Origins of Opposition

Thomas Jefferson began early in the verbal assault on the trade. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, he asserted that King George III “has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s [sic] most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”³ This act of condemnatory blame shifting did not make it into the final draft of the declaration. Yet it serves as an indicator of the contemporaneous realization that a people calling on nature’s law to justify their revolutionary cause could not long continue to act so patently in violation of it.

Whether seeking to shift the blame for the trade or to make amends for complicity in it, much of the Anglo-American world was condemning it by the end of the eighteenth century. Early in the nineteenth, condemnation had turned into active legal, even military, attempts to suppress it. While not all supported the efforts, even those who appealed to its economic necessity were likely to cite “their personal moral opposition to the slave trade.”⁴ With such consensus that the trade was an evil—necessary or otherwise—what could possibly hamper the success of suppression efforts?

Actually, there was much that could—and did. Among the most significant impediments was hostility and mistrust in Anglo-American relations, especially in the arena of British naval policy. This suspicion amplified the already strong American desire to keep strictly limited its formal cooperation with any European power in any area except legitimate commerce. Slavery drew the Americans increasingly into the international relations of the Atlantic world. But it was in the matter of the suppression of the trade, more than on any other, that American policymakers sought to keep that involvement within tight bounds. Additionally, southerners began increasingly to fear the connection between abolition of the trade and general abolition of the institution of slavery.⁵ The result was mutual frustration, much barren diplomacy, increasing enmity, and, in the end, an inability for decades to achieve what both London and Washington, DC, claimed to want: an end to the cruel trade.

The economic development of America’s slaveholding regions significantly affected the domestic politics of slave trade suppression as time progressed. As a general rule, legislators from the Upper South and Border States were more likely to support the suppression of the trade than were their counterparts in the Deep South. A decline in tobacco prices, together with the depletion of soil nutrients that resulted from cultivation of that crop, led growers in the Upper South to switch increasingly to the farming of wheat. This was now a more profitable crop, and it did not rapidly lead to erosion and soil exhaustion as did tobacco. It was also not as labor intensive as cotton production, and the work was seasonal. As a result, planters found themselves with a surplus of slaves, whom they were now motivated to sell. Meanwhile, the growth in cotton production in what came to be called the Black Belt created a demand for slaves in that region. Slaveholders in the Upper South now had an economic interest in restricting supply and thus securing a higher price for the slaves whom they could sell to farther south and west. This financial incentive—added to the perception of the baleful effects of slavery on white society and a legitimate repulsion to the horrors of the transatlantic trade—helps explain these men’s desire to see an end to the international trade.⁶

Banning the Trade

It is sometimes said that the US Constitution provided for an end to the slave trade in 1808. In fact, the Constitution provided that importation of slaves could not be prevented until that year, and that this provision was not amendable. But as 1808 approached, and the topic of the slave trade was taken up by Congress, the regional fault lines already began to appear, even if less vociferously than would later be the case. When in December 1803 South Carolina’s legislature voted to once again allow the importation of slaves, Congress quickly took up a bill that would tax each African imported. Representatives who were hostile to slavery used this opportunity to declaim not only against the reopening of the trade—South Carolina was now the only state to allow importations—but also against slavery itself. Representative David Bard of Pennsylvania gave voice to such thoughts, proclaiming that slavery, and not just the trade, “is radically unjust, and violates the principles of morality.” Slavery also, he added, affected America’s standing in the eyes of other nations. Americans had denounced “tyranny and oppression.” Yet what would foreigners think of the Republic’s character “when they examine our census and find that we hold a million men in the most degraded slavery?” What, indeed, should other nations conclude, but that “we possess the principles of tyranny, but want the power to carry them into operation, except against the untutored and defenceless African”?⁷ Slavery damaged foreign perceptions of the United States, and especially so in light of its clear contradiction of America’s revolutionary rhetoric. While some members thought the tax was an unfair burden on a single state, “not a single voice was raised in defense” of South Carolina’s act. In fact, “by all its existence was deprecated.”⁸

Given this consensus in Congress, it was clear that Charleston would not long be open to slavers: 1808 was fast approaching, and, with it, an almost certain ban on importation. The president was also urging Congress to act, calling in December 1806 for legislation that would end the trade on January 1, 1808. As Matthew E. Mason notes, “In contrast to his record on slavery in general,’ in fact, Jefferson proved effective and decisive in his opposition to the international slave trade.”⁹ The trade thus became illegal on the first day that the Constitution allowed.

The 1807 legislation was actually the culmination of a “congressional attack on the slave trade that had begun in 1790” with Congress’s assertion of its authority to restrict American participation in the trade. The 113–5 vote indicated “an aversion to the slave trade that varied in intensity but was prevalent across most of the nation,” while the near “national consensus” on the subject “seemed to promise a high level of compliance.” But the promise of the legislative actions was not realized for decades. Don E. Fehrenbacher writes of “impressive legislation” but “faulty enforcement.”¹⁰

The Failure of International Enforcement

The significant failures of enforcement frequently stemmed from the international context in which slave trade suppression had to take place if it were to be successful. Like the trade itself, the problem of suppression was a multinational, transatlantic problem. The fact that the United States was, over the course of administration after administration, resistant to participation in the British-sponsored international regime to suppress the trade may not be surprising. But Washington’s refusal to do so made elimination of the Atlantic slave trade impossible. It was not until 1862 that the administration of President Abraham Lincoln would accede to the key component of the British treaty system, the right of search of US-flagged vessels. At that point, with the Union in dire peril, President Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward were less concerned with the rights of neutrals on the seas than they were with preventing European support for the Confederate cause.¹¹

The British came to the slave trade suppression table at essentially the same time as did the Americans. In the same year that Congress passed the law banning the slave trade, Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act 1807, which became law in May 1808. With this act Britain prohibited slave trade with its colonies. In its first years, enforcement was not much of a problem: given the general war in Europe, Britain was able to seize the slave ships of France, and of France’s allies the Netherlands and Spain, at this time. For the duration of the war, the trade was largely suppressed.¹²

But the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought with it the likelihood that the slave trade would be revived. As Reginald Coupland notes, “When at last the end of the war came in sight, it was clear that, unless something were done to prevent it, the West European Trade, especially that of France … would recover all of its old proportions.” By this time, a peace of this sort had become completely unacceptable. Antislavery “became part of the British self-definition” at the time when Europe was moving from war to peace.¹³ Something would have to be done to prevent other nations from using the cover of peacetime to reestablish their lucrative slave trades.

Initially the hope was to use a series of international conferences, set to put Europe right after more than two decades of war, to convince the other European nations to join Britain in prohibiting the trade. Going into these congresses, London could well expect that Britain would be able to exert considerable influence in this matter, as in others. Jeremy Black explains that “Britain’s influence on other states rose greatly as a result of her major, and eventually successful, role in resistance to revolutionary and Napoleonic France from 1793–1815. Britain emerged from its wars with France as the preeminent global power.”¹⁴ The British foreign secretary, the redoubtable Lord Castlereagh, could well expect to carry the day on an issue of such vital importance—and clear moral purpose—at the upcoming diplomatic conferences.

