After the 23d of February, Douglas neither gave nor expected quarter from the Southern faction led by Jefferson Davis. So far from avoiding conflict, he seems rather to have forced the fighting. He flaunted his views in the faces of the fire-eaters. Prudence would have suggested silence, when a convention of Southern States met at Vicksburg and resolved that "all laws, State and Federal, prohibiting the African slave-trade, ought to be repealed,"[790] but Douglas, who knew something of the dimensions which this illicit traffic had already assumed, at once declared himself opposed to it. He said privately in a conversation, which afterwards was reported by an anonymous correspondent to the New York _Tribune_, that he believed fifteen thousand Africans were brought into the country last year. He had seen "with his own eyes three hundred of those recently imported miserable beings in a slave-pen at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and also large numbers at Memphis, Tennessee."[791] In a letter which speedily became public property, Douglas said that he would not accept the nomination of the Democratic party, if the convention should interpolate into the party creed "such new issues as the revival of the African slave-trade, or a congressional slave code for the Territories."[792] And to leave no doubt as to his attitude he wrote a second letter, devoted exclusively to this subject; it also found its way, as the author probably intended it should, into the newspapers. He opposed the revival of the African slave-trade because it was abolished by one of the compromises which had made the Federal Union and the Constitution. "In accordance with this compromise, I am irreconcilably opposed to the revival of the African slave-trade, in any form and under any circumstances."[793] How deeply this unequivocal condemnation lacerated the feelings of the South, will never be known until the economic necessities and purposes of the large plantation owners are more clearly revealed.