[Footnote 33: DuBois, _Suppression of the Slave Trade_, pp. 118-123.]
As to the dimensions of the illicit importations between 1808 and 1860,
conjectures have placed the gross as high as two hundred and seventy
thousand.[34] Most of the documents in the premises, however, bear palpable
marks of unreliability. It may suffice to say that these importations were
never great enough to affect the labor supply in appreciable degree. So far
as the general economic regime was concerned, the foreign slave trade was
effectually closed in 1808.
[Footnote 34: W.H. Collins, _The Domestic Slave Trade of the Southern
States_ (New York [1904], pp. 12-20). _See also_ W.E.B. DuBois,
"Enforcement of the Slave Trade Laws," in the American Historical
Association _Report_ for 1891, p. 173.]
At that time, however, there were already in the United States about one
million slaves to serve as a stock from which other millions were to be
born to replenish the plantations in the east and to aid in the peopling of
the west. These were ample to maintain a chronic racial problem, and had no
man invented a cotton gin their natural increase might well have glutted
the market for plantation labor.
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