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.