Where did most enslaved Americans live in North America?

In 1860, the state of Virginia had the largest number of enslaved Americans, at 490,850, followed by the states of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, each of which had more than 400,000 slaves. These were all states with a strong base of cotton-growing, a labor-intensive form of farming that relied on slave labor to enrich the plantation owners.
The explosion of cotton growth after the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 dismayed those Americans who had hoped that the institution of slavery would gradually wither away, especially after the relatively new country of the United States failed to abolish it. It would take the Civil War to finally sweep away an institution many had objected to since the founding of the United States.

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