Slavery in the United States

Slavery existed as an institution in the United States from the country's founding 1776 through its prohibition by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865. In the New World in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, 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, an opponent of slavery, was elected President in 1860, a number of slave states responded by seceding from the Union, forming the Confederate States, and starting the American Civil War. The war ended in 1865, with the abolition of slavery being a consequence.