Certainly if their testimony could only be received in courts of justice in cases, when not in opposition to the interests of the whites, which was the situation in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, their ability to protect themselves against injury from whites was seriously affected, but, at the same time, that this tiny stream, trickling into Ohio, was thus harshly dammed, the Negroes were pouring into South Carolina in such numbers, that legislation against their introduction from other States and Territories was passed.[42] But again the same desire for ephemeral benefits to a class, which had sufficed to overthrow a wise law in 1803, induced action for repeal in 1818, and, with lamentable lack of foresight, the brilliant George McDuffie led the fight for the repeal of the law of 1816. By the census of 1810, the colored population of South Carolina was 200,919, the white only 214,196. With the exception of Louisiana, just admitted, with a colored population of 42,245, and a white population of 34,311, no State in the Union had, proportionately to its white, as great a Negro population as South Carolina. The increase of its colored population had been so accelerated by the mischievous action of Governor Richardson and his supporters in 1803, as to have increased almost two and a half times as much as that of Maryland, the Negro population of which, as has been before pointed out, was greater than that of South Carolina in 1790, and had increased from that day to 1800 in a greater proportion compared to its white population, than South Carolina. It is true the increase of the colored population of North Carolina had also been very great; but, at the same time, the increase of the white population had been much greater than in South Carolina, and it had had originally so much larger a number of white inhabitants that they were still more than double the number of blacks. To a large and important portion of South Carolina’s legislators, therefore, the evil of this continual increase of the Negro population was apparent, and these under the leadership of Robert Y. Hayne, at that time Speaker of the House, opposed the repeal of the law of 1816. Unfortunately no Hooker was present to record his impressions of the discussion, and all that we know of this great struggle is, that the Act of 1816 was repealed after “one of the most eloquent and animated debates that has taken place on the floor for many years.”[43] In the Senate the repeal was only secured by a vote of 22 to 19. In the year which followed came in Congress the first great sectional struggle over the Missouri Question, involving the right of Southern men to move into the Northwest with their slaves, with regard to which some of them argued, that, in the long run, such diffusion of slaves would not increase their number or result in the extension of slavery, but rather tend to check the increase.