This map depicts the forced movement of millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas over a span of 4 centuries. It is estimated that as many as 15 million people were transported as slaves, with unknown numbers dying enroute. Most of the enslaved people ended up in South America or the Caribbean, while nearly 500,000 were transported to North America. Almost all of the enslaved Africans worked as plantation laborers or else in mining, and most of those in the Caribbean and Central and South America died from the harshness of the work and the brutality of their living conditions. Only in North America did the slave population reproduce itself, with individuals having a life expectancy equal to that of the white population. In Africa, European traders dealt with African suppliers, seldom capturing the slaves themselves.

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The slave population of the United States increased from 698,000 to 3,954,000 between 1790 and 1860, and 75 percent of these enslaved people worked as agricultural laborers growing cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, and hemp. The majority of these, moreover, worked in cotton. About 15 percent of southern slaves were classified as domestic servants, and approximately ten percent worked in commerce, trades, and industry--principally in towns and cities. This map shows the heavy concentration of slaves in plantation districts, in which the majority of the enslaved lived on plantations of between 20 to 150 slaves. This so-called "black belt" (so named because of the rich, dark soil and the domination of enslaved blacks in the population) swept across the southern states from Virginia to Texas. In some of these areas, enslaved blacks outnumbered whites 13 to 1.

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By 1850, it was commonly believed that a systematic, and well-organized "Underground Railroad" assisted fugitive slaves throughout the South to escape slavery. Most of these runaways, perhaps one or two thousand each year, escaped from slave states close to the North or from coastal regions where they fled by hiding on ships or boats. Few received any help from abolitionists until they made it into a free state. Once there, safe houses and other African Americans often helped the fugitives from slavery to make it safely to northern cities and even to Canada. Some fugitives did escape from the Deep South, but the idea of an established Underground Railroad was more myth than fact. Abolitionists often dramatized these escapes in anti-slavery newspapers, and slaveholders who wanted strong fugitive slave laws enforced by the federal government also spread stories about an underground railroad with stations all over the South.

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This map depicts the slave and non-slaveholding states at the outbreak of the Civil War, along with the dates when each non-slaveholding state legally ended slavery. In the 1850s, the issue of slavery's spread into the western territories divided the nation politically and spawned new political parties, including the Republican Party--which was dedicated to the non-expansion of slavery westward. Southern whites bitterly contested the threat to slavery posed by northern "free soil" politicians, abolitionists, and militant anti-slavery advocates, such as John Brown. Much was at stake for whites and blacks in the nation in 1860, including the very future of slavery itself. Southern whites feared the outbreak of slave rebellions, and almost everyone in the nation talked seriously about the possibility of a civil war between the North and the South.

"Slavery in America." The Geography of Slavery . New York Life. 11 Nov. 2006 <http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/geography/overview.htm>.

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Historical Census – Slave Population of Southern States

"Geospatial and Statistical Data Center at the University of Virginia Library." Historical Census Browser. 2004. The Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. 11 Nov. 2006 <http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/php/newlong2.php

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"TIME Graphics: Making of America - Abraham Lincoln." 2004. Time Inc. 11 Nov. 2006 <http://www.time.com/time/covers/20050704/graphics/index.html>.

"TIME Graphics: Making of America - Abraham Lincoln." 2004. Time Inc. 11 Nov. 2006 <http://www.time.com/time/covers/20050704/graphics/index.html>.