Answer:
<em>Slavery was so profitable, it sprouted more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation. With cash crops of tobacco, cotton and sugar cane, America's southern states became the economic engine of the burgeoning nation. Their fuel of choice? Human slavery. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property and could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until 1865. As an economic system, slavery was largely replaced by sharecropping and convict leasing.</em>
<em>Slavery had been practiced in British America from early colonial days, and was legal in all thirteen colonies at the time those colonies formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property and could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until 1865.The first 19 or so Africans to reach the British colonies arrived in Point Comfort, Virginia, near Jamestown, in 1619, brought by British privateers who had seized them from a captured Portuguese slave ship. Slaves were usually baptized in Africa before embarking.</em>
Just one month after writing this letter, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which announced that at the beginning of 1863, he would use his war powers to free all slaves in states still in rebellion as they came under Union control.
