It took but a spark to put this instinctive feeling into words, and words led to deeds. The movement first took definite form in the ever radical State of South Carolina. In 1854 a grand jury in the Williamsburg district declared, "as our unanimous opinion, that the Federal law abolishing the African Slave Trade is a public grievance. We hold this trade has been and would be, if re-established, a blessing to the American people, and a benefit to the African himself."[1] This attracted only local attention; but when, in 1856, the governor of the State, in his annual message, calmly argued at length for a reopening of the trade, and boldly declared that "if we cannot supply the demand for slave labor, then we must expect to be supplied with a species of labor we do not want,"[2] such words struck even Southern ears like "a thunder clap in a calm day."[3] And yet it needed but a few years to show that South Carolina had merely been the first to put into words the inarticulate thought of a large minority, if not a majority, of the inhabitants of the Gulf States. 81. ~Commercial Conventions of 1855-56.~ The growth of the movement is best followed in the action of the Southern Commercial Convention, an annual gathering which seems to have been fairly representative of a considerable part of Southern opinion. In the convention that met at New Orleans in 1855, McGimsey of Louisiana introduced a resolution instructing the Southern Congressmen to secure the repeal of the slave-trade laws. This resolution went to the Committee on Resolutions, and was not reported.[4] In 1856, in the convention at Savannah, W.B. Goulden of Georgia moved that the members of Congress be requested to bestir themselves energetically to have repealed all laws which forbade the slave-trade. By a vote of 67 to 18 the convention refused to debate the motion, but appointed a committee to present at the next convention the facts relating to a reopening of the trade.[5] In regard to this action a pamphlet of the day said: "There were introduced into the convention two leading measures, viz.: the laying of a State tariff on northern goods, and the reopening of the slave-trade; the one to advance our commercial interest, the other our agricultural interest, and which, when taken together, as they were doubtless intended to be, and although they have each been attacked by presses of doubtful service to the South, are characterized in the private judgment of politicians as one of the completest southern remedies ever submitted to popular action.... The proposition to revive, or more properly to reopen, the slave trade is as yet but imperfectly understood, in its intentions and probable results, by the people of the South, and but little appreciated by them. It has been received in all parts of the country with an undefined sort of repugnance, a sort of squeamishness, which is incident to all such violations of moral prejudices, and invariably wears off on familiarity with the subject.