years.[3]
The ensuing war, of course, hampered the trade, and the legislatures of
several Northern states, along with Delaware and Virginia, took occasion
to prohibit slave importations. The return of peace, although followed by
industrial depression, revived the demand for slave labor. Nevertheless,
Maryland prohibited the import by an act of 1783; North Carolina laid a
prohibitive duty in 1787; and South Carolina in the spring of that year
enacted the first of a series of temporary laws which maintained a
continuous prohibition for sixteen years. Thus at the time when the framers
of the Federal Constitution were stopping congressional action for twenty
years, the trade was legitimate only in a few of the Northern states, all
of which soon enacted prohibitions, and in Georgia alone at the South.
The San Domingan cataclysm prompted the Georgia legislature in an act
of December 19, 1793, to forbid the importation of slaves from the West
Indies, the Bahamas and Florida, as well as to require free negroes to
procure magisterial certificates of industriousness and probity.[4] The
African trade was left open by that state until 1798, when it was closed
both by legislative enactment and by constitutional provision.

[Footnote 1: The slave trade enactments by the colonies, the states and
the federal government are listed and summarized in W.E.B. DuBois, _The
Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States, 1638-1870_
(New York, 1904), appendices.]

[Footnote 2: W.C. Ford, ed., _Journals of the Continental Congress_
(Washington, 1904), I, 75, 77.]

[Footnote 3: DuBois, pp. 44-48.]

[Footnote 4: The text of the act, which appears never to have been printed,
is in the Georgia archives. For a transcript I am indebted to the Hon.
Philip Cook, Secretary of State of Georgia.]

The scale of the importation in the period when Georgia alone permitted
them appears to have been small. For the year 1796, for example, the
imports at Savannah were officially reported at 2084, including some who
had been brought coastwise from the northward for sale.[5] A foreign
traveler who visited Savannah in the period noted that the demand was light
because of the dearth of money and credit, that the prices were about three
hundred dollars per head, that the carriers were mainly from New England,
and that one third of each year's imports were generally smuggled into
South Carolina.[6]

[Footnote 5: American Historical Association _Repor