Yes, Georgia banned the importation of slaves in 1798 when the Georgia Constitution was ratified:
Background Georgia had a history of antislavery attitudes, starting with the colony's founding in 1733. The colony's trustees banned slavery in 1735, but the ban was overturned in 1751.
1793 law In 1793, the Georgia Assembly passed a law prohibiting the importation of enslaved Africans, but it didn't take effect until 1798.
1798 Constitution The 1798 Constitution prohibited the importation of slaves and emancipation by legislation.
Fear of slave revolts One reason for the ban was a fear of slave revolts.
Planters' disregard Planters ignored the law and continued to increase their enslaved workforce.
Entry of free Africans Georgia prohibited the entry of free Africans, so freed slaves couldn't return to the state.
The life of a slave in Colonial America differed greatly depending on the colony, nature of work, the size of the enslaved workforce, temperament, and the power of the enslaver. Additionally there had been a variety of psychological experiences of those that experienced slavery from birth, versus those born free, and differences across the different ethnicities.
The first enslaved Africans in Georgia arrived in 1526 with Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's establishment of San Miguel de Gualdape on the current Georgia coast, after failing to establish the colony on the Carolina coast. They rebelled and lived with indigenous people, destroying the colony in less than two months.
Two centuries later, Georgia was the last of the Thirteen Colonies to be established and the furthest south (Florida was not one of the Thirteen Colonies). Founded in the 1730s, Georgia's powerful backers did not object to slavery as an institution, but their business model was to rely on labor from Britain (primarily England's poor) and they were also concerned with security, given the closeness of then Spanish Florida, and Spain's regular offers to enemy-slaves to revolt or escape. Despite agitation for slavery, it was not until a defeat of the Spanish by Georgia colonials in the 1740s that arguments for opening the colony to slavery intensified. To staff the rice plantations and settlements, Georgia's proprietors relented in 1751, and African slavery grew quickly. After becoming a royal colony, in the 1760s Georgia began importing slaves directly from Africa
Slave markets existed in several Georgia cities and towns, including Albany, Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Macon, Milledgeville, and above all, in Savannah. In 1859 Savannah was the site of a slave sale colloquially known as the Weeping Time, one of the largest slave sales in the history of the United States. Historian E.A. Pollard wrote in 1858, "Macon, you must know, is one of the principal marts for slaves in the South. Some time ago, I attended on the city's confines an extraordinarily large auction of slaves, including a gang of sixty-one from a plantation in southwestern Georgia. The prices brought were comparatively low, as there was no warranty of soundness, and owing very much, also, to the fact that the slaves were all sold in families." At the beginning of the American Civil War, active traders in Atlanta included Robert M. Clarke, Solomon Cohen, Crawford, Frazer & Co., Fields and Gresham, W. H. Henderson, Inman, Cole & Co., Zachariah A. Rice, A. K. Seago, B. D. Smith, and Whitaker and Turner.
Importing slaves to Georgia was illegal from 1788 until the law was repealed in 1856. Despite these restrictions, researchers estimate that Georgians "transported approximately fifty thousand bonded African Americans" from other slave states between 1820 and 1860. Some of these imports were legal transfers, others were not. Samuel Oakes, the father of a Charleston slave trader named Ziba B. Oakes, was implicated in illegally importing slaves to Georgia in 1844, which resulted in a newspaper notice about the case from Savannah mayor William Thorne Williams that concluded, "The laws of our State are severe, inflicting heavy fines and Penitentiary confinement on such as shall be convicted of these offences Our own safety requires us to be vigilant in preventing the outcasts and convicted felons of other communities from being brought into ours. And all those entrusted with the administration of the laws are bound to use their utmost efforts to bring to just punishment such as shall be guilty of this nature."
Slaves intended for "personal use" could be imported which resulted in a number of workarounds used by traders. One described in the Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1843: "Hamburg, South Carolina was built up just opposite Augusta, for the purpose of furnishing slaves to the planters of Georgia. Augusta is the market to which the planters of Upper and Middle Georgia bring their cotton; and if they want to purchase negroes, they step over into Hamburg and do so. There are two large houses there, with piazzas in front to expose the 'chattels' to the public during the day, and yards in rear of them where they are penned up at night like sheep, so close that they can hardly breathe, with bull-dogs on the outside as sentinels. They sometimes have thousands here for sale, who in consequence of their number suffer most horribly."
Killing of traders Jesse Kirby and John Kirby
Another example of slave importation to Georgia during this period is known from the 1834 killing of "negro traders" Jesse Kirby and John Kirby by enslaved men they were transporting overland to Georgia in a coffle." The Kirbys had been to the slave markets of Baltimore (one enslaved person was purchased at Chestertown) and were traveling with a group of at least nine slaves through Virginia. The Kirbys were killed by enslaved men named George and Littleton at an overnight campsite near Bill's Tavern, around "Prince Edward C. House," near Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia, by between two and four enslaved men. Such campsites were apparently typical to the transportation of slaves by overland coffle, as a letter written from Georgia in 1833 described, "During this and other days I have passed by many negro traders, who were crossing to Alabama. These negro traders, in order to save expense, usually carry their own provisions, and encamp out at night. Passing many of these encampments early in the morning, when they were just pitching tents, I have observed groups of negroes hand-cuffed, probably to prevent them from running away. The driver told us, that a thousand negroes had gone on his road to Alabama, the present spring." Slaves working "collectively" to do violence to "cruel owners" was a comparative "rarity" in the history of antebellum violence by the enslaved in Virginia, but "Having left Maryland and their homes behind, [George, Littleton and their allies] likely believed that violence afforded them the last possible opportunity to escape whatever fate awaited them in Georgia. Georgia offered fewer opportunities for escape than Maryland. The movement south threw the slaves lives into flux.
