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.Lowcountryrepresentatives favored reopening both trades by only one vote, –.Yet theO P E N I N G T H E S L A V E T R A D E101twenty-six Lowcountry votes in favor of reopening represented a sharp change ofopinion in the area.Moreover, since the Lowcountry controlled South Carolina’sbadly malapportioned legislature, the bill could not have passed without substan-tial Lowcountry support.Had the roughly one-half of Lowcountry representa-tives who had previously opposed reopening by overwhelming margins not brokenranks and supported the reopening of both the foreign and domestic slave trades,the ban would have remained in place despite persistent Upcountry interest inreopening the slave trade.84Close analysis of the fi nal vote on the slave trade bill in the House, however, sug-gests revealing voting patterns within the state’s two major sections and the possiblelines of the cross-sectional coalition that secured passage of the bill.In the interior,support for reopening both slave trades was strongest in those areas just moving intothe vortex of the cotton economy.Representatives from districts lying on or abovethe fall line voted in favor of reopening the overseas and interstate slave trades byseven votes, –, providing all of the bill’s margin of victory among interior rep-resentatives and all but one vote of the bill’s margin in the House.But Upcountrysupport for reopening both the foreign and domestic slave trades lay mostly in thelower Piedmont, where cotton production was expanding most rapidly.LowerPiedmont representatives cast seventeen votes in favor of reopening and only ten against.Upper Piedmont legislators, representing hill-country districts still largely isolatedfrom the cotton economy, split evenly on the reopening proposal, as did representa-tives from districts in the lower reaches of the state’s interior, where plantations werealready well stocked with slaves.Strikingly, the area of the state most overwhelm-ingly in favor of reopening the foreign and domestic slave trades was not the short-staple-cotton-producing lower Piedmont but the portion of the Lowcountry lyingbetween Charleston and the Georgia border.In the parishes south of Charlestonand around Beaufort, an area near the Georgia border where Sea Island cotton fl our-ished, the bill to reopen the slave trade received support from fi fteen house membersand opposition from only two.More than the seven-vote margin for reopening inthe lower Piedmont, this thirteen-vote margin in the southernmost Lowcountryparishes emerged as the key to reopening the slave trade in South Carolina.Therest of the Lowcountry, including the Charleston and Georgetown areas devotedalmost exclusively to rice production, opposed reopening the trade.Representativesfrom these areas voted – against the bill.Together, the districts of the lowerPiedmont and the Lowcountry parishes south of Charleston voted for reopeningboth the foreign and domestic slave trades by a margin of twenty votes.The rest ofthe state voted against the proposal by a margin of twelve.85This vote represented a dramatic about-face on the slave trade issue in one year.No single factor fully explains the sudden shift in legislative sentiment on the for-eign slave trade.A multiplicity of motives prevailed among the Lowcountry leg-islators who supported reopening the African slave trade.Some wanted cheaperslaves for the fl ourishing Sea Island cotton culture and the expansion of short-staple102T H E L O W E R S O U T H ’ S E M B R A C E O F S L A V E R Ycotton production in parts of the Lowcountry that lay beyond the reach of thetidal rice culture.Still more Lowcountry legislators favored reopening because theyhoped their families, friends, and constituents could profi t from the slave tradeitself, which had built many fortunes across several generations in eighteenth-centuryCharleston.Indeed, the wealth of Charleston during the city’s late-eighteenth-century golden age, the so-called Age of the Pinckneys, rested heavily on wealthaccumulated through the slave trade.Upcountry demand for more slaves to workcotton during the heady years of the fi rst boom clearly explains why determinedinterior legislators persisted in their eff orts to open the trade and later to keep itopen.Interior senators and representatives who supported reviving the slave tradesought to increase the supply and thus lower the purchase price of slaves needed towork the ever-expanding cotton fi elds of the South Carolina interior.They wouldhave been satisfi ed with the reopening of the interstate slave trade alone but neededLowcountry support, which they could gain only by supporting the reopening ofthe foreign trade as well.Yet neither the demand for more slaves from the emerging cotton belt nor theavarice of would-be business partners in the slave trade can entirely explain thesuddenness or the timing of South Carolina’s stunning reversal of a decade-oldpolicy.Instead, the sudden appearance of a golden opportunity to supply the newlyacquired Louisiana Territory’s voracious appetite for African slaves through theport of Charleston changed the landscape of political support for the internationalslave trade in short order in [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]