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from them; the prohibition was repealed, and the United States became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.
Scarcely a month after this repeal, Bard of Pennsylvania solemnly
addressed Congress on the matter.
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