United States Bans Slave Imports
The United States prohibited the importation of enslaved people from 1 January 1808, the earliest date the Constitution permitted. The prohibition had been written into the founding compromise. Article I, Section 9 barred Congress from banning the trade before 1808 — a twenty-year protection demanded by South Carolina and Georgia as the price of ratification, and accepted by delegates who expected the institution to decline on its own. Jefferson recommended the ban in his annual message of December 1806, urging Congress to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in violations of human rights which the morality, the reputation and the best interests of the country had long been eager to proscribe. The act passed in March 1807 and took effect on the first permissible day. Britain abolished its own trade in the same period, and the two acts together are the beginning of the trade's end in the Atlantic. The ban did not touch slavery itself, and its practical effect was limited in a way its supporters had not all foreseen. The enslaved population of the United States was, uniquely in the Americas, growing by natural increase. It rose from about 1.2 million in 1810 to nearly four million by 1860 without significant imports, and the value of enslaved people rose with the cotton boom that followed the gin and the Louisiana Purchase. The result was the domestic trade. Around a million people were sold from the upper South to the cotton states, breaking up families on a scale that made the trade the central fact of enslaved life. Smuggling continued at a modest scale until the Civil War.
- Year: 1808 CE
- Category: Political
