In recounting the triumphs of the South, he avowed that one stronghold remained to be carried, "the abrogation of the prohibition of the slave-trade." So eminent a man as William L.Yancey formally proposed in a Southern commercial convention, in 1858, that the South should demand the repeal of the laws "declaring the slave-trade to be piracy;" and Governor Adams of South Carolina pronounced those laws to be "a fraud upon the slave-holders of the South." The Governor of Mississippi went still farther, and exhibited a confidence in the scheme which was startling.

He believed that "the North would not refuse so just a demand if the South should unitedly ask it." Jefferson Davis did not join in the movement, but expressed a hearty contempt for those "who prate of the inhumanity and sinfulness of the slave-trade." Quotations of this character might be indefinitely multiplied.
The leaders of public opinion in the Cotton States were generally tending in the same direction, and, in the language of Jefferson Davis, were basing their conclusion on "the interest of the South, and not on the interest of the African." Newspapers and literary reviews in the Gulf States were seconding and enforcing the position of their public men, and were gradually but surely leading the mind of the South to a formal demand for the privilege of importing Africans.

A speaker in the Democratic National Convention at Charleston, personally engaged in the domestic slave-trade, frankly declared that the traffic in native Africans would be far more humane.

The thirty thousand slaves annually taken from the border States to the cotton-belt represented so great an aggregation of misery, that the men engaged in conducting it were, even by the better class of slave-holders, regarded with abhorrence, and spoken of as infamous.
It is worthy of observation that the re-opening of the African slave-trade was not proposed in the South until after the Dred Scott decision.

This affords a measure of the importance which pro-slavery statesmen attached to the position of the Supreme Court.
In the light of these facts, the repeated protests of Senator Douglas "against such schemes as the re-opening of the African slave-trade" were full of significance; nor could any development of Southern opinion have vindicated more completely the truth proclaimed by Mr.Lincoln, that the country was destined to become wholly anti-slavery or wholly pro-slavery.