gia.

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from them; the prohibition was repealed, and the United States became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. "For many reasons," said he, "this
House must have been justly surprised by a recent measure of one of the
Southern States. The impressions, however, which that measure gave my
mind, were deep and painful. Had I been informed that some formidable
foreign Power had invaded our country, I would not, I ought not, be more
alarmed than on hearing that South Carolina had repealed her law
prohibiting the importation of slaves.... Our hands are tied, and we are
obliged to stand confounded, while we see the flood-gate opened, and
pouring incalculable miseries into our country."[51] He then moved, as
the utmost legal measure, a tax of ten dollars per head on slaves
imported.

Debate on this proposition did not occur until February 14, when Lowndes
explained the circumstances of the repeal, and a long controversy took
place.[52] Those in favor of the tax argued that the trade was wrong,
and that the tax would serve as some slight check; the tax was not
inequitable, for if a State did not wish to bear it she had only to
prohibit the trade; the tax would add to the revenue, and be at the same
time a moral protest against an unjust and dangerous traffic. Against
this it was argued that if the tax furnished a revenue it would defeat
its own object, and make prohibition more difficult in 1808; it was
inequitable, because it was aimed