Slavery: Definition and Abolition

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Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings (1773-1835) was an enslaved woman owned by Founding Father Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). Hemings and Jefferson had a longstanding romantic relationship, and had at least one and perhaps as many as six children together.

Map illustrates the status of slavery in the United States in 1821. Published in 1920, it shows Free States (brown), states undergoing gradual abolition (light brown), free states via the Ordinance of 1787 (dotted), free states via the Missouri Compromise (striped), and slave-holding states (yellow).

Missouri Compromise

Pro- and Anti-Slavery Factions in Congress When the Missouri Territory first applied for statehood in 1818, it was clear that many in the territory wanted to allow slavery in the new state. Part of the more than 800,000 square miles bought from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Missouri was known as the Louisiana […]

Compromise of 1850

The Compromise of 1850 was made up of five bills that attempted to resolve disputes over slavery in new territories added to the United States in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1846-48). It admitted California as a free state, left Utah and New Mexico to decide for themselves, defined a new Texas-New Mexico boundary, and made it easier for slaveowners to recover runway slaves.

John Brown

Early Life Brown was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut, the son of Owen and Ruth Mills Brown. His father, who was in the tannery business, relocated the family to Ohio, where the abolitionist spent most of his childhood. The Brown family’s new home of Hudson, Ohio, happened to be a key stop […]

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Details of Brutal First Slave Voyages Discovered

After Charles I of Spain signed an edict launching the transatlantic slave trade, human cargo on transatlantic voyages spiked nearly tenfold.

Enslaved workers of General Thomas F. Drayton, in Hilton Head, S.C., 1862

Could Compromise Have Prevented the Civil War?

It’s not as if Congress didn’t try.

How the Amistad Rebellion, and Its Extraordinary Trial, Unfolded

The 1839 mutiny, led by an African rice farmer known as Cinqué, galvanized the abolitionist movement.

What Frederick Douglass Revealed—and Omitted—in His Famous Autobiographies

The former slave, whose brilliant prose and soaring oratory pricked the conscience of a nation, carefully shaped his own myth. Details like a white second wife didn’t fit.

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2:43 minTV-PG

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The System of American Slavery

Historians and experts examine the American system of racialized slavery and the hypocrisy it relied on to function.

1:55 minTV-PG

Compromise of 1850

Matthew Pinsker gives a crash course on the Compromise of 1850, the resolution to a dispute over slavery in territory gained after the Mexican-American War.

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2:39 minTV-PG

Gateway to Freedom: The Underground Railroad

Professor Eric Foner discusses key people and events in the history of the Underground Railroad. He explains how slaves escaped to freedom with assistance from anti-slavery activists.

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