I shall appear to many as a promoter not only of strange but of dangerous doctrines; it will therefore be necessary to proceed with caution."[20] Had either Gadsden or Laurens entertained thoughts of launching an anti-slavery campaign, however, the palpable hopelessness of such a project in their community must have dissuaded them.

The negroes of the rice coast were so outnumbering and so crude that an agitation applying the doctrine of inherent liberty and equality to them could only have had the effect of discrediting the doctrine itself.

Furthermore, the industrial prospect, the swamps and forests calling for conversion into prosperous plantations, suggested an increase rather than a diminution of the slave labor supply.
Georgia and South Carolina, in fact, were more inclined to keep open the African slave trade than to relinquish control of the negro population.
Revolutionary liberalism had but the slightest of echoes there.
[Footnote 20: Frank Moore ed., _Correspondence of Henry Laurens_ (New York, 1861), pp.

20, 21.

The version of this letter given by Professor Wallace in his _Life of Henry Laurens_, p.