In 1841 Mr. Woodbridge submitted a resolution to the Senate requesting the Committee on Foreign Relations to consider the expediency of entering into an arrangement with Great Britain for the arrest of fugitive slaves charged with crime who might escape over the northern boundary of the United States.[127] No action was taken upon the resolution. The North, however, was not the only region to which slaves were fleeing at this time. Complaint was heard after 1830, that the "freedom and equality granted blacks by the Mexican Constitution and law of 1829, was attracting large numbers of slaves from Louisiana,"[128] while in Florida the Seminole trouble was not yet ended. The last case of this kind occurred just at the outbreak of the Civil War. A slave by the name of Anderson was found one day by Mr. Seneca T. P. Diggs, wandering about his plantation in Howard County, Missouri, without a pass. Mr. Diggs thereupon arrested him as a fugitive slave. In the struggle which followed, the desperate runaway plunged a knife into Mr. Diggs's heart. His captor dead, Anderson hastened on to Canada.[129] There he lived a quiet and industrious life until 1860, when the American government called upon Canada, under the extradition treaty, to give up Anderson for punishment. He was arrested, but applied to the Toronto court for a writ of habeas corpus, which was refused. An appeal was immediately made to the Queen's Bench, England, which granted the writ.[130] In the trial Anderson was defended by Mr. Gerrit Smith in an eloquent speech, which made a great impression, and was circulated all over the United States.[131] The prisoner was discharged on a technical point.[132] =§ 24. Status of fugitives on the high seas.=--When in 1830 gradual emancipation began in the British colonies, and in 1837 slavery ceased to exist there, a new set of complications arose. American vessels carrying slaves from one part of the United States to another were repeatedly driven or conveyed into British ports, and the slaves were there treated as ordinary fugitives, that is, as free men. Thus the Comet in 1830,[133] and the Encomium in 1834,[134] were cast away on the Bahamas, and the slaves on board could not be recovered. In 1835 the Enterprise was forced by stress of weather to enter a port of the Bermudas,[135] and the officers were not permitted by the British authorities to restrain the persons on board.