When, after 1850, the price of slaves had risen to a
monopoly height, the leaders of the plantation system, brought to the
edge of bankruptcy by the crude and reckless farming necessary under a
slave _regime_, and baffled, at least temporarily, in their quest of new
rich land to exploit, began instinctively to feel that the only
salvation of American slavery lay in the reopening of the African
slave-trade.
It took but a spark to put this instinctive feeling into words, and
words led to deeds. The movement first took definite form in the ever
radical State of South Carolina. In 1854 a grand jury in the
Williamsburg district declared, "as our unanimous opinion, that the
Federal law abolishing the African Slave Trade is a public grievance. We
hold this trade has been and would be, if re-established, a blessing to
the American people, and a benefit to the African himself."[1] This
attracted only local attention; but when, in 1856, the governor of the
State, in his annual message, calmly argued at length for a reopening of
the trade, and boldly declared that "if we cannot supply the demand for
slave labor, then we must expect to be supplied with a species of labor
we do not want,"[2] such words struck even Southern ears like "a thunder
clap in a calm day."[3] And yet it needed but a few years to show that
South Carolina had merely been the first to put into words the
inarticulate thought of a large minority, if not a majority, of the
inhabitants of the Gulf States.
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