[Footnote 25:  W.E.B.  DuBois, Suppression of the African Slave Trade, p. 105.]

The report of proceedings in the House was now full, now scant.  The paragraph of the President’s message was referred on December 3 to a committee of seven with Peter Early of Georgia as chairman and three other Southerners in the membership.  The committee’s bill reported on December 15, proposed to prohibit slave importations, to penalize the fitting out of vessels for the trade by fine and forfeiture, to lay fines and forfeitures likewise upon the owners and masters found within the jurisdictional waters of the United States with slaves from abroad on board, and empowered the President to use armed vessels in enforcement.  It further provided that if slaves illegally introduced should be found within the United States they should be forfeited, and any person wittingly concerned in buying or selling them should be fined; it laid the burden of proof upon defendants when charged on reasonable grounds of presumption with having violated the act; and it prescribed that the slaves forfeited should, like other goods in the same status, be sold at public outcry by the proper federal functionaries.[27]

[Footnote 26:  Annals of Congress, 1806-1807, p. 14.]

[Footnote 27 Ibid., pp. 167, 168.]

Mr. Sloan of New Jersey instantly moved to amend by providing that the forfeited slaves be entitled to freedom.  Mr. Early replied that this would rob the bill of all effect by depriving it of public sanction in the districts whither slaves were likely to be brought.  Those communities, he said, would never tolerate the enforcement of a law which would set fresh Africans at large in their midst.  Mr. Smilie, voicing the sentiment and indicating the dilemma of most of his fellow Pennsylvanians, declared his unconquerable aversion to any measure which would make the federal government a dealer in slaves, but confessed that he had no programme of his own.  Nathaniel Macon, the Speaker, saying that he thought the desire to enact an effective law was universal, agreed with Early that Sloan’s amendment would defeat the purpose.  Early himself waxed vehement, prophesying the prompt extermination of any smuggled slaves emancipated in the Southern states.  The amendment was defeated by a heavy majority.

Next day, however, Mr. Bidwell of Massachusetts renewed Sloan’s attack by moving to strike out the provision for the forfeiture of the slaves; but his colleague Josiah Quincy, supported by the equally sagacious Timothy Pitkin of Connecticut, insisted upon the necessity of forfeiture; and Early contended that this was particularly essential to prevent the smuggling of slaves across the Florida border where the ships which had brought them would keep beyond the reach of congressional laws.  The House finding itself in an impasse referred the bill back to the same committee, which soon reported it in a new form declaring the illegal