When African slaves began arriving in the Chesapeake region in the early 17th century, they were treated, in many ways, as servants under contract blanks shipped from England. For example, a black man could, under the right conditions, sue for his freedom, or if the slave converted to Christianity, he could gain his freedom. However, around the second half of the 17th century, planters began to systematically deprive slaves of their minimal rights. Until the middle of the 19th century, Southern slaves were treated as beasts of burden, therefore exchanged, 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 in New England, never embraced slavery like their southern neighbors. As migration to the colonies increased and differences emerged between the colonies and a Parliament an ocean away, the issue of slavery accompanied growing ideas of freedom and equality in the New World. As colonialists, and ultimately 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 the 1780s, slavery was disappearing in the North, and all states from 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 alongside the British during the war. Nonetheless, while Americans were encouraged to create their manifest destiny and the Union...... middle of paper ......d, by the framers of the Constitution. In the 19th century, territories were added to the Union and slavery was at the forefront each time, 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 slave camps did not improve, and white Southerners justified the institution of slavery in almost every way imaginable. Nevertheless, slavery moved from a “necessary evil” in Jeffersonian Virginia to a “positive good” in the antebellum South. This development imbued America with a culture that could not have formed naturally. Therefore, black people were socially disadvantaged from the start, and the subsequent social divides that defined the 20th century should not have been a surprise..