Africans. I will not say that this is their motive, but their conduct certainly justifies a suspicion that their object is to pass such a law as will connive at the continuance of the trade for the emoluments of their constituents."
The discussion was further embittered by a motion made by Smilie of Pennsylvania to make the importation of negroes a felony to be punished by death. This proposition called out another display of Early's frankness.
- "We have been asked," said he,[1] "what punishment can be considered too severe for so atrocious a crime. Without answering the question in the abstract, it will be sufficient to answer it by a practical view of the subject. How do people consider the transaction? Do they consider it such an atrocious crime? They do not."
The Pennsylvania philanthropists had assumed that they could at least follow Jefferson in holding slavery to be an evil and the slave-trade to be a violation of human rights; but even these points were no longer conceded.
- "All the people in the Southern States," continued Early, "are concerned in slavery. It is not, then, considered as criminal. . . . I will tell the truth,—a large majority of people in the Southern States do not consider slavery as even an evil."
The death-penalty was rejected by a vote of sixty-three to fifty-three, almost the whole Pennsylvania delegation voting in its favor. Bidwell of Massachusetts
- ↑ Annals of Congress, 1806-1807, p. 238.
