History of slavery in Missouri

The history of large-scale slavery in the State of Missouri began in 1720, when a French entrepreneur named Philippe François Renault brought about 500 negro slaves from Saint-Domingue up the Mississippi River to work in lead mines in what is now southeastern Missouri and southern Illinois. These people were the first enslaved Africans brought en masse to the middle Mississippi River Valley. Prior to Renault's enterprise, slavery in Missouri under French colonial rule had been practiced on a much smaller scale as compared to elsewhere in the French colonies.

The institution of slavery only became especially prominent in the area following two major events: the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793, and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. These events led to the westward migration of slave-owning settlers into the area of present-day Missouri and Arkansas, then known as Upper Louisiana. The majority of slave owners in Missouri had moved from worn-out agricultural lands in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. Still, cotton cultivation, arguably the industry to which slave labor was the most important, was never as well-suited to Missouri's climate as to the rest of the southern United States, and was limited entirely to the most southern parts of the state near the border with present-day Arkansas. Slavery in other areas of Missouri was concentrated in other agricultural industries, such as those for tobacco, hemp, grain, and . A number of slaves was also hired out as stevedores, cabin boys, or deck hands on the ferries of the Mississippi River.

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