Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Slave states and free states
Summary
In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the internal or domestic slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were prohibited. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states, so new states were admitted in slave–free pairs. There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 specifically stated that a slave did not become free by entering a free state.
Slavery in what would become the United States was established as part of European colonization. By the 18th century, slavery was legal throughout the Thirteen Colonies, after which rebel colonies started to abolish the practice. Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780, and about half of the states had abolished slavery by the end of the Revolutionary War or in the first decades of the new country, although this did not always mean that existing slaves became free. Vermont – having declared its independence from Britain in 1777 and thus not being one of the Thirteen Colonies – banned slavery in the same year, before being admitted as a state in 1791.
Slavery was a divisive issue in the United States. It was a major issue during the writing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the subject of political crises in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, and was the primary cause of the American Civil War in 1861. Just before the Civil War, there were 19 free states and 15 slave states. The last free state, Kansas, only coming in after its own years-long bloody fight. During the war, slavery was abolished in some of the slave state jurisdictions, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in December 1865, finally abolished slavery throughout the United States.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.