When two years later the stringency persisted, the radicals in the legislature demanded a law to stay the execution of debts, while the now unified conservatives proposed again the stoppage of the slave trade.  In the course of the debate David Ramsay “made a jocose remark that every man who went to church last Sunday and said his prayers was bound by a spiritual obligation to refuse the importation of slaves.  They had devoutly prayed not to be led into temptation, and negroes were a temptation too great to be resisted."[9] The issue was at length adjusted by combining the two projects of a stay-law and a prohibition of slave importations for three years in a single bill.  This was approved on March 28, 1787; and a further act of the same day added a penalty of fine to that of forfeiture for the illegal introduction of slaves.  The exclusion applied to slaves from every source, except those whose masters should bring them when entering the state as residents.[10]

[Footnote 9:  Charleston Morning Post, March 23, 1787.]

[Footnote 10:  Ibid., March 29, 1787; Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, VII, 430.]

Early in the next year an attempt was made to repeal the prohibition.  Its leading advocate was Alexander Gillon, a populistic Charleston merchant who had been made a commodore by the State of South Carolina but had never sailed a ship.  The opposition was voiced so vigorously by Edward Rutledge, Charles Pinckney, Chancellor Matthews, Dr. Ramsay, Mr. Lowndes, and others that the project was crushed by 93 votes to 40.  The strongest weapon in the hands of its opponents appears to have been a threat of repealing the stay-law in retaliation.[11] At the end of the year the prohibitory act had its life prolonged until the beginning of 1793; and continuation acts adopted every two or three years thereafter extended the regime until the end of 1803.  The constitutionality of the prohibition was tested before the judiciary of the state in January, 1802, when the five assembled judges unanimously pronounced it valid.[12]

[Footnote 11:  Georgia State Gazette (Savannah), Feb. 17, 1788.]

[Footnote 12:  Augusta, Ga., Chronicle, Jan. 30, 1802.]

But at last the advocates of the open trade had their innings.  The governor in a message of November 24, 1803, recited that his best exertions to enforce the law had been of no avail.  Inhabitants of the coast and the frontier, said he, were smuggling in slaves abundantly, while the people of the central districts were suffering an unfair competition in having to pay high prices for their labor.  He mentioned a recently enacted law of Congress reinforcing the prohibitory acts of the several states only to pronounce it already nullified by the absence of public sanction; and he dismissed any thought of providing the emancipation of smuggled slaves as “a remedy more mischievous than their introduction in servitude."[13] Having thus described the problem as insoluble by prohibitions, he left the solution to the legislature.