While it was not technically a tariff, the 1808 law prohibiting the importation of enslaved people to the U.S. from Africa and the Caribbean had the same effect, protecting domestic industries—in this case the breeding of the enslaved for commercial trade—from foreign competitors. For everyone but the enslaved of course, the ban worked like a charm, raising significantly the sale price that slaveholders could demand for a bondswoman or bondsman.

In the half-century that followed the embargo on international slave trafficking, the number of enslaved in the U.S. quadrupled from one to four million by the time the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in 1861.

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