Slavery in
America began during the days of the Jamestown settlement, which was the first permanent English
settlement in the New World. As the seventeenth century progressed into the eighteenth century,
Europeans saw African prisoners as a better option for workers than indentured servants, so
slavery became the enabling force behind crops in the American South, like tobacco and
cotton.
Only after the American Revolution, which took place between 1775 and
1783, did Americans link their own feelings of oppression by the English crown to the state of
oppression that they themselves had forced upon the slaves. The drafting of the Constitution
began in 1787, and at this point in American history, slavery was already a divisive issue among
the states.
Issues that related to commerce and business as well as
governmental representation eventually led the delegates to make an agreement called the
"Three-Fifths Compromise." This compromise meant that the Southern states would stop
bringing slaves from Africa by the year 1808.
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