The novel Adventures of Huckeberry Finn is based against the historical back-drop of slavery and race relations in nineteenth-century America.
Slavery in America began in 1619, to aid in the production of crops as tobacco. Slavery was practiced throughout the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and African-American slaves helped build the economic foundations of the new nation.
From the 1830s to the 1860s, a movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength in the northern United States
Free blacks and other antislavery northerners had begun helping fugitive slaves escape from southern plantations to the North This practice gained real momentum in the 1830s and it's estimated to have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 slaves reach freedom. This era was marked by sectional tension between the Northerners that were anti- slavery and wanted to abolish it and the Southerners who wanted to sustain it.
During Abraham Lincoln's presidency this tension was a major reason that led to the Civil War (1861-65). Growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many African Americans finally lead to abolition of slavery on 1863.
This was followed by Reconstruction era , which began in 1867 and newly enfranchised blacks gained a voice in government for the first time in American history
Reconstruction ended prematurely giving rise to the Jim Crow laws that mandated the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants and drinking fountains for whites and blacks
After witnessing the whole anti slavery movement, the civil war, reconstruction
