African-American history started with the forced transportation of Sub-Saharan Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting Atlantic slave trade, encompassed a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold in the Atlantic slave trade, either to Europe or the Americas, approximately 388,000 were sent to North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to European colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of Sub-Saharan African descent, both free and enslaved.
During the American Revolutionary War, in which the Thirteen Colonies gained independence and began to form the United States, Black soldiers fought on both the British and the American sides. After the conflict ended, the Northern United States gradually abolished slavery. However, the population of the American South, which had an economy dependent on plantations operation by slave labor, increased their usage of slaves to pick cotton, which became the basis of the industrial revolution underway in England and New England. Slavery moved westward from the Southern states during the westward expansion of the United States. During this period, numerous enslaved African Americans escaped into free states and Canada via the Underground Railroad. Disputes over slavery between the Northern and Southern states led to the American Civil War, in which 178,000 African Americans served on the Union side. During the war, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which ended slavery as soon as the Union armies arrived. After the war ended the Thirteenth Amendment, abolished slavery in the U.S., except as punishment for a crime.
