United States History Student Edition

Understanding the Time and Place: The United States, 1619–1865

In early 1865, the United States was nearing the end of the Civil War, which had resulted from deep divisions between the Northern and the Southern states. Those divisions were directly related to the practice of enslaving Africans and forcing them to work against their will on Southern plantations.

Slavery and the Economies of the North and the South The arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, began a dark era for the part of North America that is today the United States. Slavery became an essential part of the South, which had an agricultural economy dependent for its profits on the labor of enslaved Africans. By the early 1800s, the use of enslaved labor was less common in the North. However, a major Northern industry was textiles, or cloth, and textiles were made from Southern cotton. The large demand for cotton from Northern textile factories helped preserve slavery. Life for African Americans In the early 1800s, African Americans faced difficult lives throughout the United States. Even after Northern states ended slavery, most African Americans still encountered prejudice made legal by state laws. For example, in New York, African Americans were required to own property before they were allowed to vote. In Pennsylvania in 1838, they were denied the right to vote completely. Furthermore, African Americans in the North faced unequal treatment in segregated public institutions, such as schools and hospitals. At times, they also faced physical violence. In the South, most African Americans were enslaved and subjected to brutal treatment. They toiled long hours in unsafe conditions and earned no money. Many were physically abused, and women suffered sexual violence. Slave codes were put in place to control the lives of enslaved African Americans. They were prohibited from leaving a slaveholder’s property, meeting in large groups, and learning to read and write. Then in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford declared that enslaved persons could be taken to a free territory, but they remained enslaved. This ended any hope for a legal path to freedom for the nation’s enslaved people.

Abolitionism In the first half of the 1800s, a number of Americans who hoped to abolish slavery, called abolitionists, helped advance the cause of freedom. They included William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth. Garrison, who was white, founded important antislavery groups in New England. Douglass was an enslaved African American who had escaped and eventually bought his freedom. Douglass gave abolitionist speeches all over the North and founded an abolitionist newspaper. Truth, who also had once been enslaved, spoke extensively for the movement. The abolitionists helped bring attention to the antislavery movement across the country. Slavery’s Expansion and the Civil War Despite the hard work of abolitionists, slavery persisted. Fierce debates in Congress resulted in laws such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska

Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky argues for the Compromise of 1850 before Congress. The Compromise of 1850 was one of several congressional acts that attempted to reduce tensions between the free and slave areas of the country.

Yale University Art Gallery

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