Slavery in the United States
Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel slavery that existed in the United States of America in the 18th and 19th centuries after it gained independence and before the end of the American Civil War. Slavery had been introduced and practiced by the British Empire in North America from early colonial days, and was practiced in all the Thirteen Colonies at the time of the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776. After the United States gained its independence, states in the Northern United States, motivated by the ideals of the American Revolution, outlawed the practice of slavery, whereas states in the Southern United States continued it. As a result, the existence of slavery grew to become a major political issue in the United States throughout its practice, being contested by those who desired to end it, such as abolitionists and the Republicans, and those who desired to maintain it, such as the Democrats. In 1860, the anti-slavery candidate Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 United States presidential election. Several slave-holding states, unwilling to live under an anti-slavery leader, declared that they were leaving the U.S. as a result. The U.S. refused to recognize their claims and American Civil War erupted, after four years of which, the rebelling Confederate States of America surrendered and the institution was outlawed under the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Quotes
edit- If there breathe on earth a slave,
Are ye truly free and brave?
If ye do not feel the chain,
When it works a brother's pain,
Are ye not base slaves indeed,
Slaves unworthy to be freed? - They are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think;
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.- James Russell Lowell, "Stanzas on Freedom", Miscellaneous Poems (1843)
