Note: Explore this map with the activity The Underground Railroad.This map shows which states and territories in 1850 permitted the enslavement of people, and which did not. Slavery had been practiced in North America since well before the United States was founded in 1776, and by 1850 it was a key part of the agricultural economy of the southern states. Large cotton plantations operated on the labor of enslaved people, particularly Black Africans. Meanwhile, the northern United States had a more industrial economy, and by 1850 had mostly prohibited slavery for economic, political, and moral reasons. Though these states were considered “free” states, in many cases this meant that slavery wasn’t widespread. Even in states and territories where slavery was technically illegal, there were many loopholes that kept people enslaved and restricted free Black people.

In the years before the American Civil War, which began in 1861, the question of whether new states would allow slavery caused a lot of disagreement and tension between the North and South. The United States was carefully balanced to have as many "slave" states as "free" states, giving both sides an equal number of senators. The South was worried that if more free states were added, this balance would be upset, and the North would be able to pass legislation banning slavery in the United States. The North didn't want slavery to spread to new areas, both for moral reasons and because they didn’t think it was fair that enslaved people couldn’t vote but counted as part of the population when assigning congressional delegates. They argued that this gave the South an unfair advantage when voting for new laws. To try to keep the peace, a series of compromises, such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 were proposed to determine what states and territories would or would not permit slavery.

Another issue that caused tension between abolitionists in the North and slave owners in the South was the ongoing trade of enslaved people. The United States government had banned foreign slave trade in 1800, but this did nothing to free the people who were already enslaved in the United States. States in the upper South, such as Virginia, now profited from selling enslaved people to new states in the Deep South.

To escape enslavement, some enslaved people used an informal network of routes, places, and people known as the Underground Railroad to travel in secret to the Northern United States and into Canada, where slavery was illegal. The Underground Railroad was not a literal underground railroad, but because escaping from slavery and helping enslaved people escape was illegal, the network operated in secret. The “conductors” were the people leading enslaved people to freedom and the “station masters,” those who hid enslaved people on the way north. According to some estimates, between 1810 and 1850, the Underground Railroad helped to guide 100,000 enslaved people to freedom.

This map was made through the process of digitization, or tracing historical maps using modern geographic information system (GIS) software. These maps don’t always line up perfectly with modern boundaries, for many reasons. Over time, natural landmarks, such as rivers, can shift their paths, and human landmarks, such as buildings and roads, can be abandoned and demolished. There are also differences in the accuracy of hand-drawn maps compared to computer-drawn maps.

The original maps are published in Harper’s Atlas of American History, and are available through the Library of Congress:

Slavery and Slave Trade 1830-1850

Routes of the Underground Railroad 1830-1865

Fox, Dixon Ryan. Harper's atlas of American history, selected from "The American nation series," with map studies, by Dixon Ryan Fox. [New York, London, Harper & Brothers, 1920] Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/32005827/

