On the whole, sectional divergence was fairly pronounced, but only on matters of detail.  The expressions from all quarters of a common desire to make the prohibition of importations effective were probably sincere without material exception.  As regards the Virginia group of states, their economic interest in high prices for slaves vouches for the genuine purpose of their representatives, while that of the Georgians and South Carolinians may at the most be doubted and not disproved.  The South in general wished to prevent any action which might by implication stigmatize the slaveholding regime, and was on guard also against precedents tending to infringe state rights.  The North, on the other hand, was largely divided between a resolve to stop the sanction of slavery and a desire to enact an effective law in the premises directly at issue.  The outcome was a law which might be evaded with relative ease wherever public sanction was weak, but which nevertheless proved fairly effective in operation.

When slave prices rose to high levels after the war of 1812 systematic smuggling began to prevail from Amelia Island on the Florida border, and on a smaller scale on the bayous of the Barataria district below New Orleans; but these operations were checked upon the passage of a congressional act in 1818 increasing the rewards to informers.  Another act in the following year directed the President to employ armed vessels for police in both African and American waters, and incidentally made provisions contemplating the return of captured slaves to Africa.  Finally Congress by an act of 1820 declared the maritime slave trade to be piracy.[33] Smuggling thereafter diminished though it never completely ceased.

[Footnote 33:  DuBois, Suppression of the Slave Trade, pp. 118-123.]

As to the dimensions of the illicit importations between 1808 and 1860, conjectures have placed the gross as high as two hundred and seventy thousand.[34] Most of the documents in the premises, however, bear palpable marks of unreliability.  It may suffice to say that these importations were never great enough to affect the labor supply in appreciable degree.  So far as the general economic regime was concerned, the foreign slave trade was effectually closed in 1808.

[Footnote 34:  W.H.  Collins, The Domestic Slave Trade of the Southern States (New York [1904], pp. 12-20). See also W.E.B.  DuBois, “Enforcement of the Slave Trade Laws,” in the American Historical Association Report for 1891, p. 173.]

At that time, however, there were already in the United States about one million slaves to serve as a stock from which other millions were to be born to replenish the plantations in the east and to aid in the peopling of the west.  These were ample to maintain a chronic racial problem, and had no man invented a cotton gin their natural increase might well have glutted the market for plantation labor.  Had the African source