Slavery in South Carolina was widespread and systemic even when compared to other slave states. Although African slavery was not mentioned in the “Declarations and Proposals to all that will Plant in Carolina” (1663), the Lords Proprietors revised their stance to accommodate the wishes of the Barbadian settlers; these settlers, whom the Lords Proprietors sought to attract to the colony, expressed a desire to bring their enslaved African laborers with them. South Carolina's first governor, William Sayle, set a precedent by bringing three black people "in the founding fleet in 1670 and another a few months later." Similar to Virginia, "many of the slaves in seventeenth-century South Carolina came from the West Indies" because they were considered to have a certain level of immunity to diseases like malaria and yellow fever that were common in the region, and they were proficient in making use of native plants to could cope with "South Carolina’s semitropical environment". The region had a black majority throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. South Carolina was the only English colony in North America that favored African labor over white indentured servitude and Indigenous labor. By 1715, South Carolina's black population accounted for sixty percent of the colony's total population. On the verge of the American Civil War, "45.8 percent of white families in the state owned slaves." Under South Carolina law, slaves were "deemed, sold, taken, reputed and adjudged in law, to be chattels, personal in the hands of their owners and possessors, and their executors, administrators, and assigns, TO ALL INTENTS, CONSTRUCTIONS AND PURPOSES WHATSOEVER...A slave is not generally regarded as legally capable of being within the peace of the State. He is not a citizen, and is not in that character entitled to her protection."
Transatlantic Slave Trade
Charleston was a major hub of both the transatlantic and interstate slave trades. The South Carolina General Assembly reopened the port of Charleston to the transatlantic slave trade between 1803 and 1807, during which time some 50,000 enslaved Africans were imported to the state; this trade was finally cut off by the 1808 federal law Prohibiting Importation of Slaves. Historian Frederic Bancroft found that there were no fewer than 50 slave traders, called "brokers" in Charlestonian parlance, working in the city in 1859–60.