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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 from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas.
The legal status of slavery in New Hampshire has been described as "ambiguous," [15] and abolition legislation was minimal or non-existent. [16] New Hampshire never passed a state law abolishing slavery. [17] That said, New Hampshire was a free state with no slavery to speak of from the American Revolution forward. [9] New Jersey
Chattel slavery developed in British North America before the full legal apparatus that supported slavery did. During the late 17th century and early 18th century, harsh new slave codes limited the rights of African slaves and cut off their avenues to freedom.
While the United Kingdom did not ban slavery throughout most of the empire, including British North America till 1833, free blacks found refuge in the Canadas after the American Revolutionary War and again after the War of 1812. Refugees from slavery fled the South across the Ohio River to the North via the Underground Railroad.
The arrival of the Europeans ushered in the Atlantic slave trade, where Africans were sold into chattel slavery into the Americas. It lasted from the 15th through 19th centuries and was the largest legal form of unfree labor in the history of the United States, reaching 4 million slaves at its height.
The border states of Maryland (November 1864) [16] and Missouri (January 1865), [17] and the Union-occupied Confederate state, Tennessee (January 1865), [18] all abolished slavery prior to the end of the Civil War, as did the new state of West Virginia (February 1865), [19] which had separated from Virginia in 1863 over the issue of slavery.
[3] Slave rebellions in the United States were small and diffuse compared with those in other slave economies in part due to "the conditions that tipped the balance of power against southern slaves—their numerical disadvantage, their creole composition, their dispersal in relatively small units among resident whites—were precisely the same ...
In chattel slavery, the slave is legally rendered the personal property (chattel) of the slave owner. In economics, the term de facto slavery describes the conditions of unfree labour and forced labour that most slaves endure. [6] Photograph of a slave boy in the Sultanate of Zanzibar. 'An Arab master's punishment for a slight offence.' circa 1890.