When African slaves began arriving in the Chesapeake region in the early 17th century, they were treated, in many respects, like white indentured servants shipped from 'England. For example, a black man could, under the right conditions, ask for his own freedom, or if the slave converted to Christianity he could gain his own freedom. By the second half of the 17th century, however, planters began systematically depriving slaves of their minimal rights. Until the mid-nineteenth century, slaves in the South were treated as beasts of burden, thus traded, sold, and classified not among beings, but among things, as an article of property. Throughout the colonial period, slavery continued to expand in the South, but Northerners, especially those from New England, never adopted slavery as their Southern neighbors did. As migration to the colonies increased and differences emerged between the colonies and a Parliament an ocean away, the issue of slavery accompanied the growing thought of freedom and equality in the New World. As colonialists, and eventually Americans, attempted to define freedom and equality in an evolving state, slavery polarized society along lines of race and status. The issue of slavery remained under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention. By 1780, slavery was dying in the North, and every state in northern Pennsylvania recognized that slavery was fundamentally incompatible with the Revolutionary ideology that “all men are created equal. In the Deep South, freedom for slaves was unthinkable, yet thousands had defected to fight with the English during the war. However, since Americans were encouraged to create their own manifest destiny and Uni...... middle of paper ......d, by the framers of the Constitution. In the nineteenth century, territories were added to the Union, and slavery was at the forefront in each case, as pro-slavery and anti-slavery states struggled to gain the upper hand in congressional votes. With the invention of the cotton gin in 1797, the demand for slaves increased. Yet conditions in the slave camps did not improve, and Southern whites justified the institution of slavery in almost every way imaginable. Nonetheless, slavery evolved from a “necessary evil” in Jeffersonian Virginia to a “positive good” in the antebellum South. This evolution infused America with a culture that was not allowed to form naturally. Thus, blacks were at a severe social disadvantage from the beginning, and the subsequent social fractures that came to define the twentieth century should not have been surprising..