising facts about the bloodiest revolt in American slavery history.

Depiction of slave ship

A half-century after Congress banned the slave trade, a converted racing yacht defied American law in 1858 and made the last documented voyage of an American slave ship.

Professor Eric Foner discusses key people and events in the history of the Underground Railroad. He explains how slaves escaped to freedom with assistance from anti-slavery activists.

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Portrait of Harriet Jacobs

From a man who mailed himself to freedom to a husband and wife team of impostors, learn the true stories behind five of American history’s most audacious escapes from slavery.

The 1839 mutiny, led by an African rice farmer known as Cinqué, galvanized the abolitionist movement.

Deeper Roots of Northern Slavery Unearthed

An investigation has revealed that one of Colonial New England’s most aristocratic families participated in the slave trade.

With Oscar buzz building around "12 Years a Slave," find out more about the mysterious life of protagonist Solomon Northup.

American writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1817-1895).

Douglass looked back on September 3, 1838 as the day when his “free life began,” but he encountered several close calls during his journey to freedom.

Find out about seven groups of enslaved people who risked everything for a chance at freedom.

Slavery is a central paradox of much of American history. In fact, most of the country's founding fathers owned slaves.

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Slavery became an industry for the first time in history when millions of African men and women were sold as slaves to Europeans.

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John Brown's failed attempt to loot the armory at Harper's Ferry sparks the beginning of abolition.

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America is at the brink of a Civil War as cotton spreads west and threatens to expand slavery into new territories.

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Born a slave, Harriett Tubman became a famous "conductor" on the Underground Railroad, leading hundreds of slaves to freedom.

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View of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

The Harper's Ferry raid was an 1859 assault by an armed band of abolitionists led by John Brown on the federal armory in the small town of Harper's Ferry, Virginia. It was intended to be the start of establishing an independent freehold of freed slaves, but it failed and was a main catalyst leading to the Civil War.

The "Life of Sally Hemings" exhibit at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Charlottesville, Va.

Sally Hemings (1773-1835) was an enslaved woman owned by Founding Father Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). Hemings and Jefferson had a longstanding romantic relationship, and had at least one and perhaps as many as six children together.

Nat Turner Rebellion

Nathanial “Nat” Turner (1800-1831) was a black American slave who led the only effective, sustained slave rebellion (August 1831) in U.S. history.

The Fugitive Slave Acts, passed in 1793 and 1850, were federal laws that allowed for the capture and return of runaway enslaved people within the United States.

Map illustrates the status of slavery in the United States in 1821. Published in 1920, it shows Free States (brown), states undergoing gradual abolition (light brown), free states via the Ordinance of 1787 (dotted), free states via the Missouri Compromise (striped), and slave-holding states (yellow).

The Missouri Compromise, an 1820 law passed amid debate over slavery, admitted Missouri to the Union as a state that allowed slavery, and Maine as a free state.

Henry Clay, Compromise of 1850

The Compromise of 1850 was made up of five bills that attempted to resolve disputes over slavery in new territories added to the United States in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1846-48). It admitted California as a free state, left Utah and New Mexico to decide for themselves, defined a new Texas-New Mexico boundary, and made it easier for slaveowners to recover runway slaves.

Illustration of abolitionist John Brown leading a raid on Confederate arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, 1859.

John Brown was a militant abolitionist whose violent raid on the U.S. military armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was a flashpoint in the pre-Civil War era.

HISTORY: The Amistad Case

The Amistad Case took place in 1839 when 53 illegally purchased African slaves were being transported from Cuba to the U.S. aboard the Spanish-built schooner Amistad. En route, the slaves staged a successful mutiny. They were later intercepted and thrown in jail. A federal district court judge ruled they were not liable for their actions. Former president John Quincy Adams argued on behalf of the slaves before the U.S. Supreme Court, which eventually determined the Africans to be free.