that the unfortunates brought from Africa should not regain the liberty they had lost through the work of land pirates.
No slaves were smuggled into the Northern region. In the South some States passed no law on this matter, and in others the laws varied widely. The Alabama-Mississippi territory act of 1815 provided for the sale of the negroes by public auction, for cash, to the highest bidder, the informer to have half the proceeds of the sale, and the other half to go to the public treasury. How this law worked will appear later on. In North Carolina (law of 1816) one-fifth of such sales went to the informer. In Georgia the slaves, by the act of December 18, 1817, might be "sold, after giving sixty days' notice in a public gazette," or "if the society for the colonization of free persons of color... will undertake to transport them to Africa... at the sole expense of said society, and shall likewise pay all expenses incurred by the State since they had been captured and condemned, His Excellency the Governor is authorized and requested to aid in promoting the benevolent views of said society."
No national law regulating the disposal of such slaves as these was passed until after the war of 1812.
Another matter considered in connection with this bill introduced on December 3, 1806, was the coastwise traffic between the States. The efforts to prohibit that failed; but the law provided that no ship under forty tons should engage in it. There was no limit to the number of slaves that might be carried, although a voyage from the Chesapeake to New Orleans frequently lasted as long as one from Africa to the West Indies.