There were almost 700 thousand slaves in the US in 1790, which equated to approximately 18 percent of the total population, or roughly one in every six people. By 1860, the final census taken before the American Civil War, there were four million slaves in the South, compared with less than 0.5 million free African Americans in all of the US. Of the 4.4 million African Americans in the US before the war, almost four million of these people were held as slaves; meaning that for all African Americans living in the US in 1860, there was an 89 percent* chance that they lived in slavery. A brief history Trans-Atlantic slavery began in the early sixteenth century, when the Portuguese and Spanish forcefully brought captured African slaves to the New World, in order to work for them. The British Empire introduced slavery to North America on a large scale, and the economy of the British colonies there depended on slave labor, particularly regarding cotton, sugar and tobacco output. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century the number of slaves being brought to the Americas increased exponentially, and at the time of American independence it was legal in all thirteen colonies. Although slavery became increasingly prohibited in the north, the number of slaves remained high during this time as they were simply relocated or sold from the north to the south. It is also important to remember that the children of slaves were also viewed as property, and (apart from some very rare cases) were born into a life of slavery. Abolition and the American Civil War In the years that followed independence, the Northern States began gradually prohibiting slavery, and it was officially abolished there by 1805, and the importation of slave labor was prohibited nationwide from 1808 (although both still existed in practice after this). Business owners in the Southern States however depended on slave labor in order to meet the demand of their rapidly expanding industries, and the issue of slavery continued to polarize American society in the decades to come. This culminated in the election of President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, who promised to prohibit slavery in the newly acquired territories to the west, leading to the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Although the Confederacy (south) were victorious in much of the early stages of the war, the strength in numbers of the northern states (including many free, black men), eventually resulted in a victory for the Union (north), and the nationwide abolishment of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Legacy In total, an estimated twelve to thirteen million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves, and this does not include the high number who did not survive the journey (which was as high as 23 percent in some years). In the 150 years since the abolishment of slavery in the US, the African-American community have continuously campaigned for equal rights and opportunities that were not afforded to them along with freedom. The most prominent themes have been the Civil Rights Movement, voter suppression, mass incarceration and the relationship between the police and the African-American community has taken the spotlight in recent years.

Beginning in the 16th century, European traders began to buy or capture people in the African continent to enslave and sell for profit. This trade began with Portugal and Spain, but it later expanded to include France, England, the Netherlands and other European countries. By the time the trading of enslaved people was finally put to an end in the 19th century, Europeans had abducted an estimated 12.5 million African people from their homelands, forced them onto ships, trafficked them to the Americas, and sold them on the auction block. Almost two million people died during transport; most of the rest were forced into labor camps, also called plantations. This extensive and gruesome human trafficking is commonly referred to as the transatlantic slave trade. The Portuguese began human trafficking in Africa by trading manufactured goods or money for Africans who had been captured during local wars. Later, some Europeans captured Africans themselves or paid other local Africans to do it for them. Europeans traded for or kidnapped Africans from many points on Africa’s coast, including Angola, Senegambia and Mozambique. Most of the people who were enslaved by the Europeans came from West and Central Africa.The most brutal segment of the route was the Middle Passage, which transported chained African people across the Atlantic Ocean as they were packed tightly below the decks of purpose-built ships in unsanitary conditions. This trip could last weeks or even months depending on conditions, and the trafficked people were subjected to abuse, dangerously high heat, inadequate food and water, and low-oxygen environments. Olaudah Equiano, a young boy who was forced into the Middle Passage after being captured in his home country of Nigeria, later described the foul conditions as “intolerably loathsome” and detailed how people died from sickness and lack of air. Approximately 1.8 million African people are thought to have died during the passage, accounting for about 15–25 percent of those who were taken from Africa.For many enslaved Africans trafficked across the Atlantic, the port at which their ship landed was not their final destination. Enslaved people were often transported by ship between two points in the Americas, particularly from Portuguese, Dutch and British colonies to Spanish ones. This was the intra-American slave trade. No matter where they landed, enslaved Africans faced brutal living conditions and high mortality rates. Moreover, any children born to enslaved persons were also born into slavery, usually with no hope of ever gaining freedom.This data set is the culmination of decades of archival research compiled by the SlaveVoyages Consortium. This data represents the trafficking of enslaved Africans from 1514 to 1866. All mapmakers must make choices when presenting data. This map layer represents individuals who experts can definitively place at a given location on one of at least 36,000 transatlantic and at least 10,000 intra-American human trafficking routes. However, this means the enslaved people for whom records cannot place their departure or arrival with certainty do not appear on this map (approximately 170,985 people). This map, therefore, is part of the story and not a complete accounting. You can learn more about the methodology of this data collection here.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in November of 1860 brought to a head the issue of slavery in the United States. In direct response to Lincoln's election as president, seven southern states seceded from the Union rather than continue to negotiate and compromise over the issue of slavery, which had been the norm for so many decades.This story map locates most of the major battles of the American Civil War. It was developed in partnership with the American Battlefield Trust.Many of the descriptions for individual sites include links to excellent battlefield maps, articles and in-depth analysis from the American Battlefield Trust. The Trust is America's largest non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of our nation's endangered battlefields. The Trust also promotes educational programs and heritage tourism initiatives to inform the public of the war's history and the fundamental conflicts that sparked it. See additional story maps at esri.com/arcgisstorymaps.

