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Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast
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-North America turned to African slaves
/cheaper -
271 years
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All of the northern states abolished slavery, but the so-called “peculiar institution” of slavery remained absolutely vital to the South.
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Free blacks and other antislavery northerners had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early
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Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds.
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Slave rebellions did occur within the system—notably ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond
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But the enslaved population in the U.S. nearly tripled over the next 50 years.
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Slave rebellions did occur within the system—notably ones led by Denmark Vesey in Charleston
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The movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free blacks such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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This practice, known as the Underground Railroad, gained real momentum
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The revolt that most terrified white slaveholders was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia;
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Iit had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.
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Though Lincoln’s anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.
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Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation
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He made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
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99 years
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56 years
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Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era would lead to the civil rights movement, which would achieve the greatest political and social gains for blacks since Reconstruction.