page_title: Slavery
section_title: North America
hierarchical_section_title: Slavery / Abolitionism / North America
caption_attribution_description: English: Joseph Jenkins Roberts, the first and seventh president of Liberia. Deutsch: Joseph J. Roberts, nach Liberias Unabhängigkeitserklärung von 1848 bis 1856 erster Präsident des Landes, der von 1872 bis 1876 ein weiteres Mal das Präsidentenamt bekleidete, um 1851.
context_page_description: Slavery and enslavement are the state and condition of being a slave. A person is enslaved when a slaver, by means of physical restraint or threat, has forced, coerced, or intimidated him or her into unwilling work. In chattel slavery, the enslaved person is legally rendered the personal property of the slave owner. In economics, the term de facto slavery describes the conditions of unfree labour and forced labour, where people are forced or compelled to work against their will. In the course of human history, slavery was often a feature of civilisation and legal in most societies, but is now outlawed in most countries of the world.
  In 2019, approximately 40 million people, of whom 26 percent were children, were enslaved throughout the world. In the modern world, more than 50 percent of enslaved people provide forced labor, usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country's economy. In the industrialised countries, human trafficking is the modern variety of slavery; in the unindustrialised countries, enslavement by debt bondage is a common form of enslaving a person, such as captive domestic servants, forced marriage, and child soldiers.
context_section_description: The Spanish colonization of the Americas sparked a discussion about the right to enslave Native Americans. A prominent critic of slavery in the Spanish New World colonies was Bartolomé de las Casas, who opposed the enslavement of Native Americans, and as well as Africans in America.
  One of the first protests against slavery came from German and Dutch Quakers in Pennsylvania in 1688. In 1777, Vermont, at the time an independent nation, became the first portion of what would become the United States to abolish slavery.
  In the United States, all of the northern states had abolished slavery by 1804, with New Jersey being the last to act. Abolitionist pressure produced a series of small steps towards emancipation. After the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves went into effect on January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited, but not the internal slave trade, nor involvement in the international slave trade externally. Legal slavery persisted; most of those slaves already in the U.S. were legally emancipated only in 1863. Many American abolitionists took an active role in opposing slavery by supporting the Underground Railroad. Violent clashes between anti-slavery and pro-slavery Americans included Bleeding Kansas, a series of political and armed disputes in 1854–1861 as to whether Kansas would join the United States as a slave or free state. By 1860, the total number of slaves reached almost four million, and the American Civil War, beginning in 1861, led to the end of slavery in the United States. In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves held in the Confederate States; the 13th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution prohibited most forms of slavery throughout the country.
  Many of the freed slaves became sharecroppers and indentured servants. In this manner, some became tied to the very parcel of land into which they had been born a slave having little freedom or economic opportunity because of Jim Crow laws which perpetuated discrimination, limited education, promoted persecution without due process and resulted in continued poverty. Fear of reprisals such as unjust incarcerations and lynchings deterred upward mobility further.
caption: Joseph Jenkins Roberts, born in Virginia, was the first president of Liberia, which was founded in 1822 for freed American slaves.
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