How to Use slave state in a Sentence

slave state

noun
  • The old south, the slave states have a power that must be unleashed.
    — Lisa Donovan, chicagotribune.com, 27 June 2019
  • There’s no way one woman could cause this much havoc in a slave state and survive.
    — Whitney Friedlander, Vulture, 3 May 2021
  • Missouri was a slave state that never seceded from the Union.
    — Chadd Scott, Forbes, 21 Apr. 2023
  • Missouri was a slave state at the time and was forcing free Black people like Bush to leave.
    — Chron, 24 Feb. 2021
  • Southerners wanted to take it over in order to gain another slave state.
    — David S. Reynolds, The New York Review of Books, 27 Apr. 2021
  • Again, not something a moderate would do, especially in a state that wasn’t a slave state.
    — Sal Rodriguez, Oc Register, 24 Feb. 2026
  • California entered the union in 1850 as a free state, not a slave state.
    — Los Angeles Times, 27 Apr. 2021
  • And then there was the irony of establishing a colony based on equality in a slave state on land that had been forcibly cleared of natives.
    — Mark Lamster, Dallas News, 15 Apr. 2020
  • People from Missouri came from the east, hoping in vain to create another slave state like their own.
    — Will Daniel, Fortune, 15 June 2024
  • Again, states that stoutly deny human freedom — often former slave states, by the way — are at odds with states that uphold it.
    — Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune, 2 Apr. 2025
  • Most historians now agree that the slave states seceded to protect slavery.
    — James Oakes, The New York Review of Books, 23 May 2019
  • His proclamation of freedom applied only to slave states still in rebellion.
    — WSJ, 20 Feb. 2019
  • If those new states were slave states, pro-slavery jurists from them became candidates for the Supreme Court.
    — Allen C. Guelzo, WSJ, 5 Oct. 2018
  • The man relayed her message to sympathetic white lawyers in Kentucky, a slave state, who filed a suit on her behalf.
    — Eric Herschthal, The New Republic, 16 Oct. 2019
  • Women in slave states had legal rights to property that was half of the wealth in the southern United States at the time.
    — Trevon Logan, The Conversation, 10 June 2024
  • At the end of the trip, Lincoln’s train would go through Baltimore, Maryland, which at the time was a slave state.
    — Time, 30 Apr. 2020
  • How California became a slave state and stayed that way for decades after the Civil War.
    — Gwendolyn Wu, San Francisco Chronicle, 29 Nov. 2021
  • Problem solved with a little boundary redrawing, sending them all back to Maryland’s arms, a former slave state.
    — Washington Post, 22 Mar. 2021
  • But Iowans were proud of the state's reputation as the initial non-slave state west of Mississippi.
    — Bill Steiden, Des Moines Register, 24 Mar. 2026
  • Seven Southern states had already seceded with the fate of Kentucky, a slave state, still unknown.
    — Jeanine Santucci, USA TODAY, 13 Feb. 2025
  • Settlers poured into Kansas, many of them pro-slavery from neighboring Missouri, a slave state.
    — Steve Grant, Hartford Courant, 6 Aug. 2022
  • Johnson, now very wealthy and a high-profile public figure, was fiercely advocating to make Kansas a slave state.
    — Alfredo Sosa, The Christian Science Monitor, 13 Mar. 2025
  • The attempt by the Southern slave states to break away in 1861 seemed to offer several ways to strike at slavery.
    — Allen C. Guelzo, WSJ, 11 Feb. 2019
  • This seemed to promise the decline of the Comanche empire and the security of Texas as a burgeoning slave state.
    — Phil Klay, The New Yorker, 11 June 2022
  • During the Civil War, that meant holding Kentucky — a slave state — in the Union and serving in battle.
    — Washington Post, 16 July 2021
  • The House, dominated by free states, wanted Missouri to be free; the Senate, split between free and slave states, balked.
    — Richard Brookhiser, WSJ, 28 July 2017
  • Richard Harvey Cain and Robert Brown Elliott were Northerners who did not grow up in slave states.
    — CBS News, 25 Apr. 2026
  • With Missouri entering the union as a slave state, Maine could enter as a free state to maintain the balance of slave to free states, Fishman said.
    — Maria Lovato, BostonGlobe.com, 30 July 2019
  • Additionally, no new slave states would be created north of the 36°30′ line of latitude.
    — Made By History, Time, 7 Apr. 2025
  • Maine was allowed into the union as a free state and was allowed to draft a constitution as a slave state, so long as no other new slave states formed north of Missouri’s southern border.
    — From Usa Today Network and Wire Reports, USA TODAY, 20 Sep. 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'slave state.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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