Castlereagh was, in a sense, right. But he was also a realist. The British foreign secretary “foresaw from the outset that it would not be difficult to obtain from the Congress some general moral condemnation of the traffic in slaves; the difficulties would arise when it came to putting this general principle into practice.” He was correct in this estimate. The Final Act of the Congress of Vienna indeed issued a general moral condemnation of the slave trade. And though it was nonspecific regarding implementation, it was not meaningless. No signatory nation could now “reject diplomatic initiatives concerning [the trade] as interference in domestic affairs.”¹⁵ So far, so good.

British policy came to be based on the creation of an interlocking network of alliances after failure of initial diplomacy to achieve specifics as to the means of suppression. Castlereagh proceeded, in short order, to achieve most of the treaties. Frustrations arose, nevertheless, with the half-hearted efforts of the signatories to actually do the work of suppression.¹⁶ Of all the powers “abolishing” the trade by treaty, “only Britain took the requisite steps to ensure that her law was strictly and continuously obeyed.” Particularly frustrating for Castlereagh and the British was French “nonchalance” with regard to abolishing the trade. After agreeing to do so, Paris was, in fact, doing precious little. According to Coupland, “Having conceded abolition to appease Britain, nobody in the government gave it further thought.”¹⁷ The French Navy showed “but little zeal” in pursuing a mission of which they, in the majority, disapproved.¹⁸

British vexation with treaty signatories was significant and persistent. But a different set of problems was to be had with the slaveholding republic on the other side of the Atlantic; a nation that had recently fought a war with Britain, and which had reason to be suspect of British motives. The causes of the War of 1812 are debatable. But what is clear is that impressment “served as the key justification for the war once it began.”¹⁹ Memories of this issue on the part of the Americans would bedevil attempts to end the trade in slaves for half a century. Thus, as much as successive administrations might have desired to end the trade, they were unwilling to take the vital step necessary to do so.

The United States had abolished the slave trade by law. But legislating against the trade and actually stopping it were two different matters. James Madison acknowledged as much in his December 3, 1816 address to Congress. The president noted that the United States had gone first in banning the importation of slaves, as well as the punishment of citizens who participated in it. And Americans could be “gratified” by the efforts that other nations were making toward suppression. With this being the case, Americans must feel, at the same time, “the greater solicitude, to give the fullest efficacy to their own Regulations.” He therefore called for further action by Congress due to “the violations and evasions which, it is suggested, are chargeable on unworthy Citizens who mingle in the Slave-trade under Foreign Flags, and with Foreign Ports, and by collusive importations of Slaves, into the United States, through adjoining ports and territories.” Thus, the president called upon Congress once again to act, “with a full assurance of their disposition to apply all the remedy which can be afforded by an amendment of the law.”²⁰

Congress indeed took up the issue, and in 1818 passed a new law that facilitated prosecution of those accused of participation in the trade. The congressional debate over the suppression of the trade is instructive, since it raised the central issue at play in the diplomacy that would follow—namely, to what extent ought the United States participate in a collaborative effort with other maritime powers to interdict the trade in slaves. On the second day of 1818, Senator George Troup, a Democratic-Republican from Georgia, rose to oppose a section of a resolution dealing with suppression of the slave trade. The senator objected to the final clause of this sense of the Senate resolution, since it called for a “concert with other nations” in pursuit of an end to the trade in humans. According to Troup, “no measure could be adopted more replete with danger to the welfare, to the very existence of this country, than a formal coalition, for any purposes, with any foreign nation whatever.” Troup could not “separate from foreign alliances the idea of foreign politics and foreign wars; and the proposed measure he should view as the commencement of a system of foreign connections tending to foreign alliances, to which Mr. T[roup] expressed great repugnance.”²¹ The rejection of multilateralism was categorical. The problem with a unilateral approach, however, was that it was unlikely to be successful in achieving the goal of ending the slave trade.

Senator James Burrill, a Federalist from Rhode Island, made this point clearly in response to Troup. The United States, in Burrill’s opinion, ought indeed to work with other maritime nations in suppressing the trade, “because it was only by such concert and co-operation that the slave trade could be abolished.” It was, in fact, “impossible to put an entire stop to it without a co-operation among the nations prohibiting it; for, no matter how many nations prohibit the trade, if one or two are allowed to carry it on, the evil will still exist.” The issue was decidedly not one of entanglements in foreign politics, he added. In fact, he “had no idea of [the resolution’s] authorizing the slightest interference with the international affairs of other nations, or of allowing them to interfere in ours.”²²

Unfortunately for the British, they would find that the administration of President James Monroe inclined toward Senator Troup’s framing of the issue. In early October 1820 the British minister to Washington, George Canning, met for over two hours with Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. His goal was to convince the Americans to accede to the right of British warships to search US-flagged vessels in pursuit of slavers. Reciprocal right of search was the basis for the interlocking system of treaties that Britain had negotiated for the suppression of the trade. Castlereagh was, however, aware that this treaty structure was doomed to fail without the participation of all of the major maritime powers. Yet the United States remained outside the system. A central thrust of British foreign policy at this time would thus be to convince the Americans to accede to the right of search.

As Adams summarized the British proposal in his memoirs, “The United States should accede to the principles of the treaties made by Great Britain with the Netherlands and Portugal, by which the vessels of either nation are allowed to be searched by the captains of the armed vessels of another, and two mixed Courts of Commissioners are instituted to try all such captures.” The secretary of state then went on to delineate the American objections to both aspects of the British scheme. First, the federal government lacked all constitutional authority to establish such courts. As to the mutual right search, the administration disapproved of “the principle of allowing the search, in time of peace, of our merchant vessels by armed cruisers from another nation.” The objections would appear lock solid, and especially the constitutional objection to the mixed courts. After all, what nation could speak with more authority on the proper interpretation of the US Constitution than the United States? Adams added, correctly, that the Americans were not the only holdouts: “France has been the most decisive in her objections.”²³

Yet Castlereagh, and thus Canning, were not to be discouraged by American reluctance. The British minister sought to convince the American secretary, at their October 2 meeting, that the latter’s objections could be successfully addressed. Canning began by suggesting that one of the two proposed reciprocal courts might “be established within the United States”—thus, it would appear, addressing the constitutional issue. Adams brought him up short, adding that there were additional, broader reasons, for American refusal to participate in the British treaty system. The first of these was “the general extra-European policy of the United States—a policy which they had always pursued as best suited to their own interests and best adapted to harmonize with those of Europe. This policy had also been that of Europe, which had never considered the United States as belonging to her system.” Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the great powers of Europe had “regulated the affairs of all Europe without ever calling the United States to their consultations.” This was a good thing, and it “was best for both parties that they should continue to do so.” After all, the United States would bring to any such deliberations “some principles not congenial to those of the other members, and those principles would lead to discussions tending to discord rather than harmony.” Thus, in the interest of maintaining transatlantic good will, the Unites States must remain outside of any European diplomatic combination.²⁴

