South Carolina Re-Opens International Slave Trade — 40,000 Africans Imported in Five Years

South Carolina, the only state to do so, re-opened the international slave trade in December 1803, taking advantage of the Constitutional protection that ran until 1808. In the five years before the federal ban took effect, South Carolina's ports — primarily Charleston — received an estimated 40,000 enslaved Africans. Slave ships arrived from the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Senegambia. The trade was openly commercial; Charleston newspapers listed slave ship arrivals alongside cargo manifests. This last burst of importation was a deliberate effort to stock labor for the expanding cotton and rice economy before the federal door closed.