The Atlantic slave trade is customarily divided into two eras, known as the First and Second Atlantic Systems. The First Atlantic system was the trade of enslaved Africans to, primarily, South American colonies of the Portuguese and Spanish empires; it accounted for slightly more than 3% of all Atlantic slave trade. Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of Georgia had banned or limited the African slave trade by holding African-American slaves. Slavery itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the region’s businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Between and , all of the northern states abolished slavery, but the so-called “peculiar institution” of slavery remained absolutely vital to the South.