Tells the story of the purpose of the cemeteries map, considerations when identifying cemeteries and burial grounds, and provides a map for users to find cemeteries. This also highlights cemeteries associated with historic African-American communities and burials of enslaved people.Please note cemeteries located on private property have restricted access to specific individuals (such as family members or descendants of those buried there) with advanced notice to the landowner, who may designate the frequency of access, hours and duration of access, and the access route. Please review § 57-27.1 of the Code of Virginia for more details.

In the 1800s, the spread of railroads enabled the growth and spread of the United States. Although slow by today’s standards, trains traveled more quickly than other forms of transportation available at the time. By train, it took roughly four days to reach San Francisco from Omaha, Nebraska. By contrast, it had taken covered wagons four to six months, and stagecoaches around a month. In addition to travel, railroads facilitated trade and economic growth. Prior to railroads, people relied on a system of roads and canals for transportation of goods and crops. But this system could be unreliable depending on road conditions, the weather, and many other factors. Trains brought products made in the factories of the East and Midwest to the rest of the country and carried farm produce and livestock to urban markets. The first railroad charter was granted to John Stevens in 1815, and several railroads were in service by 1830. Early rail development was haphazard, financed by individual investors and built without government oversight. Rail gauges, or the distance between rails, could be different depending on the company. This caused a lot of problems for connecting railroads, because only trains designed for that gauge could use those sections of track. Despite miles of track being built, people were generally still skeptical about the usefulness of railroads. In 1843, the Western Railroad of Massachusetts proved to Americans that trains could transport crops and other goods long distances at low costs. By 1861, there were 35,400 kilometers (22,000 miles) of track in the North and only 15,300 kilometers (9,500 miles) in the South. Troops and supplies could be transported quickly using trains. Many battles, like the Battle of Bull Run, were fought over control of Southern railway depots, and tracks were used to move both Confederate and Union soldiers to battles. After the Civil War, railway construction increased significantly. In 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act with the goal of building a transcontinental railroad. The first, built by the Central Pacific Railroad Company in the West and the Union Pacific in the Midwest, was completed in 1869. Following roughly the route previously taken by the Pony Express and the California Trail, the route was called the Overland Route. Construction was dangerous, as rail crews had to cross mountains, rivers, and other difficult terrain. For this work, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific relied mainly on immigrant labor, recruiting Chinese immigrants in the West and Irish immigrants in the Midwest. Formerly enslaved people and Mormons were also part of these crews. Between 10,000 and 15,000 Chinese workers completed an estimated 90 percent of work on the Central Pacific’s portion of track, facing racism, violence, and discrimination. Chinese workers were often paid less than white workers and were given the most undesirable and dangerous jobs. The Overland Route was one of the first land-grant railroads. To fund construction of such a long and expensive project, the U.S. government gave railroad companies millions of acres of land that they could sell for profit. Following this model, many more railroads were built, including four additional transcontinental railroads. These new railroads took southern and northern routes across the country. In addition to connecting existing cities on the West Coast to the rest of the country, the railroads also influenced where people settled. Trains made multiple stops to refuel, make repairs, and take on more food and water. In return, towns grew around these stops. More than 7,000 cities and towns west of the Missouri River started as Union Pacific depots and water stops. In 1890, the U.S. Bureau of the Census announced that the “Frontier was closed.” The railroads had played a large role in that milestone. This dataset was researched and built by Dr. Jeremy Atack, Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University. His procedure and sources, as well as downloadable files, are documented here.