It reflected the force of the general trend toward abolishing the international slave trade, which Virginia, followed by all the other states, had prohibited or restricted since then.

[2] South Carolina reopened the transatlantic slave trade in December 1803 and imported 39,075 enslaved people of African descent between 1804 and 1808[3]).

[5] In 1774, the influential, revolutionary Fairfax Resolves, called for an end to the "wicked, cruel, and unnatural" Atlantic slave trade.

[13] On March 3, 1805, Joseph Bradley Varnum submitted a Massachusetts Proposition to amend the Constitution and Abolish the Slave Trade.

On December 2, 1806, in his annual message to Congress, widely reprinted in most newspapers, President Thomas Jefferson denounced the "violations of human rights."

The House and Senate agreed on a bill, approved on March 2, 1807, called An Act to prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States, from and after the first day of January, in the year of our Lord, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eight.

The effective date of the Act, January 1, 1808, was celebrated by Peter Williams, Jr., in "An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade" delivered in New York City.

[18] However, South Carolina Governor Henry Middleton estimated in 1819 that 13,000 smuggled African slaves arrived every year.

[19]: 160 Carl C. Cutler's book on American clippers records: The act outlawing the slave trade in 1808 furnished another source of demand for fast vessels, and for another half century ships continued to be fitted out and financed in this trade by many a respectable citizen in the majority of American ports.

[20]In 1820, slave trading became a capital offense with an amendment to the 1819 Act to Protect the Commerce of the United States and Punish the Crime of Piracy.

A total of 74 cases of slaving were brought in the United States between 1837 and 1860, "but few captains had been convicted, and those had received trifling sentences, which they had usually been able to avoid".

[22] The U.S. Navy was slow to institute anti-slaving patrols off the slave ports of Africa—it was not until the 1820 legislation that authority was given to the president to use naval vessels for this task.

The U.S. position meant that many slave ships from other countries falsely flew the American flag to avoid being seized by British anti-slaving patrols.

Historian Erskine Clarke writes that this call "was a shameless expression of their contempt for any antislavery sentiment and a part of their stratagem to divide the nation and create a slaveholding confederacy.

Among other things, the Fire-Eaters hoped that a reopened international slave trade would incense the North, and that Northern outrage would cause white Southerns to unite and move toward secession.

The view alarmed even pro-slavery figures, such as former President John Tyler, who in retirement wrote a widely republished letter condemning the Fire-Eaters' call to abrogate Article 8 of the Webster–Ashburton Treaty (which barred the slave trade).