These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

The problem of property in the form of people had become an even bigger problem than it had been before the Revolution. The years following the end of the war had witnessed the largest importation of African slaves to the Americas in history—a million people over a single decade. The slave population of the United States, 500,000 in 1776, had soared to 700,000 by 1787. After the Treaty of Paris, when Britain recognized the independence of the United States, it also regarded its former colonies as a foreign nation, which meant that American merchants were banned from British ports, including ports in the West Indies. As a result, a trade in slaves grew within the United States, as slave owners in the South sold their property to back country settlers in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Yet even as the number of slaves in the southern states was rising, it was falling in the North; by 1787, slavery had been effectively abolished in New England and much challenged in Pennsylvania and New York. Economically, it was significant in only five of the thirteen states, and in only two, South Carolina and Georgia, was it the crux of the economy.