... Sir, I do believe that persons
have been sent from France to feel the pulse of this country, to know
whether these [i.e., the Negroes] are the proper engines to make use of:
these people have been talked to; they have been tampered with, and this
is going on."
Finally, after censuring certain parts of this Negro petition, Congress
committed the part on the slave-trade to the committee already
appointed. Meantime, the Senate sent down a bill to amend the Act of
1794, and the House took this bill under consideration.[40] Prolonged
debate ensued. Brown of Rhode Island again made a most elaborate plea
for throwing open the foreign slave-trade. Negroes, he said, bettered
their condition by being enslaved, and thus it was morally wrong and
commercially indefensible to impose "a heavy fine and imprisonment ...
for carrying on a trade so advantageous;" or, if the trade must be
stopped, then equalize the matter and abolish slavery too. Nichols of
Virginia thought that surely the gentlemen would not advise the
importation of more Negroes; for while it "was a fact, to be sure," that
they would thus improve their condition, "would it be policy so to do?"
Bayard of Delaware said that "a more dishonorable item of revenue" than
that derived from the slave-trade "could not be established." Rutledge
opposed the new bill as defective and impracticable: the former act, he
said, was enough; the States had stopped the trade, and in addition the
United States had sought to placate philanthropists by stopping the use
of our ships in the trade.
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