After the United States was founded in 1776, the country split into slave states (states permitting slavery) and free states (states prohibiting slavery). Slavery became concentrated in the Southern United States. The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1807 banned the Atlantic slave trade, but not the domestic slave trade or slavery itself. Slavery was finally ended throughout the entire country after the American Civil War (1861–1865), in which the U.S. government defeated a confederation of rebelling slave states that attempted to secede from the U.S. in order to preserve the institution of slavery. During the war, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which ordered the liberation of all slaves in rebelling states. In December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, abolishing chattel slavery nationwide. Native American slave ownership also persisted until 1866, when the federal government negotiated new treaties with the "Five Civilized Tribes" in which they agreed to end slavery.[1] In June 2021, Juneteenth, a day that commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S., became a federal holiday.
In 1804, Alexander von Humboldt visited the United States and expressed the idea that slavery was not a good way to treat citizens; this was during Thomas Jefferson's presidency. Humboldt's ideas were expanded by the following generation of American politicians, writers, and clergy members, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Lincoln.[4][5][6]
The practice of slavery in the United States was one of the key political issues of the 19th century; decades of political unrest over slavery led up to the war.
At the start of the Civil War, there were 34 states in the United States, 15 of which were slave states. Eleven of these slave states, after conventions devoted to the topic, issued declarations of secession from the United States and created the Confederate States of America and were represented in the Confederate Congress.[8][9] The slave states that stayed in the Union — Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, and Kentucky (called border states) — continued to be represented in the U.S. Congress. By the time the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, most of Tennessee was already under Union control.[10] Accordingly, the Proclamation applied only to the Confederate states that were not under major Union control. During the war, the abolition of slavery was required by President Abraham Lincoln for the readmission of Confederate states.[11]
The U.S. Congress, after the departure of the powerful Southern contingent in 1861, was generally anti-slavery. In a plan endorsed by Abraham Lincoln, slavery in the District of Columbia, which the Southern contingent had protected, was abolished in 1862.[12] The Union-occupied territories of Louisiana[13] and eastern Virginia,[14] which had been exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation, also abolished slavery through respective state constitutions drafted in 1864. The State of Arkansas, which was not exempt but came partly under Union control by 1864, adopted an anti-slavery constitution in March of that year.[15] The border states of Maryland (November 1864)[16] and Missouri (January 1865),[17] and the Union-occupied Confederate state, Tennessee (January 1865),[18] all abolished slavery prior to the end of the Civil War, as did the new state of West Virginia (February 1865),[19] which had separated from Virginia in 1863 over the issue of slavery. However, slavery persisted in Delaware,[20] Kentucky,[21] and (to a very limited extent) in New Jersey[22][23] — and on the books in 7 of 11 of the former Confederate states.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the Civil War.[24] Lincoln preceded it with the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, which read:
That on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.[25]
On January 1, 1863, the Proclamation changed the legal status under federal law of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free. As soon as an enslaved person escaped the control of his or her master, either by running away across Union lines or through the advance of federal troops, the person was permanently free. Ultimately, the Union victory brought the proclamation into effect in all of the former Confederacy.
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), emancipation came at different times to different places in the Southern United States. Large celebrations of emancipation, often called Jubilees (recalling the biblical Jubilee in which enslaved people were freed) occurred on September 22, January 1, July 4, August 1, April 6, and November 1, among other dates. Although June 19, 1865, was not the actual end of slavery even in Texas (like the Emancipation Proclamation, General Gordon's military order had to be acted upon), and although it has competed with other dates for emancipation's celebration,[29] ordinary African Americans created, preserved, and spread a shared commemoration of slavery's wartime demise across the United States.[26]
Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution[edit]
The Thirteenth Amendment (Amendment XIII) to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. It was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865.[30] The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified by the 27th of the then 36 states, fulfilling the constitutional requirement of ratification by 3/4 of states, on December 6, 1865.[30] Secretary of State William H. Seward announced the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 18, 1865.[30]
The end of slavery effectively occurred with the federal Padrone Act of 1874 (18 Stat. 251), which was enacted on June 23, 1874, "in response to exploitation of immigrant children in forced begging and street crime by criminalizing the practice of enslaving, buying, selling, or holding any person in involuntary servitude."[32]
Brussels Conference and slavery in the 20th century[edit]
The documentary film, 13th, explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States."[36] Its title alludes to the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, except as a punishment for a crime. The film asserts that slavery has since been silently perpetuated by criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor black people and forcing them to work for the state. In addition, "carceral states" are managed by for-profit prison corporations.[37]
^Martis, Kenneth C. (1994). The Historical Atlas of the Congresses of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865. Simon & Schuster. p. 7. ISBN0-02-920170-5.
^Only Virginia, Tennessee and Texas held referendums to ratify their Fire-Eater declarations of secession, and Virginia's excluded Unionist county votes and included Confederate troops in Richmond voting as regiments viva voce.Dabney, Virginius. (1983). Virginia: The New Dominion, a History from 1607 to the Present. Doubleday. p. 296. ISBN9780813910154.
^American Memory "Abolition in the District of ColumbiaArchived 2016-08-21 at the Wayback Machine", Today in History, Library of Congress, viewed December 15, 2014. On April 16, 1862, Lincoln signed a bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia and providing compensation for enslavers, five months before the victory at Antietam led to the Emancipation Proclamation.
^Harrison, Lowell H.; Klotter, James C. (1997). A New History of Kentucky. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky. p. 180. ISBN0813126215. Archived from the original on March 11, 2024. Retrieved October 16, 2016.