Slavery in the colonial history of the United States

The institution of slavery in the European colonies in North America, which eventually became part of the United States of America, developed due to a combination of factors. Primarily, the labor demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were targets of enslavement by Europeans during the era.

As the Spaniards, French, Dutch, and British gradually established colonies in North America from the 16th century onward, they began to enslave indigenous people, using them as forced labor to help develop colonial economies. As indigenous peoples suffered massive population losses due to imported diseases, Europeans quickly turned to importing slaves from Africa, primarily to work on slave plantations that produced cash crops. The enslavement of indigenous people in North America was later replaced during the 18th century by the enslavement of black African people. Concurrent with the development of slavery, racist ideology was developed among Europeans, the rights of free people of color in European colonies were curtailed, slaves were legally defined as chattel property, and the condition of slavery as hereditary.

The Thirteen Colonies of northern British America, were for much or all of the period less dependent on slavery than the Caribbean colonies, or those of New Spain, or Brazil, and slavery did not develop significantly until later in the colonial era. Nonetheless, slavery was legal in every colony prior to the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), and was most prominent in the Southern Colonies (as well as, the southern Mississippi River and Florida colonies of France, Spain, and Britain), which by then developed large slave-based plantation systems. Slavery in Europe's North American colonies which did not have warm climates and ideal conditions for plantations to exist primarily took the form of domestic labor or doing other forms of unpaid work alongside non-enslaved counterparts. The American Revolution led to the first abolition laws in the Americas, although the institution of chattel slavery would continue to exist and expand across the Southern United States until finally being abolished at the time of the American Civil War in 1865.^[2][3][4]

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