Compared with some European countries and American territories, the United States was late to abolish slavery.
Mexico abolished slavery in
1829. The abolition of slavery was one of the reasons that white slave-holders in Texas rebelled and that the Republic of Texas re-instated slavery when it was formed in 1836. Though there was little documentation, historians estimate that at least 5,000 enslaved people escaped the United States and lived freely in Mexico.
Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in
1833. When the Slavery Abolition Act went into effect, it dismantled the structure of plantation slavery in the Caribbean colonies, but only freed enslaved people under the age of six in British North America. In modern Canada, enslaved people over the age of six were forced to be apprentices to slave owners for another four to six years.
France abolished slavery in
1848, after a 70-year period of abolishing and re-instating slavery in its colonies. Its former colony, Haiti, had already abolished slavery after the majority Black population won the
Haitian Revolution in 1804.
Denmark abolished slavery in the Danish Colonies in
1848, 50 years after it had abolished the transatlantic slave trade in the West Indies. In 1847, the Danish government announced that all future children of enslaved people would be free and that slavery would be completely abolished by 1859. However, large scale
slave rebellions in 1848 pressured Danish official Peter von Scholten to announce the abolition of slavery immediately.
The United States didn’t officially abolish slavery until
1865 when the 13th Amendment passed Congress and was signed by President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s 1863
Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people in the 11 Confederate states at war against the Union, and specifically applied to territory in those states that weren’t under Union control. It addressed only a small portion of the institution of slavery in the U.S., which could only be permanently abolished through a constitutional amendment.
Brazil was the last country in the Americas that relied on legal enslaved labor. The imperial government finally abolished slavery in
1888 after years of intense pressure from abolition organizations across the country.
