With a view to increase the power of the South to expand, and for other purposes mainly political, a group of agitators in the ’fifties raised a vehement contention in favor of reopening the African slave trade in full volume.  This, if accomplished, would have lowered the cost of labor, but its increase of the crops would have depressed staple prices in still greater degree; its unsettling of the slave market would have hurt vested interests; and its infusion of a horde of savage Africans would have set back the progress of the negroes already on hand and have magnified permanently the problems of racial adjustment.

The prohibition of the interstate slave trade was another project for modifying the situation.  It was mooted in the main by politicians alien to the regime.  If accomplished it would have wrought a sharp differentiation in the conditions within the several groups of Southern states.  An analogy may be seen in the British possessions in tropical America, where, following the stoppage of the intercolonial slave trade in 1807, a royal commission found that the average slave prices as gathered from sale records between 1822 and 1830 varied from a range in the old and stagnant colonies of L27 4_s_. 11-3/4_d_. in Bermuda, L29 18_s_. 9-3/4_d_. in the Bahamas, L47 1_s_. in Barbados and L44 15_s_. 2-1/4_d_. in Jamaica, to L105 4_s_., L114 11_s_. and L120 4_s_. 7-1/2_d_ respectively in the new and buoyant settlements of Trinidad, Guiana and British Honduras.[93] If the interstate transfer had been stopped, the Virginia, Maryland and Carolina slave markets would have been glutted while the markets of every southwestern state were swept bare.  Slave prices in the former would have fallen to such levels that masters would have eventually resorted to manumission in self-defence, while in the latter all existing checks to the inflation of prices would have been removed and all the evils consequent upon the capitalization of labor intensified.

[Footnote 93:  Accounts and Papers [of the British Government], 1837-1838, vol. 48, [p. 329].]

Another conceivable plan would have been to replace slavery at large by serfdom.  This would have attached the negroes to whatever lands they chanced to occupy at the time of the legislation.  By force of necessity it would have checked the depletion of soils; but by preventing territorial transfer it would have robbed the negroes and their masters of all advantages afforded by the virginity of unoccupied lands.  Serfdom could hardly be seriously considered by the citizens of a new and sparsely settled country such as the South then was.