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.
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