“By the votes of Southern representatives as well as Northern, we have stamped upon it the brand and penalty of the greatest of crimes against mankind.... The change has not yet been worked in public opinion in the South. It will be hard to produce it. When the attempt shall be made, it will develop a division which ages of discussion will utterly fail to overcome.”[166] As objectionable as slavery is in the abstract, it is a debatable question whether Harper of Georgia, advocate of slavery, as it existed in the South in 1858, but determined opponent of the re-opening of the slave trade, did not occupy higher ground from a humanitarian standpoint, than did Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut in 1787, who was then, “for leaving the clause as it stands, let every State import what it pleases.... As population increases poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless.” Ellsworth might have gone further and declared with truth, that, if poor laborers were not sufficiently plenteous, they could be imported. In 1912 they were being brought in in such swarms that our civilization was said to be threatened thereby. But while there was this pronounced opposition to the re-opening of the slave trade in the South, there is not much room to doubt that the slave population of the South had been largely recruited with illicit importations from abroad from 1808. To what extent it is difficult to arrive at with any degree of accuracy. In his “Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Prof. DuBois quotes Congressional documents, to indicate that from Amelia Island, on the Gulf Coast, in 1817 the pirates had eleven armed vessels with which they captured slavers, and brought their cargoes into the United States[167] and that, a year after the capture of the island by United States troops, African and West Indian Negroes were almost daily illicitly introduced into Georgia.[168] He also claims that the estimates of three representatives of Congress, Tallmadge of New York, Middleton, of South Carolina, and Wright of Virginia, in the year 1819, were that slaves were then being brought into the country at the rate of about 14,000 a year.[169] He thinks while smuggling never entirely ceased, the participation of Americans declined between 1825 and 1835, when it again revived, reaching its highest activity between 1840 and 1860, when the city of New York was “the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce, although Portland and Boston were only second.”[170] He quotes DeBow for the statement that, in 1856, forty slavers cleared annually from Eastern harbors, clearing yearly $17,000,000, and from the report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, that between 1857 and 1858 twenty-one of the twenty-two slavers seized by the British cruisers proved to be American, from New York, Boston and New Orleans;[171] and Stephen A. Douglas claimed to have seen recently imported slaves at Vicksburg and Memphis in 1859.[172]