Nevertheless, the revival of the trade was naturally a matter of some difficulty, as the West India circuit had been cut off, leaving no resort except to contraband traffic and the direct African trade.  The English slave-trade after the peace “returned to its former state,” and was by 1784 sending 20,000 slaves annually to the West Indies.[33] Just how large the trade to the continent was at this time there are few means of ascertaining; it is certain that there was a general reopening of the trade in the Carolinas and Georgia, and that the New England traders participated in it.  This traffic undoubtedly reached considerable proportions; and through the direct African trade and the illicit West India trade many thousands of Negroes came into the United States during the years 1783-1787.[34]

Meantime there was slowly arising a significant divergence of opinion on the subject.  Probably the whole country still regarded both slavery and the slave-trade as temporary; but the Middle States expected to see the abolition of both within a generation, while the South scarcely thought it probable to prohibit even the slave-trade in that short time.  Such a difference might, in all probability, have been satisfactorily adjusted, if both parties had recognized the real gravity of the matter.  As it was, both regarded it as a problem of secondary importance, to be solved after many other more pressing ones had been disposed of.  The anti-slavery men had seen slavery die in their own communities, and expected it to die the same way in others, with as little active effort on their own part.  The Southern planters, born and reared in a slave system, thought that some day the system might change, and possibly disappear; but active effort to this end on their part was ever farthest from their thoughts.  Here, then, began that fatal policy toward slavery and the slave-trade that characterized the nation for three-quarters of a century, the policy of laissez-faire, laissez-passer.

31. The Action of the Confederation. The slave-trade was hardly touched upon in the Congress of the Confederation, except in the ordinance respecting the capture of slaves, and on the occasion of the Quaker petition against the trade, although, during the debate on the Articles of Confederation, the counting of slaves as well as of freemen in the apportionment of taxes was urged as a measure that would check further importation of Negroes.  “It is our duty,” said Wilson of Pennsylvania, “to lay every discouragement on the importation of slaves; but this amendment [i.e., to count two slaves as one freeman] would give the jus trium liberorum to him who would import slaves."[35] The matter was finally compromised by apportioning requisitions according to the value of land and buildings.

After the Articles went into operation, an ordinance in regard to the recapture of fugitive slaves provided that, if the capture was made on the sea below high-water mark, and the Negro was not claimed, he should be freed.  Matthews of South Carolina demanded the yeas and nays on this proposition, with the result that only the vote of his State was recorded against it.[36]