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Slavery in the United States lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. It had its origins with the first English colonization of North America in Virginia in 1607, although African slaves were brought to Spanish Florida as early as the 1560s.[1] Most slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native Americans and free blacks also held slaves; there was a small number of white slaves as well.[citation needed] Slaves were spread to the areas where there was good quality soil for large plantations of high value cash crops, such as cotton, sugar, and coffee. The majority of slaveholders were in the southern United States, where most slaves were engaged in an efficient machine-like gang system of agriculture, with farms of fifteen or more slaves proving to be far more productive than farms without slaves.[citation needed] Also, these large groups of slaves were thought to work more efficiently if guarded by a managerial class called overseers to ensure that the slaves did not waste a second of movement. From 1654 until 1865, slavery for life was legal within the boundaries of much of the present United States.[2] Before the widespread establishment of chattel slavery (outright ownership of the slave), much labor was organized under a system of bonded labor known as indentured servitude. This typically lasted for several years for white and black alike, and it was a means of using labor to pay the costs of transporting people to the colonies.[3] By the 18th century, court rulings established the racial basis of the American incarnation of slavery to apply chiefly to Black Africans and people of African descent, and occasionally to Native Americans. In part because of the success of tobacco as a cash crop in the Southern colonies, its labor-intensive character caused planters to import more slaves for labor by the end of the 17th century than did the northern colonies. The South had a significantly high number and proportion of slaves in the population.[3] Twelve million Africans were shipped to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries.[4][5] Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States. The largest number were shipped to Brazil (see slavery in Brazil).[6] The slave population in the United States had grown to four million by the 1860 Census.[7] Slavery was one of the principal issues leading to the American Civil War. After the Union prevailed in the war, slavery was abolished throughout the United States with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[8]

Slavery in the United States