President Jefferson, in his pacificatory message of December 2, 1806, said:  “I congratulate you, fellow-citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally, to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country, have long been eager to proscribe.  Although no law you may pass can take prohibitory effect till the first day of the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, yet the intervening period is not too long to prevent, by timely notice, expeditions which cannot be completed before that day."[1]

In pursuance of this recommendation, the very next day Senator Bradley of Vermont introduced into the Senate a bill which, after a complicated legislative history, became the Act of March 2, 1807, prohibiting the African slave-trade.[2]

Three main questions were to be settled by this bill:  first, and most prominent, that of the disposal of illegally imported Africans; second, that of the punishment of those concerned in the importation; third, that of the proper limitation of the interstate traffic by water.

The character of the debate on these three questions, as well as the state of public opinion, is illustrated by the fact that forty of the sixty pages of officially reported debates are devoted to the first question, less than twenty to the second, and only two to the third.  A sad commentary on the previous enforcement of State and national laws is the readiness with which it was admitted that wholesale violations of the law would take place; indeed, Southern men declared that no strict law against the slave-trade could be executed in the South, and that it was only by playing on the motives of personal interest that the trade could be checked.  The question of punishment indicated the slowly changing moral attitude of the South toward the slave system.  Early boldly said, “A large majority of people in the Southern States do not consider slavery as even an evil."[3] The South, in fact, insisted on regarding man-stealing as a minor offence, a “misdemeanor” rather than a “crime.”  Finally, in the short and sharp debate on the interstate coastwise trade, the growing economic side of the slavery question came to the front, the vested interests’ argument was squarely put, and the future interstate trade almost consciously provided for.

From these considerations, it is doubtful as to how far it was expected that the Act of 1807 would check the slave traffic; at any rate, so far as the South was concerned, there seemed to be an evident desire to limit the trade, but little thought that this statute would definitively suppress it.