'"[4] For example, in 1854 a Williamsburg County, South Carolina grand jury reported, "As our unanimous opinion, that the Federal law abolishing the African Slave Trade is a public grievance.
As one speaker, William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, argued: The gentleman said that be held in his hand a suggestion from a friend from Georgia: 'If it is right to raise slaves for sale is it not right to import them?
The gentleman will say there is nothing wrong in that morally, but he would point to the Federal statistics which discriminate in favor of Virginia and against Cuba, Brazil, and Africa, preventing the Captain from buying his slaves where he could obtain them cheapest.
[6] A Louisiana newspaper editorial argued, "The minute you put it out of the power of common farmers to purchase a Negro man or woman to help him in his farm or his wife in the house, you make him an abolitionist at once.
"[8] There were apparently sectional differences amongst the slave states about the idea: "Thomas Walton of Mississippi said in an essay appearing in DeBow's Review for January, 1859, that if a southern confederacy were formed Virginia and Kentucky would prevent the re-opening of the African trade for the sake of their own dealers.