How did the United States end slavery?
Freedom's Long Thread
How did the United States end slavery?
For most of America's first century, something terrible was woven right into the country: slavery. Millions of Black men, women, and children were owned by other people, forced to work without pay or freedom. The story of how that ended is messy, slow, and full of brave people who refused to give up. So let's follow the thread.
From the very beginning, people knew slavery was wrong and said so out loud. These voices were called abolitionists — a big word that just means "people who wanted slavery abolished," meaning gone for good. Some were formerly enslaved, like Frederick Douglass, who escaped and then told the whole world what slavery really was.
