though of positive weight was but one of several factors.  The distinctively Southern considerations against the trade were that its continuance would lower the prices of slaves already on hand, or at least prevent those prices from rising; that it would so increase the staple exports as to spoil the world’s market for them; that it would drain out money and keep the community in debt; that it would retard the civilization of the negroes already on hand; and that by raising the proportion of blacks in the population it would intensify the danger of slave insurrections.  The several arguments had varying degrees of influence in the several areas.  In the older settlements where the planters had relaxed into easy-going comfort, the fear of revolt was keenest; in the newer districts the settlers were more confident in their own alertness.  Again, where prosperity was declining the planters were fairly sure to favor anything calculated to raise the prices of slaves which they might wish in future to sell, while on the other hand the people in districts of rising industry were tempted by programmes tending to cheapen the labor they needed.

The arguments used in South Carolina for and against exclusion may be gathered from scattering reports in the newspapers.  In September, 1785, the lower house of the legislature upon receiving a message from the governor on the distressing condition of commerce and credit, appointed a committee of fifteen on the state of the republic.  In this committee there was a vigorous debate on a motion by Ralph Izard to report a bill prohibiting slave importations for three years.  John Rutledge opposed it.  Since the peace with Great Britain, said he, not more than seven thousand slaves had been imported, which at L50 each would be trifling as a cause of the existing stringency; and the closing of the ports would therefore fail to relieve the distress[7] Thomas Pinckney 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.]