In contrast, Virginia maintained a white majority despite its significant Black enslaved population.[16] It was said that in the eighteenth century, the colony South Carolina resembled an "extension of West Africa". All legal, direct importation of enslaved Africans had stopped by 1808, when the now, newly formed United States finally banned its citizens from participating in the international slave trade altogether by law. Despite the ban, small to moderate cargoes of enslaved Africans were occasionally and illegally shipped into the United States directly from Africa for many years, as late as 1859.[17]