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12. apr. 2024 · slavery, condition in which one human being was owned by another. A slave was considered by law as property, or chattel, and was deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held by free persons. There is no consensus on what a slave was or on how the institution of slavery should be defined.
By 1860, the total number of slaves reached almost four million, and the American Civil War, beginning in 1861, led to the end of slavery in the United States.
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.
12. apr. 2024 · Beginning in the 16th century, a more public and “racially” based type of slavery was established when Europeans began importing slaves from Africa to the New World ( see slave trade). An estimated 11 million people were taken from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade.
16. aug. 2019 · Slavery flourished initially in the tobacco fields of Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. In the tobacco-producing areas of those states, slaves constituted more than 50% of the population by...
Slavery was practiced in the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and helped propel the United States into the Civil War. Learn more about slavery and its abolition in America.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, African and African American (those born in the New World) slaves worked mainly on the tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations of the Southern seaboard. Eventually slavery became rooted in the South’s huge cotton and sugar plantations.