Adams went on to add a second, more specific objection to Castlereagh’s proposal. Britain’s past policy of impressment now precluded any future American concession on the right of search. As Adams noted, “we had had one war with Great Britain for exercising what she alone claims of all the nations of the earth as a right—search of neutral vessels in time of war to take out men.” During both the peace negotiations in 1814 and since, the United States had sought to come to an agreement with Britain on this matter but had been frustrated in this attempt. It remained, nevertheless, “a point upon which, more than any other, not only the people but the Government of the United States were sensitive.” The secretary’s rejection of the British proposal was thus categorical, as the administration was fixed in “the determination in no case to yield the right of search in time of peace.”²⁵ Past British actions had poisoned the well. London could not now expect the Americans to concede in time of peace what it had rejected in time of war.

Canning, undaunted, sought to address Adams’s objections to the concession of the right of search. He did not, he began, see “any analogy” between what the British were now seeking from the Americans and the issue that had done so much to provoke war between the two nations in 1812. After all, in the current case, the “right of search given was entirely reciprocal.” The Netherlands and Portugal had seen fit to assent. These were, he implied, nations that were less capable than France and the United States of protecting their interests. Why, then, should “nations justly conscious of their power” hesitate to sign on? Adams responded forthrightly, concerned that “all concessions of principle tended to encourage encroachment.” Give British naval officers the right to board ships for one thing in a time of peace and they would be “still more encouraged” to do so for another reason in time of war. As to the Netherlands and Portugal, “they might be supposed to be actuated by a sense of dependence upon or of obligation to Great Britain.”²⁶ In reporting the results of the conversation to Castlereagh, Canning was left to seek the silver lining that he could. He was, he said, “gratified” to find that Adams willingly granted that the current measures in place for suppressing the trade were inadequate.²⁷ Beyond that, it was difficult to find too much encouragement for the British in Adams’s line of diplomacy.

This lengthy discussion of the issues between Britain and the United States anticipated the extensive diplomatic back-and-forth between the two nations on the issue of slave trade suppression. Of course, “it seemed a little ungracious to be nursing the grievances of 1812 whenever the British Minister called.” Castlereagh, for his part, had expressed the sense that, if the Monroe administration were to continue to reject the British system for suppression, then it should be invited to “point out in return how, in their judgment, the evil is to be cured—for we must hope that so enlightened a State is not prepared supinely to acquiesce in the continued existence of so flagrant an immorality.”²⁸ Canning was thus to keep up the diplomatic effort.

In early December the House of Representatives called upon President Monroe to submit the diplomatic correspondence of the administration concerning the slave trade. Canning appears to have taken this as an opportunity to reopen the conversation and called on Adams for another lengthy conversation on the December 18, during which Adams “told him that there was no change in the President’s opinions concerning the British proposals.” But the secretary suggested that Canning submit an aide-memoire of Britain’s recent proposals. Canning did so on December 20. In this note he indicated that “it is generally acknowledged that, a combined system of Maritime Police can alone afford the means of putting it [the slave trade] down with effect.” He once again called for cooperation between the English-speaking naval powers. Such a concert, he thought, could not be rejected in light of the desire on both sides to put an end to “a practice so flagrantly immoral.”²⁹

The House’s inquiry was not, however, to open up new vistas for the institution of joint commissions for the prosecution of slavers. In his response to Canning’s December 20 memorandum, Adams at length restated the constitutional impossibility of American accession to this scheme, stressing “the incompetency of this government, to become a party to the institution of Tribunals organized like those” that Britain had created with the cooperation of the Iberian nations and the Netherlands. Such courts, furthermore, would violate the “Constitutional rights guaranteed to every citizen of the Union.” No American could be “called to answer for any penal offense, without the intervention of a Grand Jury to accuse, and of a Jury of Trial to decide upon the charge.” While Monroe and Adams were on firm constitutional ground in this assertion, this did nothing to help the cause of suppression. To address this problem, Adams proposed a system of joint cruising of British and American naval ships on the African coast. In granting this concession, the president and secretary of state evinced a willingness, however limited, to go beyond the strict American unilateralism that had marked their policy up to this point. American and British naval commanders off Africa could thus “be ordered, whenever the occasion may render it convenient, to cruize [sic] in company together—to communicate mutually to each other all information, obtained by the one, and which may be useful to the execution of the duties of the other, and to give each other every assistance which may be compatible with the performance of their own service, and adapted to the end which is the common aim of both parties.”³⁰ This carefully worded concession to British importuning was as far as Monroe and Adams were willing to go in the direction of multilateralism on the slave trade front. As Adams noted, he had written the response to Canning, refusing to accede to the right of search, “in terms of the strongest character, with a view to leave no occasion for further discussion upon the subject.”³¹

The only concession—the stipulation of joint cruising—was hardly likely to solve the problem of slavers hiding under the American flag. But it was something, and Castlereagh soon instructed the Admiralty to “use their best endeavours to cooperate, as far as may be in their power, with such American ships as may be placed on the Coast of Africa” for the purpose of apprehending slavers. Canning nevertheless complained to Adams just a few days after receiving the December 30 note that “the proposals in my [Adams’s] note would be quite inadequate to the object proposed, the effectual suppression of the trade.” To Adams it was “very apparent that Mr. Canning was in no wise satisfied with our proposed substitute; nor is it to be expected that his Government will be more so.”³²

It was not. While discussions continued regarding the number of American ships to be deployed to Africa, and the methods of joint cruising, Canning could not hold back from observing to Adams that the British government had “felt the deepest regret” to learn that the US government would not participate in the “mutual Engagements” that were required to effectually suppress the trade in Africans. Despite Adams’s attempt in his December 30 letter to indicate that the time had come to drop the whole matter of the British proposals, Canning made manifest yet again that “it is not possible for His Majesty to consider the Counter-proposal, contained in your letter, as an efficient substitute for the system of measures which I have had the honour of proposing to you.” Yet “such is the King’s benevolent anxiety to co-operate with the Government of The United States, in whatever may tend, in the slightest degree, to mitigate the evils of the Slave-trade, that His Majesty is willing even to avail himself of the present very limited opening to a concert between the two countries.”³³ His pen thus veritably dripping with regret, Canning went about his duty to facilitate the limited cooperation to which the Americans had acceded. Had he even the slightest hope, however, Adams sought to put that to rest. In his response to Canning’s note, the secretary of state once again reviewed American objections to British proposals, explaining that, in fact, the US proposal for cooperation by joint cruising was “better adapted to the suppression of the Traffick than that of the British Government.”³⁴ Joint cruising it was to be.

