The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina's Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803

Abstract

In the fall of 1802, Governor John Drayton mobilized the South Carolina militia to defend the state's coast against an invasion. The source of his terror was not Napoleon's navy or the British fleet, but merely a rumor that ships carrying slaves from St. Domingue might dock at the Charleston harbor. As of 1802, the brutal slave revolution in St. Domingue had been raging for eleven years, and the violence had just reached a new terrifying peak. Based solely on the sighting of one black foreigner in Georgetown, this rumor erupted into a security crisis.1 Back in 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, South Carolina had fought to preserve the states' right to import slaves; in fact, the state had sacrificed other interests to win a twenty-year barrier against congressional regulation of the slave trade. But soon after this compromise, in 1792, anxious about slave revolts and financial concerns, South Carolina voluntarily closed its foreign and domestic slave trade. Over the next ten years, overwhelming majorities in the South Carolina state legislature extended this ban: by 1802 the antislave trade majority stood at eight-to-one in the house, and support in the senate was so strong they did not bother to call the roll.2 However, just one year after these sweeping majorities voted to keep the trade closed, and just one year after Governor John Drayton mobilized the militia in order to prevent slaves from landing at the state's ports, South Carolina's legislature reopened the African slave trade. Drayton himself had supported the ban in his three years as governor, but as a state legislator in 1803 he suddenly reversed his stance and voted to reopen the slave trade. From 1804 to 1808, traders flooded Charleston with 39,075 African slaves-over one tenth of the total number of slaves brought into all of British North America over the previous 200 years-probably the strongest surge in the history of the global slave trade. Meanwhile, all of the other states maintained their prohibitions.3 Historians have generally offered two explanations for South Carolina's stunning reversal. First, the invention of a successful cotton gin created new opportunities for cotton production and a corresponding increase in the state's demand for slaves. Second, the illegal slave trade from the volatile Caribbean terrified white South Carolinians, prompting them to seek as an alternative a legal and supposedly more docile supply of slaves from Africa. However, South Carolinians had been aware of the cotton boom and illegal slave smuggling for many years before 1803, and yet they consistently extended the prohibition. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that the first few years of the nineteenth century produced no significant increase in these factors.4 Certainly, both the cotton boom and the illegal slave trade contributed to the 1803 reversal, and they probably were necessary causes, but they were not quite sufficient. In fact, the apparent trigger lay beyond South Carolina's borders: the Louisiana Purchase, the truly revolutionary event of 1803, which doubled America's territory. Jefferson's acquisition of Louisiana literally transformed the political landscape and heightened a fascination with the frontier, and it seems to have been a catalyst that broadened concerns about illegal slaves entering the frontier and expanded an interest in western cotton production. Because South Carolinians had first-hand experience with these issues, and because they already were absorbed with the frontier, they would have been more attuned to the impact of the purchase. Throughout the early years of the republic, South Carolina's politicians played important national roles in opening up the frontier to American settlement and American slavery. News of the negotiations with Napoleon heightened this widespread excitement about the frontier. Throughout 1803, Charleston's newspapers trumpeted the importance of this new frontier for national expansion and agriculture. …