ckney supported Rutledge with an argument
that the exclusion of the trade from Charleston would at once drive
commerce in general to the ports of Georgia and North Carolina, and that
the advantage of low prices, which he said had fallen from a level of L90
in 1783, would be lost to the planters. Judge Pendleton, on the other hand,
stressed the need of retrenchment. Planters, he said, no longer enjoyed the
long loans which in colonial times had protected them from distress; and
the short credits now alone available put borrowers in peril of bankruptcy
from a single season of short crops and low prices.[8] The committee
reported Izard's bill; but it was defeated in the House by a vote of 47 to
51, and an act was passed instead for an emission of bills of credit by the
state. The advocacy of the trade by Thomas Pinckney indicates that at this
time there was no unanimity of conservatives against it.

[Footnote 7: Charleston _Evening Gazette_, Sept. 26 and 28, 1785.]

[Footnote 8: _Ibid_., Oct. 1, 1785.]

When two years later the stringency persisted, the radicals in the
legislature demanded a law to stay the execution of debts, while the now
unified conservatives proposed again the stoppage of the slave trade. In
the course of the debate David Ramsay "made a jocose remark that every
man who went to church last Sunday and said his prayers was bound by a
spiritual obligation to refuse the importation of slaves. They had devoutly
prayed not to be led into temptation, and negroes were a temptation too
great to be resisted."[9] The issue was at length adjusted by combining
the two projects of a stay-law and a prohibition of slave importations for
three years in a single bill. This was approved on March 28, 1787; and a
further act of the same day added a penalty of fine to that of forfeiture
for the illegal introduction of slaves. The exclusion applied to slaves
from every source, except those whose masters should bring them when
entering the state as residents.[10]

[Footnote 9: Charleston _Morning Post_, March 23, 1787.]

[Footnote 10: _Ibid_., March 29, 1787; Cooper and McCord, _Statutes at
Large of South Carolina_, VII, 430.]

Early in the next year an attempt was made to repeal the prohibition. Its
leading advocate was Alexander Gillon, a populistic Charleston merchant
who had been made a commodore by the State of South Carolina but had never
sailed a ship. The opposition was voiced so vigorously by Edward Rutledge,
Cha