In early 1819 Congress had passed a law, signed by Monroe in early March, authorizing the president to deploy ships to the African coast in furtherance of the suppression of the slave trade. The bill also provided for a twenty-five-dollar-per-slave bounty to the captain and crew of the ship making the seizure, though an amendment prescribing the death penalty for slavers was removed by the Senate. The following year both houses of Congress concurred on a bill that equated slaving with piracy. Slave traders, as pirates, were now subject to the death penalty. In this sense, at least, “the American law against the slave trade [was] the most strenuous in existence.”³⁵ In August 1821 Adams forwarded to Canning instructions that were to be issued “immediately” to US naval ships charged with interdicting slavers on the African coast. The Americans were to cooperate with the British Navy “by all suitable means” and to engage in joint cruising “should the occasion occur in which [the American commanders] may find it mutually convenient.”³⁶

None of this meant, however, that the British had permanently given up their attempt to get the United States to sign on to a right of search. By year’s end, Adams and Canning were at it again. The two met on December 4 and spoke for three hours. The conversation was wide ranging but, necessarily, came to the topic of the slave trade. Canning had spoken with the French minister to the United States, Baron Hyde de Neuville, about the slave trade, and found him to be foursquare in favor of suppression. Reflecting the position of his government, however, Neuville was also opposed to the right of search, even while admitting that it was the best way to end the trade. Canning used his report of the conversation with Neuville to raise the issue, yet again, of the American position on the right of search. Indefatigably, the British minister remarked that he thought that the US government “should ultimately be convinced of the necessity” of agreeing to the right of search.

Adams could not have been more categorical this time in his rejection, nor clearer on the key reason: “I said that it was impossible. There were objections of the most serious nature against the thing itself in any shape; but unless Britain would bind herself by an article, as strong and explicit as language can make it, never again in time of war to take a man from an American vessel, we never for a moment could listen to a proposal for allowing a right of search in time of peace.” Lest Canning get the idea that this unambiguous rejection contained a seed of hope, Adams quickly made clear that, as far as he was concerned, negotiations with London over impressment were off the table: “We had exhausted negotiation in endeavoring to make an arrangement with Great Britain on the subject of impressment. We had failed, and were not desirous of obtaining the object by indirect means. The proposal must come from them, if they were prepared for it.”³⁷ Both Adams and Canning well knew that the government of the Earl of Liverpool was decidedly not willing to propose an end to impressment. There seemed no room for diplomatic maneuver: London remained frustrated with Washington’s refusal to accede to the right of search, while Washington despaired of ever convincing London to renounce the despised practice of impressment.

Such was London’s commitment to effective suppression of the trade, however, that even the definitive nature of Adams’s statements was not enough to daunt Canning and Castlereagh—not for long, in any event. Both saw opportunity in the actions of Congress. The House of Representatives had constituted a committee on the slave trade, which was in the habit of issuing reports that went against clear policy direction coming from the Monroe administration. In both 1821 and 1822 the committee had recommended adopting the right of search as an effective means of combating the trade. Castlereagh would seek opportunity where he could find it. In April 1822 he spoke with the American minister to London, Richard Rush. The foreign secretary expressed his hope that, as “unfavorable the language of the American Government was to our wishes,” the 1822 report of the House Committee on the Suppression of the Slave Trade “still gave ground for hope, that, upon the principles therein laid down, some joint Measure could, in the end, be arranged between the Two Countries.” In addition to previous suggestions, which had already been rejected, Castlereagh hoped at this point for joint Anglo-American “representations” to Paris, urging the French to do more to suppress the trade which “is still very extensively carried on under their Flag.” Castlereagh, therefore, urged Rush to raise the matter with Adams, stressing the “great advantages which might be expected” if the two English-speaking powers were to unite in diplomatic pressure on France.³⁸

Rush, complying with the foreign minister’s request, wrote out a memorandum of this conversation. To the extent that Rush can be assumed to have accurately summarized Castlereagh’s words, the memorandum is revealing. The Briton had taken heart from the report of the House committee, which “opened a new hope to him that The United States might accede to some System” that allowed the right of search. Additionally, he hoped that a way could be found to make the mixed tribunal system accord with the American Constitution. Finally, a joint Anglo-American approach to France “would not be without its effect in overcoming the scruples that had hitherto existed with that Power” regarding mutual search. Duly summarizing Castlereagh’s fond wishes, Rush reports adding that “I had not the least expectation of my Government agreeing to the mutual Right of Search, under whatever modification or circumstances the proposition might be again exhibited, but on the contrary, entertained the most decided and unequivocal belief … that its objections to it in every shape would be insurmountable.”³⁹ Rush was, indeed, correct in his assumptions. In the last weeks of his life, Castlereagh was to learn from Canning that the House did not, in fact, take up the slave trade committee’s report. Nor had it done so the previous year, under similar circumstances. And at that point, in March 1821, Adams had made clear to Canning that the president “would not have changed his policy” even if Congress had voted the resolutions. Castlereagh perceived a division within the US government on the question of the right of search.⁴⁰ But with Adams directing foreign policy for the Monroe administration, there was no chance that even a more united Congress could have brought a change in policy. When Canning met with Adams in mid-July, the secretary described Monroe as “still decidedly adverse to the Right of Search.” Likewise, there was nothing to be expected from the administration when it came to a joint diplomatic approach to Paris.⁴¹ Castlereagh never received Canning’s report of this meeting with Adams; by the time his note arrived in London, the foreign secretary had committed suicide.

His successor, Stratford Canning’s cousin George, proved equally persistent in attempting to bring America into the British system of slave trade suppression. Yet again, Adams proved up to the task of limiting American commitments to those it could execute unilaterally. Foreign Secretary George Canning could have been forgiven had he found the situation that he inherited dispiriting. Minister Stratford Canning’s most recent meeting with Adams “present[ed] no very satisfactory prospect of the co-operation to be expected on the part of The United States, in our efforts for repressing that abominable Traffick,” he observed. And the news of similar discussion in Paris was “hardly less discouraging.” The foreign secretary found it “most unfortunate” that Monroe “should see anything invincibly objectionable” in the proposed right of search. After all, the right was mutual, and thus there could be no sacrifice of national dignity involved. And “what Great Britain is ready to allow, in a point so vital to her pride and to her power, may surely be allowed reciprocally by any other Nation.”⁴² The new foreign secretary was finding that the Americans could, indeed, be difficult.

