Slavery

Slavery was an institution practiced in the New World in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries wherein blacks were owned as property and forced to labor without compensation on their owners' plantations. It was introduced into what would later become the United States by Britain in 1619 and remained legal after the American Revolution. It was banned state by state in the Northern states and became a major divisive issue between northern and southern states throughout the first half of nineteenth century. When Abraham Lincoln, a fierce opponent of slavery, was elected President in 1860, a number of slave states responded by seceding from the Union, starting the War of Secession and forming the Confederate States.

Slavery proved a major embarassment to the Confederate States during and after the war, giving Britain and France serious reservations against extending diplomatic recognition to it even after the Army of Northern Virginia captured Philadelphia in 1862. In 1881, those two nations agreed to support the CS in the Second Mexican War only on the condition that they abolish the practice, which was done shortly after the CS's 1882 victory. (For its part, the United States banned the practice in the 1860s after losing the War of Secession.)

Slavery was also practiced in Brazil until 1889.