Primarily focused on dividing what was at the time known as the Northwest Territory (what would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota), the Northwest Ordinance also provided a foundation for future legislation of slavery in the United States. Article 6 of the document both prohibits slavery in the territory and any future states formed in the territory while also requiring the capture and return of any enslaved people who escaped to the territory.

While the majority of the U.S. Constitution primarily deals with governance structure and articulation of powers, there are a number of clauses that formed the basis of the country's relationship to slavery until the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil War. Most well known is Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 famously known as the 3/5ths compromise, but references to slavery as an economic issue can be found in Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 which addresses taxes on the imports of enslaved people and Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, or the Fugitive Slave Clause, which requires the arrest and return of any slave who fled across state borders.

A seemingly innocuous patent for an invention, Eli Whitney's design for the cotton gin revolutionized agriculture in the south, facilitating the process of separating cotton fiber from the seed. However, this invention made cotton a far more profitable crop to grow and harvest leading to the growth of slavery in the United States when it was previously believed the cost of cotton production would ultimately lead to the natural collapse of slavery as a practice.

The Missourin Compromise was an attempt by the United States Congress to preserve the uneasy balance between slave states and free states in the legislature. By admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state simultaneously, the thought process went, the current balance in the Senate where each state was granted two Senators, would remain unchanged. However, the compromise also prhibited slavery above the 36º 30' latitude line which would lay the ground for conflict between free and slave states in the future.

A series of bills that attempted for a last time to settle issues between slave states and free states. Topics included in the bills were new states deciding their status based upon "popular sovereignty," prohibition of the slave trade in Washington, D.C., a Texas border dispute, and a stricter Fugitive Slave Act.

A guide by the Library of Congress to the Missouri Compromise and related documents.

A Library of Congress guide to primary source documents related to the Dred Scott Supreme Court case

A resource guide from the Library of Congress on Frederick Douglass

A Library of Congress guide to using the Chronicling America digital newspaper archive to find and access articles related to the topics of slavery and abolition across the 18th and 19th centuries

A Library of Congress guide to resources on Slavery in America

A Library of Congress guide to resources related to the activist and abolitionist Sojourner Truth