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The history of the domestic slave trade can very clumsily be divided into three major periods: 1776 to 1808: This period began with the Declaration of Independence and ended when the importation of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean was prohibited under federal law in 1808; the importation of slaves was prohibited by the Continental Congress during the American Revolutionary War but resumed ...
Slavery was a divisive issue in the United States. It was a major issue during the writing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the subject of political crises in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850 and was the primary cause of the American Civil War in 1861. Just before the Civil War, there were 19 free states and 15 slave ...
Throughout U.S. history there have been disputes about whether the Constitution was proslavery or antislavery. James Oakes writes that the Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause and Three-Fifths Clause "might well be considered the bricks and mortar of the proslavery Constitution". [5] "
Slavery was maintained during the French (1699–1763, and 1800–1803) and Spanish (1763–1800) periods of government. The first people enslaved by the French were Native Americans, but they could easily escape into the countryside which they knew well.
The leading historian of the era was Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who studied slavery not so much as a political issue between North and South, but as a social and economic system. He focused on the large plantations that dominated the South. Phillips addressed the unprofitability of slave labor and slavery's ill effects on the Southern economy.
Freedmen voting in New Orleans, 1867. Reconstruction lasted from Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 to the Compromise of 1877. [1] [2]The major issues faced by President Abraham Lincoln were the status of the ex-slaves (called "Freedmen"), the loyalty and civil rights of ex-rebels, the status of the 11 ex-Confederate states, the powers of the federal government needed to ...
Conceding that the United States Congress lacked the authority to abolish slavery directly, it demanded the "absolute and unqualified divorce" of the federal government from slavery: abolition of slavery in the territories, repeal of the gag rule, and voiding the Fugitive Slave Clause and other proslavery provisions of the United States ...
By 1800, many political leaders were convinced that slavery was undesirable, and should eventually be abolished, and the slaves returned to their natural homes in Africa. The American Colonization Society , which was active in both North and South, tried to implement these ideas and established the colony of Liberia in Africa to repatriate ...