fect until the 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."[26] Next day Senator Bradley of Vermont gave
notice of a bill which was shortly afterward introduced and which, after
an unreported discussion, was passed by the Senate on January 27. Its
conspicuous provisions were that after the close of the year 1807 the
importation of slaves was to be a felony punishable with death, and that
the interstate coasting trade in slaves should be illegal.

[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
gover