A abolition of slavery in the Americas The history of chattel slavery in the Americas, from its beginnings in 1492 until its final demise in Brazil in 1888, has spawned a vast literature So, too, has the process by which the institution of chattel slavery was formally and legally abolished A highly contentious, nonlinear, and uneven process that unfolded in different ways and followed distinct time lines in various parts of the Americas, abolition must be distinguished from manumission, in which slave owners granted freedom to individual slaves, which is not examined here Especially since the 1960s, historians have examined many different aspects of abolition in the Americas, including the intellectual and moral impulses impelling it; the history of diverse social movements devoted to compelling colonial, state, and national governments to implement it; and the role of various individuals and groups—including merchants, planters, bureaucrats, and colonial, national, and imperial governments, and slaves themselves—in retarding or accelerating the process The first formal abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere came not from a national government but from state legislatures in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states of the not-yet-independent United States of America In 1777 the Vermont state assembly became the first governmental entity in the Americas to abolish slavery within its jurisdiction In 1780 the Pennsylvania state assembly passed a law requiring all blacks henceforth born in the state to become free upon reaching age 28 State laws mandating the end of chattel slavery, each stipulating different time lines and provisions, were passed in Massachusetts and New Hampshire (1783), Rhode Island and Connecticut (1784), New York (1799), and New Jersey (1804) Significantly, actual abolition sometimes lagged for decades following passage of such laws—as in New Jersey, where legal slavery persisted until ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 Because slavery did not comprise an important component of any of these states’ economies, organized opposition to abolition was limited, and abolition itself carried few economic costs to slaveholders As individual states were passing laws for gradual emancipation, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery in the Northwest Territories, setting the stage for the sectional conflict between North and South that ultimately led to the American Civil War Far more consequential for the eventual abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere was the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade passed by the British parliament in 1807, and put into effect in 1808, outlawing the transatlantic slave trade The law also authorized the British navy to suppress the slave trade among all slave traffickers, making Britain, in effect, the policeman of the high seas The U.S government passed less sweeping legislation in 1808 banning further import of slaves Three years later, the British parliament made participation in the slave trade a felony Scholarly debates have swirled regarding the origins of and inspiration behind these laws Some historians have