Slavery in the United States

The institution of human chattel slavery in the United States, which it inherited from its colonial predecessors, was prevalent from independence in 1776 until the end of the civil war in 1865. Primarily employed in the South, enslaved Afro-Americans were the backbone of the plantation economy in the US. Throughout this period, enslaved African Americans were collectively reduced to commodities which could be bought and sold for the benefit of White slave owners and had the same legal rights as farm animals. After the abolition of chattel slavery in the aftermath of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, many of chattel slavery's socio-economic relationships endured through the developments of the Jim Crow economy and sharecropping.

Slavery in the American Colonies

White Settler Colonialism's Justifications for Slavery and White Supremacy

Yeoman farmers, who did not own slave labor, made up the majority of whites. They sometimes believed in the institution of slavery but also occasionally challenged the goals of the planter elite, especially on the western frontier of the U.S, where they advocated for the gradual abolition of slavery. Due to the dominance of cotton in the south, and yeoman farmers there saw, how detrimental it was to their own survival to compete with the slave owning elite, working from dawn until dusk on with their own hands on their own lands. Poor white farms gained more voting rights in the 1830s and 1840s and sought to influence state legislatures about their political and economic concerns. Even then, trouble arose for elite slave owners with nations around the world from Europe to South America abolishing slavery, as the abolition movement picked up steam, an example of which, Britain's emancipation of ''all slaves'' in 1834, so elite white farmers came up with a system that was to ensure the institution of slavery was to be intact forever. With the three-fifths compromise, giving elite whites political power in congress, white elite planters also consolidated power, by making loans to those in need, hiring poor whites for work, as well as using resources to transport crops of yeoman farmers to the market. Even if some yeoman farmers didn't participate in the institution of slavery, they had major incentives not to end it because white settler colonial elites had made white society dependent upon themselves. White settler-colonialism, and its justification for the institution for slavery, was a political and economic move, to coerce, and influence those in slavery, and those who didn't contribute to slavery as much as actual slave owners, to disprove the evils, and horrors of slavery and to justify its evil to end it. The white settler elite created the idea of white supremacy to uphold white society together under elitist control. The idea that all whites were equal and superior towards black African slaves, was not in question due to the lower, and poor white farmers, who either did or did not support the idea of white supremacy, not having any benefits to opposing the idea of it, since the elite white farmers did in fact keep the yeoman poor farmers alive, and sustainable. Two justifying phrases include those that explain slavery, as a ''necessary evil'' or a ''positive good''. John C. Calhoun noted that:

''I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good - positive good... There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne out by history... I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions.''

Explaining the ''inherent'', and ''moral'', as well as, ''necessary'', domination of the white race over the black, race bound southern society together. The planter elite and forged a unbreakable tie with the lower white classes and established a stronghold on southern culture.