Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction, to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond. By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images Contents
This 1870s engraving depicts an enslaved woman and young girl being auctioned as property.
