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This British drawing from 1790 shows how nearly 300 slaves could be packed into the tight quarters of a ship for the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas.

Even though slavery was largely prohibited in the North, the northern states benefitted from and participated in the maintenance of the institution of slavery in many ways. For example, textile mills in New England and other northern states purchased the cotton produced by slave plantations, then sold the finished cloth to people in the southern states. Northern bankers loaned money to southern plantation owners so that they could buy more land and slaves, and northern merchants profited by shipping cotton, rice, tobacco and other slave-produced goods throughout the United States and Europe. Abolitionists hoped that the institution of slavery could be forced into a slow death across the nation if they could cut off the supply of fresh slaves. Southern slave owners fiercely opposed any tampering with the slave trade, but in 1808 the US DID YOU KNOW ? In 1860, there were 488,070 free blacks in the United States. A little more than half of them (261,918) lived in southern states, where slavery was still legal. government made it illegal to import new slaves from Africa. However, buying and selling of slaves

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SLAVE REVOLTS AND REBELLIONS