50. State of the Slave-Trade from 1789 to 1803. Meantime, in spite of the prohibitory State laws, the African slave-trade to the United States continued to flourish.  It was notorious that New England traders carried on a large traffic.[48] Members stated on the floor of the House that “it was much to be regretted that the severe and pointed statute against the slave trade had been so little regarded.  In defiance of its forbiddance and its penalties, it was well known that citizens and vessels of the United States were still engaged in that traffic....  In various parts of the nation, outfits were made for slave-voyages, without secrecy, shame, or apprehension....  Countenanced by their fellow-citizens at home, who were as ready to buy as they themselves were to collect and to bring to market, they approached our Southern harbors and inlets, and clandestinely disembarked the sooty offspring of the Eastern, upon the ill fated soil of the Western hemisphere.  In this way, it had been computed that, during the last twelve months, twenty thousand enslaved negroes had been transported from Guinea, and, by smuggling, added to the plantation stock of Georgia and South Carolina.  So little respect seems to have been paid to the existing prohibitory statute, that it may almost be considered as disregarded by common consent."[49]

These voyages were generally made under the flag of a foreign nation, and often the vessel was sold in a foreign port to escape confiscation.  South Carolina’s own Congressman confessed that although the State had prohibited the trade since 1788, she “was unable to enforce” her laws.  “With navigable rivers running into the heart of it,” said he, “it was impossible, with our means, to prevent our Eastern brethren, who, in some parts of the Union, in defiance of the authority of the General Government, have been engaged in this trade, from introducing them into the country.  The law was completely evaded, and, for the last year or two [1802-3], Africans were introduced into the country in numbers little short, I believe, of what they would have been had the trade been a legal one."[50] The same tale undoubtedly might have been told of Georgia.

51. The South Carolina Repeal of 1803. This vast and apparently irrepressible illicit traffic was one of three causes which led South Carolina, December 17, 1803, to throw aside all pretence and legalize her growing slave-trade; the other two causes were the growing certainty of total prohibition of the traffic in 1808, and the recent purchase of Louisiana by the United States, with its vast prospective demand for slave labor.  Such a combination of advantages, which meant fortunes to planters and Charleston slave-merchants, could not longer be withheld from them; the prohibition was repealed, and the United States became again, for the first time in at least five years, a legal slave mart.  This action shocked the nation, frightening Southern States with visions of an influx of untrained barbarians and servile insurrections, and arousing and intensifying the anti-slavery feeling of the North, which had long since come to think of the trade, so far as legal enactment went, as a thing of the past.