This is also where the argument of Prof. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips fails to convince, when he expresses the opinion, that “the importance of the repeal, in 1818, of the law which had prohibited the importation of slaves from other States into South Carolina has been exaggerated.” He bases his reason for this view upon the claim that “the Federal Censuses show that the average rate of increase of the Negro population in South Carolina between 1810 and 1860, was substantially smaller than that of the Negroes in the United States at large, “which” he thinks, “indicates that South Carolina was in that half century more of a slave exporting than a slave importing State; and that a prohibition of slave imports would have had no appreciable influence upon the ratio of increase of her Negro population.”[45] Unless it can be shown, however, that there were no accessions to the Negro population of the United States from without, between the periods selected by Prof. Phillips, the mere fact that the rate of increase of the Negro population of South Carolina was substantially smaller than that of the United States at large does not establish that South Carolina was more of a slave exporting than importing State for that period; for the greater increase without could well be due to importation in great volume elsewhere, and that there was such was asserted by many, notably by Henry Middleton, in Congress, the very year of Hayne’s speech in the South Carolina Legislature against importations from other States.[46] But apart from this, before this, South Carolina had become the State with the largest Negro population to its white population of all the States of the Union and that, the rate of increase of her Negro population from this date, or even a decade earlier, to 1860, “was substantially smaller than that of the Negroes in the United States at large” was simply due to the tremendous accessions of the Negro population of the four new cotton States: Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, superimposed upon a Negro population originally much smaller than that of South Carolina. The Negro population of those four States did in that period increase 1,384,555; but in the same time their white population increased 1,438,607; while in the same period the white and Negro population of South Carolina increased respectively 53,860 and 147,028. And so difficult was it to overcome this tremendous start attained by South Carolina in these early fatal years, that in 1860 the excess of South Carolina’s colored population over her white population was 121,029, as compared with an excess of only 83,505 for Mississippi, the next greatest. Undoubtedly in the period selected by Prof. Phillips many Negro slaves passed out of South Carolina; but many whites did also; for “from 1820 to 1860, South Carolina was a beehive from which swarms were continually going forth to populate the newer growing cotton