Slavery in the United States

Slavery in the United States was a system that treated people, overwhelmingly of African descent, as property and compelled their labor. It was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, except as punishment for crime.

Chattel slavery: A system in which people are treated as property and their status can be inherited by their children. This broader form describes the legal property status and hereditary bondage imposed in the United States.
Atlantic slave trade: The transatlantic trafficking of Africans and their descendants into slavery in the Americas. It forcibly brought many of the people enslaved in British North America and the United States.
Frederick Douglass: An abolitionist, writer, and formerly enslaved man who became a leading public advocate for emancipation. His speeches and autobiographies exposed slavery and pressed the nation toward abolition.
Indentured servitude: A labor arrangement in which a person served for a contracted period, usually in exchange for passage or debt repayment. Unlike hereditary chattel slavery, indenture was generally time-limited, though often coercive.
Reconstruction: The post–Civil War period when the United States attempted to rebuild the South and define freedom and citizenship. Its policies determined how emancipation would affect political rights and public life.
Partus sequitur ventrem: A legal doctrine making a child’s status follow that of the mother. This doctrine made enslaved status hereditary through enslaved women.
Virginia slave codes of 1705: A Virginia law consolidating rules that defined enslaved people as property and restricted their rights. The codes helped formalize racial slavery in a major English colony.
Harriet Tubman: An abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor who escaped slavery and helped others reach freedom. Her repeated rescue missions demonstrate organized resistance to bondage.
Free labor: A labor system in which workers are not legally owned and can leave employment. Its ideal of voluntary work stood in direct opposition to legally compelled lifelong labor.
Black Codes: State laws enacted after the Civil War to restrict the rights and mobility of Black people. They sought to control Black labor and life after slavery’s abolition.

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