Southern Politics and Attempts to Reopen The African Slave Trade *

The South Carolina legislator also effectively undermined the argument that reopening of the trade, with the consequent slave-price decline, would secure the peculiar institution by enabling the nonslaveholder to share in the fruits of the system. The Southern Commercial Conventions from 1855 to 1859 were the main field of battle for the slave-trade forces. At the Montgomery Southern Commercial Convention of 1858 further contention arose. Leonidas W. Spratt submitted a seventeen-page committee report advancing the reopening of the African slave trade. Ultimately the issue of reopening the slave trade was postponed with the convention’s unanimous approval of a resolution to table Spratt’s report and to circulate printed copies. While Spratt, J. D. B. DeBow, and other fire-eaters fanned the flames of secession with their attempts to reopen the African slave trade legally, the traffic was being carried on illegally. Some regarded slavery and the slave trade as indissoluble; they were integral parts of the same system.