Slave states and free states

In the history of the United States of America, a **slave state** was a U.S. state in which the practice of slavery was legal at a particular point in time. A **free state** were the ones in which slavery was ed. Slavery was an  that divided the country. It was one of the  causes of the American Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865, ed slavery in every state and territory of the United States except in cases of punishment for criminal activity. After that time the terms became more or less  because all states were free of slavery.

## Early history 
Slavery was legal and practiced in each of the Thirteen Colonies. Organized political and social movements to end slavery began in the mid-18th century. The desire for freedom from Britain, ed in the American Revolutionary War, caused many black Americans to join the revolution in hopes they would be freed also. Others joined the British Army, encouraged by British promises of freedom in exchange for military service. After the British lost the war, thousands were taken to Nova Scotia.

In the 1770s, blacks throughout New England began sending petitions to northern legislatures demanding freedom. At the Constitutional Convention many slavery issues were debated and for a time slavery was a major  to passage of the new constitution. As a compromise the  of slavery was d although never mentioned directly in the constitution. An example is the Fugitive Slave Clause.  By 1789, five of the Northern states had policies that started to gradually abolish slavery: Pennsylvania (1780), New Hampshire and Massachusetts (1783), Connecticut and Rhode Island (1784). Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, while it was still independent. When it joined the United States as the 14th state in 1791, it was the first state to join that had no slavery. By 1804 all of the northern states had abolished slavery or had s in place to gradually reduce it. There were 11 free states and 11 slave states. Later came the civil war.

In the South, Kentucky was created as a slave state from a part of Virginia (1792). Tennessee was created a slave state out of a part of North Carolina (1796). By 1803, after Ohio had been admitted to the United States, there were nine free states and eight slave states. The geographic divide between northern free states and southern slave states became the Mason–Dixon line. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise extended the Mason–Dixon line westward as the official dividing line between free and slave states east of the Ohio River.

## New territories
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed just before the U.S. Constitution was ratified, prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. The southern boundary of the territory was the Ohio River.  This was regarded as a westward extension of the Mason–Dixon line. The territory was generally settled by New Englanders and American Revolutionary War veterans who were granted land there. The states created from the territory&nbsp;&ndash; Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), Iowa (1846), Wisconsin (1848), and Minnesota (1858)&nbsp;&ndash; were all free states.

## War of 1812 
During the War of 1812, the British accepted all slaves who came into their hands as free. This was without any s as to military service such as had been made in the Revolutionary War. By the end of the War of 1812, the momentum for antislavery reform, state by state, appeared to lose momentum. Half the states had already abolished Slavery, had prohibited it from the start or were in the process of eliminating slavery. The other half were committed to preserving slavery within their borders.

At the federal level politicians were concerned over the balance of power in the United States. Each state had two senators so if there were an equal number of states on both sides of the issue, nothing could be done on the federal level. With an equal number of slave states and free states, the Senate was equally divided on issues important to the South. Both the North and South were concerned over the western territories and whether new states would be admitted as free states or slave states. It was repealed on December 3, 1844. An effort was attempted to organize Kansas for admission as a slave state. It was to be paired with Minnesota as a free state. But the admission of Kansas as a slave state was blocked because of questions over the legitimacy of its slave state constitution. Anti-slavery settlers in Kansas in the 1850s were called *Free-Soilers*, because they fought (successfully) to include Kansas in the Union as a free state in 1861. When the admission of Minnesota proceeded unimpeded in 1858, the balance in the Senate was lost. Oregon was admitted in 1859 as a free state.

## End of slavery
 states, including those admitted during the war; light blue represents border states; red represents Confederate states. Unshaded areas were not states before or during the Civil War.]] 
At the start of the Civil War, there were 34 states in the United States, 15 of which were slave states. Of these, 11 slave states declared their secession from the United States to form the Confederacy. The slave states that stayed in the Union were Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, and Kentucky, and were referred to as the border states. By the time the Emancipation Proclamation was made in 1863 Tennessee was already in Union control. So the Proclamation applied only to the 10 remaining Confederate states. Abolition of slavery also became a condition of the return of local rule in those states that had declared their secession. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery throughout the United States on December 18, 1865, ending the distinction between slave and free states.

## References