Or perhaps it was the secretary of state himself who was the problem. Stratford Canning reported, rather boldly, to Adams in October that he had “become satisfied that [America’s] compliance with the proposal of admitting mutual search depended personally and exclusively” on Adams. “I assured him,” Adams explained, “he had been misinformed, as he might hereafter have occasion to know.” At this, the British minister dropped the matter. Still, Canning had not been completely off base: “the slave trade was an international concern, and … only a system of international cooperation would be adequate to destroy it.” Yet Adams stood firm in his “independent attitude, and he remained of the opinion that each nation must guard its own interests in the matter.”⁴³ If Adams, moreover, was not the sole advocate of this position within the administration, he was nevertheless its most emphatic and important one.

Congress Intervenes

Anglo-American conversation on the suppression of the trade carried on in this manner for some time: the British urged cooperation, and Monroe and Adams insisted upon unilateralism. America was not to be drawn into the foreign affairs of the Atlantic world any more deeply than was absolutely necessary. If the Cannings refused to despair, Stratford was at least aware of the long odds against them. His hopes that Congress would act decisively having been all but dashed in the previous two years, he nevertheless wrote to his cousin on the first day of 1823 that “I still apprehend that nothing short of a decided impulse from that quarter will produce any change in the disposition of the American Government.”⁴⁴ It appeared that diplomatic overtures to the Monroe administration would be futile until pressure was placed upon the White House from without. Things looked bleak.

If Congress did not quite come riding to the rescue, it at least gave impetus to a matter that had remained diplomatically frustrated for some time. The catalyst was provided by the Virginia congressman Charles Fenton Mercer. In February 1823 Mercer introduced a resolution that read, “That the President of the United States be requested to enter upon, and to prosecute from time to time, such negotiations with the several maritime powers of Europe and America, as he may deem expedient for the effectual abolition of the African slave trade, and its ultimate denunciation, as piracy, under the law of nations, by the consent of the civilized world.” The wording of Mercer’s resolution might have been ambiguous with regard to the right of search. But he made clear in his remarks on the floor of the House exactly what he had in mind. “So long,” he declared, “as the right of common search and punishment is withheld, so long may the flag of a single State cover this detestable commerce.” The vote in favor of the resolution was, in Fehrenbacher’s description, a “thunderous” 131–9. Fehrenbacher adds that the resolution gave Adams “a route of graceful retreat from his and the administration’s previously held position.” Pirates were, after all, hostis humani generis—enemies of humankind—under international law, and admiralty law before that. As such, they had no claim to protection from their native country’s government, and could be apprehended by the armed ships of any nation. “With Monroe’s approval,” Fehrenbacher adds, “Adams instituted negotiations along those lines and drafted a proposed Anglo-American convention dependent upon British legislation declaring the slave trade to be piracy.”⁴⁵

Rush and George Canning began negotiations in January 1824, and by March 13 the two had hammered out an agreement. It was “remarkable that this convention contained a right of search provision,” especially given that Rush had not secured a British renunciation of impressment.⁴⁶ It is also surprising that the agreement foresaw British naval cruising in American, as well as African and West Indian, coastal waters. And while this proved acceptable to the House of Representatives, the Senate removed the provision, along with a provision allowing “the capture of citizens of either nations [sic] sailing in a vessel of a third country.” Due to these excisions, Parliament would, in the end, refuse to ratify the convention. The British, for their part, “viewed a convention that did not allow their navy to search suspect vessels on the North or South American coasts as unworkable.” In this they had a point.⁴⁷

By this time, Adams had begun to sour on an agreement for which he had little love in the first place, and which had been forced upon him by Congress. In May he spoke with Congressman Mercer, who told him that it was “apparent and known to every one” that legislative opposition to the slave trade convention “was merely personal, pointed against [Adams] with reference to the Presidential election, and but for that would not have existed.” It was, of course, an election year, and Adams, as the likely successor to Monroe, was now under fire from political opponents. He needed little convincing, then, that the debate over the suppression of the trade had now taken on a domestic political character that, in fact, determined the direction of the debate. The secretary of state was convinced that the “only object” of the “profligate opposition” to the convention in the Senate “was to use it as a weapon to raise a popular clamor against me.”⁴⁸ Partisans of Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford planned on using this convention to leverage their man into position. Additionally, as Adams was aware, “some of the Southern Senators had taken a panic at the late speeches in the British Parliament looking to the abolition of slavery, and were exceedingly adverse to forming any concert with the British Government whatever in reference to the subject of slavery.” The Senate debate thus came to revolve around the question of whether there should be a time limit on the convention, or whether one of the contracting parties should be able to annul the agreement “by giving notice of days or months.” This sort of agreement would be “pernicious,” however. As Adams noted, “It would defeat the joint attempt to influence other nations to make the slave-trade piracy. For how absurd that we should try to prevail upon all other nations to declare it piracy, when they might retort upon us that we have shrunk from our own obligations, and made it a piracy for a term of years, reserving ourselves the right of appealing our own law!”⁴⁹ Domestic politics and fear of abolitionism thus helped derail a policy that might have aided in the suppression of the trade, at exactly the time when “American complicity in that trade was rising to a scandalous level.” The United States had, for a short time, flirted with withdrawing in a significant way from its unilateralist policy toward the trade. It had done so at the impetus of Congress, acting upon the Monroe administration, which had advanced the initial proposal for the convention to London. The failure of the slave trade convention was, however, “decisive of the relations of the two countries on the question of the slave trade.” The United States now “retired into the isolation from which it had temporarily emerged,” with the result that “Great Britain was compelled to proceed with its system of alliances against the slave trade without the cooperation of the most important of the maritime powers, and the handicap was disastrous to her efforts.”⁵⁰

Asked at one point by Stratford Canning if he could imagine a worse evil than the slave trade, Adams responded, “Yes: admitting the right of search by foreign officers of our vessels upon the seas in time of peace; for that would be making slaves of ourselves.”⁵¹ Monroe’s administration had successfully avoided any commitments that would lead to this figurative type of “slavery.” But, in the process, they had assured that many more Africans would be subjected to slavery of a much more literal kind.

The Colonization of Freed Slaves

The question of what to do about the traffic in slaves across the Atlantic tested the limits of America’s willingness to become involved in international connections and cooperation. So, too, would the issue of what to do with those slaves who were already in the United States. One of the persistent themes in America’s exterior policy well into the Civil War was that of colonization of freed slaves. From early on in the history of the republic, the question of what to do with manumitted African Americans posed a conundrum for those who wished to see an end to slavery. Many Americans would, over the course of several generations, come to conclude that Blacks should be free, but that they should be so somewhere else. Colonization thus became a leitmotif for those so inclined, despite the fact that it was unclear precisely how to send so many human beings abroad and, even if the logistics could be worked out, where to send them.

