Slavery in America

 Slavery in America

Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel enslavement, primarily of Africans and African Americans, that existed in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From early colonial days, it was practiced in Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies which formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property and could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until 1865. As an economic system, slavery was largely replaced by sharecropping and convict leasing.

By the time of the American Revolution (1775–1783), the status of enslaved people had been institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry. During and immediately following the Revolution, abolitionist laws were passed in most Northern states and a movement developed to abolish slavery. The role of slavery under the U.S. Constitution (1789) was the most contentious issue during its drafting. Although the creators of the Constitution never used the word "slavery", the final document, through the three-fifths clause, gave slave-owners disproportionate political power. All Northern states had abolished slavery in some way by 1805; sometimes, abolition was a gradual process, and hundreds of people were still enslaved in the Northern states as late as the 1840 Census. Some slaveowners—primarily in the Upper South—freed their slaves, and philanthropists and charitable groups bought and freed other slaves. The Atlantic slave trade was outlawed by individual states beginning during the American Revolution. The import-trade was banned by Congress in 1808, although smuggling was common thereafter.

The rapid expansion of the cotton industry in the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin greatly increased demand for slave labor, and the Southern states continued as slave societies. The United States became ever more polarized over the issue of slavery, split into slave and free states. Driven by labor demands from new cotton plantations in the Deep South, the Upper South sold over a million slaves who were taken to the Deep South. The total slave population in the South eventually reached four million. As the United States expanded, the Southern states attempted to extend slavery into the new western territories to allow proslavery forces to maintain their power in the country. The new territories acquired by the Louisiana purchase and the Mexican cession were the subject of major political crises and compromises. By 1850, the newly rich, cotton-growing South was threatening to secede from the Union, and tensions continued to rise. Slavery was defended in the South as a "positive good", and the largest religious denominations split over the slavery issue into regional organizations of the North and South.

When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery, seven slave states broke away to form the Confederacy. Shortly afterward, the Civil War began when Confederate forces attacked the US Army's Fort Sumter. Four additional slave states then joined the confederacy after Lincoln requested arms from them to make a retaliatory strike. Due to Union measures such as the Confiscation Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the war effectively ended slavery, even before the institution was banned by constitutional amendment. Following the Union victory in the Civil War, slavery was made illegal in the United States upon the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.

Comprehension about the text, answer the questions bellow IN ENGLISH:

1 - What is slavery and what they deprived of ?

2 - How did start the slavery in the United States of Ameria?

3 - When and how did slavery end ?

4 - What do you think about slavery? Did slavery still happen today?