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.