Slavery was not new, when the first slaves arrived in America at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619.Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks were among the many whom believed in slavery. For the most part, slavery began in the fifteenth century when the Portuguese arrived in Africa and found out that the Africans did not have a stable government. Therefore, it was easy to take advantage of them. They also found that some Africans held other fellow Africans as slave.

     Slavery became popular in the U.S when the plantation system was developed. Slaves were used to help grow tobacco, rice, sugarcane, and cotton. Many Americans tried using Native American Indians, but in the Indian culture women did most of the work and men who were sent out in the fields did poorly. Indians were not as easily intimidated as the blacks were. Unlike the Indians, the blacks were not familiar with the new land. As time went by, plantation owners tried using indentured servants, white men and women who agreed to work for a certain period of time. It turned out that many of these indentured slaves had been recruited from slums and jail and knew almost nothing about working on the fields. So the only solution was to import African blacks, both from Africa and several from the Caribbean islands.

     As time went by, members of the northern legislatures came to see that slavery was wrong and so they began to pass laws to make slavery illegal. Vermont became a free state in 1777, and between 1780-1860, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts declared themselves free also. Canada also declared itself against slavery. However, southerners wanted slavery, since most of the plantations were down there. The southerners by the late 1700s began passing strict laws, called fugitive slave laws, which stated that if anyone was to help a slave escape they will be fined $1000 or 6 months in jail, and that $10 will be paid to any judge that returns a slave to its owner.