South Carolina Temporarily Bans Slave Imports — Haitian Fear

Alarmed by the Haitian Revolution, South Carolina's legislature temporarily banned the importation of enslaved people from the West Indies and, intermittently, from Africa between 1792 and 1803, fearing revolutionary ideas would arrive with Caribbean captives. The ban reflected how profoundly the Haitian Revolution disrupted the logic of American slavery — and how desperately slaveholders sought to quarantine its influence.