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European settlers in North America turned to African slaves as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.
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Exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production.
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The tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast are cultivated by slaves.
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The privateer The White Lion brought 20 African slaves ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia.
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settlers are depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.
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In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt.
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Between 1774 and 1804, all of the northern states abolished slavery.
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After the American Revolution, many colonists—particularly in the North—began to call for slavery’s abolition.
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Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the enslaved population in the U.S. nearly tripled over the next 50 years.
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From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
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The revolt that most terrified white slaveholders was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831.
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America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the Civil War.
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Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation made official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
