When the importation of slaves became illegal in 1808, South Carolina was the only state that still allowed importation, which had been prohibited in the other states. Slave owners had more control over the state government of South Carolina than of any other state. Elite planters played the role of English aristocrats more than did the planters of other states. In the late antebellum years, the newer Southern states, such as Alabama and Mississippi, allowed more political equality among whites. Although all white male residents were allowed to vote, property requirements for office holders were higher in South Carolina than in any other state. It was the only state legislature in which slave owners held the majority of seats. The legislature elected the governor, all judges and state electors for federal elections, as well as the US senators into the 20th century, so its members had considerable political power. The state's chief executive was a figurehead who had no authority to veto legislative law. With its society disrupted by slave losses during the Revolution, South Carolina did not embrace manumission as readily as states of the Upper South. Most of its small number of free blacks were of mixed race, often the children of major planters or their sons, who made sexual use of young female slaves. Their wealthy fathers sometimes passed on social capital to such mixed-race children, arranging for their manumission even if officially denying them as legal heirs. Fathers sometimes arranged to have their slave children educated, arranged apprenticeships in skilled trades, and other preparation for independent adulthood. Some planters sent their mixed-race slave children to schools and colleges in the North for education. In the early 19th century, the state legislature passed laws making manumission more difficult. The manumission law of 1820 required slaveholders to gain legislative approval for each act of manumission and generally required other free adults to testify that the person to be freed could support himself. This meant that freedmen were unable to free their slave children, since the first law required that five citizens attest to the ability of the person proposed to be freed to earn a living. In 1820, the legislature ended personal manumissions, requiring all slaveholders to gain individual permission from the legislature before manumitting anyone. The majority of the population in South Carolina was black, with concentrations in the plantation areas of the Low Country: by 1860 the population of the state was 703,620, with 57 percent or slightly more than 402,000 classified as slaves. Free blacks numbered slightly less than 10,000.