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 Report for 1903, pp. 459, 460.]

[Footnote 6:  LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels in the United States (London, 1799), p. 605.]

In the impulse toward the prohibitory acts the humanitarian motive was obvious but not isolated.  At the North it was supplemented, often in the same breasts, by the inhumane feeling of personal repugnance toward negroes.  The anti-slave-trade agitation in England also had a contributing influence; and there were no economic interests opposing the exclusion.  At the South racial repugnance was fainter, and humanitarianism