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• slave state
  slave state

  noun

  any state, nation, etc., where slavery is legal or officially condoned.
• Slave State
  Slave State

  noun

  history any of the 15 Southern states in which slavery was legal until the Civil War

slave state

American  

noun

1. any state, nation, etc., where slavery is legal or officially condoned.

2. U.S. History. Slave States, the states that permitted slavery between 1820 and 1860: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

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Slave State British  

noun

1. history any of the 15 Southern states in which slavery was legal until the Civil War

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Etymology

Origin of slave state

An Americanism dating back to 1800–10

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

slave state Slave State

By 1854, Cuba was one of Spain’s few remaining New World colonies, and Southern expansionists coveted it—and its lucrative sugar plantations—as a new U.S. slave state.

From Barron's ● Jan. 18, 2026

Robert Anderson, son of a Revolutionary War officer, a cousin of Chief Justice John Marshall, and a West Point graduate from the loyal slave state of Kentucky.

From Slate ● Sep. 24, 2025

But the issue was supposedly resolved with the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.

From Salon ● Dec. 16, 2023

"My family had nothing to do with slavery. California was never a slave state," he said.

From BBC ● Jul. 1, 2023

As Pennsylvania was a free state and Maryland was a slave state, it came to be regarded as the border between the free North and slaveholding South. k Several Civil War battles have two names.

From "Lincoln's Last Days: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever" by Bill O'Reilly

It has been so in every Slave State, and worse.

From The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 3, March, 1864 Devoted to Literature and National Policy by Various

The belief in a Southern economic solidarity so complete that the secession of any one Slave State would compel the secession of all the others, that belief had been proved fallacious.

From Lincoln; An Account of his Personal Life, Especially of its Springs of Action as Revealed and Deepened by the Ordeal of War by Stephenson, Nathaniel W. (Nathaniel Wright)

He would probably have given them their freedom before his death, but for the fact, too evident, that freedom to a black man in a Slave State was not a boon.

From Famous Americans of Recent Times by Parton, James

But one more Slave State could be carved out of the undeveloped Western Territory—that of Arkansas.

From A History of the United States by Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)

I was, in fact, a slave in New York, as subject to slave laws as I had been in a Slave State.

From Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself by Jacobs, Harriet Ann