ent
far towards accounting for the changed attitude of the entire country
on the subject of slavery. The North as well as the South became
financially interested.

It was not generally perceived before it actually happened that the
border States would take the place of Africa in furnishing the required
supply of laborers for Southern plantations. The interstate slave-trade
gave to the system a solidarity of interest which was new. All
slave-owners became partakers of a common responsibility for the system
as a whole. It was the newly developed trade quite as much as the system
of slavery itself which furnished the ground for the later anti-slavery
appeal. The consciousness of a common guilt for the sin of slavery grew
with the increase of actual interstate relations.

The abolition of the African slave-trade was an act of the general
Government. Congress passed the prohibitory statute in 1807, to go into
effect January, 1808. At no time, however, was the prohibition entirely
effective, and a limited illegal trade continued until slavery was
eventually abolished. This inefficiency of restraint furnished another
point of attack for the abolitionists. Through efforts to suppress the
African slave-trade, the entire country became conscious of a common
responsibility. Before the Revolutionary War, Great Britain had been
censured for forcing cheap slaves from Africa upon her unwilling
colonies. After the Revolution, New England was blamed for the activity
of her citizens in this nefarious trade both before and after it was
made illegal. All of this tended to increase the sense of responsibility
in every section of the country. Congress had made the foreign
slave-trade illegal; and citizens in all sections gradually became
aware of the possibility that Congress might likewise restrict or forbid
interstate commerce in slaves.

The West Indies and Mexico were also closely associated with the United
States in the matter of slavery. When Jamestown was founded, negro
slavery was already an old institution in the islands of the Caribbean
Sea, and thence came the first slaves to Virginia. The abolition of
slavery in the island of Hayti, or San Domingo, was accomplished during
the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. As incidental to the
process of emancipation, the Caucasian inhabitants were massacred
or banished, and a republican government was established, composed
exclusively of negroes and mulattoes. From the date of the