Anti-Slavery American Slavery and the Roots

During the early part of the seventeenth century, the earliest African arrivals in America held the status of indentured servants, and in fact there are records of black indentured servants being freed after serving their contracts. This practice seems to have ended by 1650, when the period of slavery in America began in earnest. The historian Kenneth M. Stampp writes in his work The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South: "prior to the civil war southern slavery was America's most profound and vexatious social problem." There is little reason to doubt this. The institution of slavery proved to be the great insoluble of American history, defying all political compromises, and helping propel the country along the path to the tragedy of the American Civil War (1861-1865).

It is important, however, to remember that the slave system in America was not created overnight. It was built little by little and in small steps, over a period of many years, and in fact up until the turn of the eighteenth century the "peculiar institution" as Southerners referred to it was amorphous and the legal status of blacks remained somewhat undefined. After the American Revolutionary War, however, the slave system in the South began to take on its modern features.

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