This is a common misunderstanding of slavery. Slave owners were in the business of raising and selling slaves. By 1860 the market value of slaves was 48.3% of the total wealth of the slave states. They did not want newly enslaved Africans imported because it reduced the value of the slaves they were raising. (The Atlantic slave trade only brought in young adults ready to work -- and breed.) In colonial times the legislatures of several states including Virginia, both Carolinas, Georgia, and Delaware had enacted laws either prohibiting the importation of slaves or imposing tariffs on importation at rates that were prohibitive. As Jefferson complained in his draft, King George III had "prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce." The King did this in part because the sale of slaves on the African Coast was a Royal monopoly.
Jefferson in his later years claimed it was South Carolina and Georgia that had wanted the clause removed and that those states had never attempted to restrain the trade, but the fact is they had. South Carolina had imposed a prohibitive tariff first in 1740 that remained in effect until 1745 and then again in 1764 remaining in effect until 1769. All of the future states, except Georgia which was not represented, had at the First Continental Congress pledged “We will neither import nor purchase, any slave imported after the first day of December next [1775]; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.”
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