Attempts to work out these problems brought successive administrations into contact with the world in new ways. But in this case, what stands out is the limits of the US government’s willingness to engage in a diplomacy that would make extensive colonization a reality. Slavery pulled the United States into the international sphere in many ways. In this instance, however, Washington sought to keep commitments and involvement limited. American policymakers were, furthermore, largely successful in doing so. Yet their admittedly limited efforts on behalf of colonization of Black Americans resulted in some of the first US involvement in sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, as a result of this involvement, Washington would once again face potential conflict with London, this time over a matter that the British viewed as a vital imperial interest.

Searching for a Cure

The roots of colonization ran deep. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” written in 1781–82, Thomas Jefferson discussed a scheme he had proposed for the manumission of the state’s slaves. As part of the plan, freed slaves would “be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper.” According to Jefferson, there was ample reason to assume that the two races could not live side by side in freedom. Indeed, any experiment in cohabitation of the races in freedom was likely to result in genocide: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” It was better, in his estimation, to deport Blacks when they reached their majority to some faraway place and “declare them a free and independant [sic] people.” It is important to note that Jefferson’s vision for colonization implied a diplomatic responsibility, since the American government was to “extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength.”⁵² This last proposal, at least, went further than American policymakers proved willing to go.

Jefferson was hardly alone in his enthusiasm for colonization at this time. In 1790 his fellow Virginian, Fernando Fairfax, likewise called for the deportation of freed African Americans “to a distance from this country.” Fairfax in fact proposed that Congress establish a colony in Africa, to which freedmen from all states could be sent. Africa had the dual advantages of being the “native climate” for Blacks, as well as being very far away from America. Christianity and commerce would both be the beneficiaries: American Blacks could bring the Gospel to Africa, while (white) Americans would gain from trade with a tropical colony.⁵³ Just two years earlier, James Madison had advocated for an American colony in Africa, also with the goal of sending freed slaves abroad.⁵⁴ Clearly, the idea that colonization could provide a solution to the problem of slavery, and especially of manumission, had garnered much support among some of the most elite of southerners by the late 1780s. Colonization seemed to offer a way out of what would otherwise be an insoluble dilemma; by means of it, the new republic could be rid of both slavery and the free Blacks that an end to that institution would necessarily produce. The revolution in Haiti served to increase elite interest in finding a way of removing Blacks—especially freedmen—to a place far from the United States.⁵⁵ The ideas that Jefferson, Fairfax, Madison, and others advocated were, however, just that—ideas. There was as yet no concrete plan for how to achieve such a monumental objective as the removal of roughly nine hundred thousand people to distant shores. Nor was there any organization—public or private—that could engage in this work, however it was to be accomplished.

The founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816 gave a new impetus to the colonization movement. In 1815, with the end of the War of 1812, “the colonization issue burst forth once again.”⁵⁶ Additionally, the founding of Sierra Leone—a crown colony from 1808 onward—as a refuge for London’s “Black poor” had given added impetus to the idea of colonization in Africa. The fact that this British colony was not open to American merchants only heightened the interest in an American establishment on the west coast of Africa.⁵⁷ In addition to being an outlet for poor Blacks from Britain and a trade station for that nation, Sierra Leone gave the British government, after 1807, a place to take “recaptured” Africans taken from slavers.⁵⁸ This last point was quite significant: as the United States entered the fight against the slave trade in the Atlantic, the question of what to do with recaptured slaves would give Washington a concrete reason to become involved in sub-Saharan Africa. It would thus give the fledgling ACS an opportunity to influence the foreign policy of the American government.

Influential advocates of colonization came together in December 1820 to give form to the new ACS. Among their numbers were such luminaries as Henry Clay, Francis Scott Key, and John Randolph of Roanoke. The conferees chose Bushrod Washington, a Supreme Court associate justice and nephew of George Washington, as president of the society. From the beginning, ACS leaders agreed that the success of their enterprise would require the support of the federal government. Two weeks after the December meeting, Randolph was already introducing a resolution in the House, calling for governmental financial assistance. The appeal was rejected by the House Committee on the Suppression of the Slave Trade.⁵⁹ Yet members of the society were hardly discouraged by this early rebuff. Over the course of the coming years, they would indefatigably lobby Congress and successive administrations to aid their cause.

President James Monroe, himself an advocate for colonization, soon appeared to rally to the cause of governmental aid to the society’s efforts. A founding member of the ACS, Charles Fenton Mercer of Virginia, introduced a bill in the House that became the Slave Trade Act of 1819. Officially titled An Act in Addition to the Acts Prohibiting the Slave Trade, it became law on March 3. As a result of the Slave Trade Act, the president was “authorized to make such regulations and arrangements as he may deem expedient for the safe keeping, support, and removal beyond the limits of the United States, of all such Negroes, mulattoes, or persons of color, as may be so delivered and brought within their jurisdiction.”⁶⁰ The act thus addressed a lacuna in American anti-slave-trade law: it required American naval forces to seize slave cargoes but did not clearly specify where those interdicted slaves were to be taken.

Precisely what the act actually allowed the president to do in relation to this problem was, however, not spelled out, allowing for a variety of interpretations. ACS leaders expressed the conviction that Monroe was now authorized to purchase land in Africa for the resettlement of freed slaves. In their zeal, they “badgered” Attorney General William Wirt in an attempt to gain an official interpretation of the law favorable to their plans for establishing an African colony.⁶¹ But Wirt, a Marylander and a “strict constructionist,” was less than convinced. Nor was the rest of Monroe’s cabinet swayed. Adams was particularly opposed to an interpretation of the law, and indeed the Constitution, that would allow the federal government to establish a colony in Africa. On March 12 the secretary told Monroe that he “thought it impossible that Congress should have had any purchase of territory in contemplation of” the March 3 act. Adams believed that the ACS plan “obviously imports the engrafting of a colonial establishment upon the Constitution of the United States, and thereby an accession of power to the National Government transcending all its other powers.” Yet it is clear that Monroe was earnestly seeking a way to interpret the law more flexibly, given his interest in colonization as a means of bringing about manumission of slaves. “The important object now,” he told Adams, “was to remove these free blacks, and to provide a place to which the emancipated slaves might go: the legal obstacles to emancipation might then be withdrawn, and the black population in time be drawn off entirely from Virginia.”⁶² He therefore called a meeting of the cabinet to advise him on the matter.

