when did slavery end

In the United States, slavery legally ended with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865, which abolished slavery nationwide except as punishment for a crime.

However, the story is more complicated and stretches across several key dates and moments.

Key dates in the end of slavery (U.S.)

• January 1, 1863 – Emancipation Proclamation : President Abraham Lincoln declared enslaved people in the rebelling Confederate states to be free, but it did not apply to Union slave states or areas already under Union control, and it depended on Union military victory to have effect.

• June 19, 1865 – Juneteenth (Texas) : Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that enslaved people in Texas were free; Texas was the last Confederate state with institutional slavery, and this date later became a major symbolic “end of slavery” celebration.

• December 6, 1865 – Thirteenth Amendment ratified : The amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude (except as criminal punishment) shall exist in the United States became law, abolishing chattel slavery nationwide in constitutional terms.

• 1866 – Native nations in Indian Territory : Some Native American nations in what is now Oklahoma still held enslaved African Americans, and new treaties with the U.S. government in 1866 required them to abolish slavery; scholars sometimes use June 14, 1866, when the Creek Nation agreed to end slavery, as the date that slavery as a legal institution ended in the continental U.S.

So when people ask “when did slavery end,” historians often answer December 6, 1865 for the formal legal end via the Thirteenth Amendment, while also pointing to Juneteenth (June 19, 1865) and the 1866 tribal treaties to show that freedom did not arrive everywhere at the same time and that the process of ending slavery was gradual and uneven.