Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/479

, four from Pennsylvania, and one from New Jersey, that of the late governor and general, Bloomfield, in his earlier days a most zealous member of the New Jersey society for the abolition of slavery.

Having reached the senate, this hill was referred to a committee, of which Crittenden was chairman. He reported it back with several amendments, one of which provided than the identity of the alleged fugitive, after being carried back, should be established by some testimony other than thai of the claimant. Thus amended, the bill was carried in the senate; but not without a very warm debate, of which, however, not a syllable has been preserved. The vote stood 17 to 13, the Delaware senators against it; Otis, of Massachusetts, Sanford, of New York, and Taylor, of Indiana, for it. But by the time the bill got back to the house, its northern supporters seem to have taken some alarm; and, in spite of repeated efforts of its authors to get some action upon it, it was suffered to lie and to die on the table.

Burrell's resolution in the senate, especially that part of it relating to cooperation with foreign nations, was strongly opposed by Barbour and Troup, as leading to foreign entanglements, and involving a pledge which congress had no right to give. Morrell, a new democratic senator from New Hampshire, launched out, in reply, into a most emphatic denunciation of slavery. King defended the resolution, since the concert which it suggested was one, not of arms, but of opinion, example, and influence, to prevail on Spain and Portugal to join in the abolition of the traffic; but he suggested that the debate had taken quite too wide a range, the subject of the resolution being, not slavery in general, a topic, as he remarked, always alluded to in the senate with very great reserve, but the abolition of the slave-trade, as to which they were all agreed. The resolution was adopted; and the committee to which it was referred reported a bill, which became a law, throwing the burden of proof, in all cases where negroes were found on board a ship, on those in possession; and extending the penalties of the prohibitory act to the fitting out of vessels for the slave-trade, or the transporting slaves to any country whatever.

At the session of 1818-19, an act was passed allowing a premium of fifty dollars to the informer for every illegally-imported African seized within the United States, and half as much for those taken at sea; with authority to the president to cause them to be removed beyond the limits of the United States, and to appoint agents on the coast of Africa for their reception. An attempt was also made to punish slave-trading with death, as had been contended for at the time of the original abolition act. Such a provision passed the house, but was struck out in the senate.

In March, 1818, the delegate from Missouri presented petitions from sundry inhabitants of that territory, praying for the admission of Missouri into the Union as a state. These petitions were referred to a select committee, which reported a bill to authorize the people of that territory to form a constitution and state government, and for the admission of such state into the Union on an equal footing with the original states. The bill was read the first and second time and sent to the committee of the whole, where it slept the remain-