Later that day, Adams met with a delegation from the ACS. He was treated to a lecture on the acquisition of Louisiana and settlement in the Oregon Territory, which, he was told, “placed beyond all question the right of acquiring territory as existing in the Government of the United States.” The secretary responded “with all possible civility” that “the late Slave-Trade Act had no reference to the settlement of a colony.” The purchase of Louisiana and the establishment of a settlement on the Columbia River were in no way precedents for the establishment of a colony in Africa, being as they were “in territory contiguous to and continuous with our own.” These examples did not justify “the purchase of countries beyond the seas, or the establishment of a colonial system of government subordinate to and dependent upon that of the United States.” The delegation left understanding, said Adams, “that they will have no aid from me.”⁶³

At the March 16 cabinet meeting, the secretary of state’s interpretation of the act prevailed. Wirt, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, and Secretary of the Navy Smith Thompson all concluded that the March 3 act authorized no colonial ventures in Africa. Monroe “accepted the decision, telling the Colonization Society that he was powerless to aid it.”⁶⁴ The attorney general followed up in October with an initial opinion that advanced a very narrow interpretation of the 1819 act. According to Wirt, no portion of the monies appropriated by Congress for execution of the act could be used to purchase land for a settlement; to transport freedmen to Africa; to purchase goods for a settlement; or to pay an agent for the colony. If Congress had intended for the US government to cooperate with the ACS in its efforts, Wirt concluded, then the act was “altogether inadequate.”⁶⁵ It was clear that the role of the federal government in this matter would remain limited, despite the presence in the White House of a strong supporter of ACS goals who was himself disposed to give a “liberal interpretation” of the act.⁶⁶

Still, even the limits that the executive placed on itself were in flux at this time. Treasury Secretary William Crawford—Adams’s cabinet rival in this and other matters—sought to loosen the administration’s interpretation of the act, and under “Crawford’s hammering, Wirt grudgingly altered his opinion,” bringing it more in line with the desires of the president. The federal government still could not establish a colony. But it now could take steps to help settle and support rescued Africans in a “station” that, in the near future, would be established privately by the society. Included in Wirt’s new opinion was the authority to establish an agency to assist in the settlement of the freed slaves.⁶⁷

Despite Wirt’s desire for delay until Congress should clarify its intention, Monroe moved forward on the basis of this second reading of the March 3 act. On December 17, 1819, the president sent a special message to Congress addressing his administration’s interpretation of the act. According to this interpretation, Congress had “enjoined on the Executive to cause all negroes, mulattoes, or persons of color, who may be taken under the act, to be removed to Africa,” and only to Africa. The president, furthermore, was “authorized to appoint one or more agents, residing there, to receive such persons.” The administration interpreted Congress as saying that the executive should see to it that shelter and food were provided for the newly freed Africans: “Should they be landed without such provision having been previously made, they might perish.” Nor could it have been “the intention of the law to preclude” the appointment of an agent or agents competent to see to these vital provisions. Monroe would thus appoint and send to the coast of Africa two salaried agents for this purpose. But, perhaps as a sop to Adams, the agents would be given “an express injunction to exercise no power founded on the principle of colonization, or other power than that of performing the benevolent offices above recited, by the permission and sanction of the existing Government under which they may establish themselves.” Because Congress “took no action” after having received Monroe’s message, the president’s interpretation of the act became the basis for future administrations’ policies toward what would become Liberia.⁶⁸

On the recommendation of the ACS, the Reverend Samuel Bacon was commissioned as US agent in Africa on January 8, 1820. Additionally, Dr. Samuel A. Crozer was chosen as both the agent of the ACS and as the government’s physician for the expedition to Africa.⁶⁹ Crozer’s double role indicated early that distinctions between the functions of the government and of the society on the African coast were not to be as clearly drawn as Monroe had seemed to imply, nor as Adams must have wished. The navy secretary, nevertheless, gave strict instructions to Bacon on this matter. Thompson wrote the new agent, “It is to be distinctly understood that you are not to connect your Agency with the views or plans of the Colonization Society, with whom, under law, the Government of the United States has no concern. You are not to exercise any power or authority founded on the principles of colonization, but to confine yourself to that of performing the benevolent intentions of the Act of Congress of the 3rd of March 1819, which will govern you in all other respects.”⁷⁰ Thus, Bacon’s official instructions provided for a distinction that, in practice, would be exceedingly difficult to maintain. They also warned against acting in any way as colonialists in what certainly looked like a colony. The administration’s goal was to make clear that the colony in Africa was not an American colony, but rather a private colony established and run by a private organization, the ACS. Yet the “entire mission was under the sponsorship of the United States government and under the command of Federal Agents.”⁷¹ If nice distinctions in responsibility were this difficult to discern when the expedition departed, they became even more so on the ground in Africa.

Early Efforts at Settlement

The first expedition ended in unmitigated disaster, with the agents and numerous colonists dying in rapid succession from tropical disease. This left them just enough time to come into conflict with British authorities at Sierra Leone. The agents and colonists arrived first at the British colony, before proceeding to their geographical objective: Sherbro Island down the coast. In February the agents met with the governor of Sierra Leone, Charles McCarthy, hoping to receive aid including small craft for transit to Sherbro. McCarthy was clearly concerned about the prospect of an American-sponsored colony being established close to Great Britain’s. “We could perceive,” Bacon wrote Thompson, “that a great excitement had been produced by our arrival,” adding that “had not a fair and clear discrimination been made between the acts of the Colonization Society and those of the Government … we should have been turned aside from this delightful part of the country to seek an asylum in the midst of an active slave trade between the Gallinas and Cape Coast. Again, had we come and settled here without first visiting Sierra Leone, we should have been disturbed according to all human probability.”⁷² In fact, despite Bacon’s interpretation of the situation, it is likely that McCarthy was unimpressed by the distinction the Americans made between the purview of the ACS and that of the federal government agents.⁷³ The agents from the New World were now encountering the international problems that arose from European colonial rivalry on the west coast of the African continent. The British had an interest in maintaining an exclusive trade with Sierra Leone, and together with the desire to exert political leverage in West Africa, they could not have looked without suspicion at an American establishment in their backyard. The Americans could thus expect only minimal help from the uneasy officials at Freetown. The British might have been less concerned had they foreseen the futility of the initial American attempt at colonization. Indeed, “neither the British nor the Americans had learned much from the disastrous mistakes of New World colonization.” They had once again chosen unsuitable, “unhealthful” sites for settlement; they had once again failed to take the natives of the place, and their cultures, into consideration.⁷⁴ The results were regrettable to the sponsors of the colony, and lethal to the expedition.

The calamity of the first attempt at settlement did not stop the ACS or the administration from trying again. In November 1820 Jonathan B. Winn and Ephraim Bacon (Samuel’s brother) were chosen as the new government agents. The ACS sent the Reverend Joseph R. Andrus, with Christian Wiltberger as assistant agent.⁷⁵ The navy secretary made clear, in his instructions to Winn, that “the Africans who may be captured & landed at Sherbro or elsewhere ought not to be supported at the expense of the United States longer than can be avoided,” a term that Secretary Thompson estimated to be less than one year. If Winn found the recaptured Africans were becoming “troublesome and insubordinate,” he was to communicate “with the European Agents at Sierra Leone, Gambia, or other places on the Coast of Africa, who may be duly authorized to cooperate in similar arrangements.” Above all, Winn was to operate with “rigid economy in fulfilling the duties enjoined.”⁷⁶ The administration clearly wanted to keep its support of the Africans limited, both in duration and expense.

