ABSTRACT
One of the most significant developments of the 1850’s was the movement to reopen the African slave trade. It represented without doubt the most radical line of Southern thought. In South Carolina, the first serious proposal to reopen the African slave trade was advanced in August 1853 by Leonidas W. Spratt, editor of the Charleston Standard. Spratt and other South Carolina extremists perceived that “the great want of the South is of population. Economic competition between white laborers and slaves had existed in South Carolina for a long time. Spratt observed that many whites had emigrated to the South since the prohibition of the African slave trade and that they struggled for subsistence in competition with the slave. To prevent the immigration of foreigners into the South, to check the increase of free laborers within the South, and to meet at the same time the demand for labor, the African slave-trade advocates demanded the reopening of the trade.