Thompson’s presumption that Winn’s European counterparts would be willing to aid the American colony in the event that his charges became refractory again reveals a failure to understand the interests and policies of the European colonial empires. In his report to Thompson on April 19, 1821, Winn indicated that relations with the British were not ideal. The American and ACS agents had recently met with the acting governor of Sierra Leone, Alexander Grant, and other high officials from the colony’s administration. Though friendly toward the Americans, “they told us that they considered they were in duty bound frankly to state that the establishment of an American settlement so contiguous to theirs at Sherbro, would be considered as clashing with the feelings, interests, etc. of the people of their Colony.” The Britons were quite clear on the fact that they did not want to see the American colony become contiguous with their own, and advocated for more suitable and healthful sites down the coast.⁷⁷ American government agents could continue to insist that the settlement that they were founding was not a colony of the US government. The British would, however, continue to act as if it were.

Once again, there appeared to be little for the Europeans to worry about. Disease took its toll on the second expedition as it had on the first. Bacon left the coast in mid-June, along with his wife, for “health reasons.” In July the fever took the life of Andrus and, the following month, Winn and his wife. With the news of Crozer’s death, the government had sent a new physician, Dr. Eli Ayers, to Africa. Ayres was also appointed as agent for the ACS, thus mingling responsibility to official Washington with that to a private body.⁷⁸ Ayres arrived in Sierra Leone on November 21, and proceeded to Fourah Bay, where the American expedition was temporarily located. He then “took over control of the Settlement,” moving it to the apparently more salubrious Cape Mesurado and promulgating a code for the punishment of mutiny, insubordination, and the like.⁷⁹ The colony now took the name of Liberia, and the first permanent settlement, Monrovia, was named in honor of the president who had sponsored the enterprise.

Monroe may well have felt honored by the gesture. But the connection of the federal government to the colony remained strictly limited. In fact, the US government “at all times refused to take any responsibility in regard to the Settlement.”⁸⁰ American government officials would continue to seek governmental aid for the colony, especially in times of significant need.⁸¹ Yet Monroe’s administration, and those that followed it, refused to take on significant political responsibility for the colony that they helped to sustain. Lawrence C. Howard thus overstates the case when he asserts that the period from 1822 to 1828 “is marked by the steady assumption of responsibilities for the operation of the colony by the United States government.”⁸² What is striking in terms of US foreign relations is the refusal of successive American administrations to treat Liberia as a full-fledged colony of the United States. The issue has been blurred by the extent to which the federal government acted in partnership with the ACS in helping to establish the colony, and then in assisting in its survival and growth. David F. Ericson notes that the ACS “may have been a private organization, but its African colonial enterprise was not a private project.” Indeed, he observes, the “public-private partnership established to pursue the project was not only one of the first of its kind in the history of the American state; it was the longest lasting and most well-funded partnership during the 1791–1861 period.”⁸³

Still, the partnership was limited. This was particularly so in the realm of international politics. Washington never viewed developments in Liberia as vital to the security of the nation, as it did with regard to, say, Haiti, and would in the future with regard to Cuba. Significantly, the US government “did not acquire sovereignty over Liberia, either under derivative title or by occupation, or by operation of law. On the contrary, the United States always disclaimed such rights, and refused to incorporate Liberia as a colony or to assume a legal protectorate over that country.” The settlers and the ACS would have “hailed with joy” an American decision to extend a formal protectorate over the new colony, but this was not offered. Above all, Washington “remained obdurate in its refusal to undertake any political commitments in this foreign field.” Domestically, Americans remained divided on the matter of the connection between colonization and abolition, and the federal government did not want to raise this issue too specifically by taking on responsibility for a colony of freedmen. In the field of foreign relations, the US government was unwilling to risk “complications” with the European powers, which increasingly defined their African colonies as vital in terms of high politics.⁸⁴ The extent of the American government’s partnership with Liberia was to be bound by these considerations.

Politics Intrude and Gurley Arrives

As has been noted, domestic political considerations played a significant role in determining the attitude of the federal government toward the colonization project. Nicholas P. Wood sees in the Missouri crisis of 1819–20 a watershed for the ACS, and thus for federal sponsorship of the society’s project. The conflict over the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave state “destroyed the cross-sectional trust essential for a federal colonization program.” As a result of the crisis, “cross-sectional support for the ACS in Congress collapsed. During the rest of the antebellum period, colonizationists were unable to mobilize a congressional majority in favor of greater federal support.”⁸⁵ This development was potentially disastrous for a movement that was predicated on garnering financial aid from the federal government.

The ACS found itself in a difficult position. At its board meeting in February 1824, General Robert Goodloe Harper acknowledged this difficulty, saying that the choice was between abandoning Liberia or else appealing to the federal government for relief aid. At this point, “There was frank admission by the Society of its inability to support the colony. The fact was that this condition had existed from the beginning although the Society had permitted the allusion [sic] to exist that the settlement had been launched under their efforts. Actually, the Society had never been in a financial position to handle the expenses of the settlement.”⁸⁶ Nor, by 1824, were things going well on the ground in Africa. In April, as ailing US government agent Jehudi Ashmun was leaving to recuperate at Cape Verde, colonists robbed him of his money and belongings while he lay on a stretcher.⁸⁷ The society was losing control of its colony, and desperately needed both financial assistance and better administration.

The Monroe administration intervened, sending a warship to Cape Mesurado to help quell the rebellion. At the head of the expedition Monroe placed Ralph R. Gurley, who was delegated by the ACS to restore the society’s control over the fractious colony. Together with Ashmun, Gurley drafted a new constitution for the colony and began the practice of allowing colonists to hold offices within the Liberian administration. Gurley’s intervention helped to save the experiment, and it also helped the ACS regain control of Liberia. In June 1825 he was rewarded with appointment as the society’s secretary.⁸⁸ Gurley proved gifted at fundraising, and helped restore the society to some semblance of fiscal stability. During this period, Secretary of the Navy Samuel L. Southard approved aid to the colony—with the obligatory adjuration to be frugal.⁸⁹

There can be little question that the colonial experiment in Liberia would have failed during the critical years of 1823–24 were it not for timely intervention of the US government. Federal aid, though quite limited, was vital to the colony. It was, therefore, a cause for concern for the ACS and its allies when Andrew Jackson was inaugurated president in 1829. One of the most prominent advocates for colonization had long been Jackson’s nemesis, Henry Clay, a founding member of the ACS. Legitimately committed to the cause, Clay had also sought to use colonization to his political advantage. Thus, as the election of 1828 approached, Jackson supporters began to view the ACS as a “political engine” in the ambitious Kentuckian’s machine. In Jackson’s Tennessee, Clay was, it was said, “considered … to be its leader and to be making use of it for political purposes—for gaining popularity in the North.”⁹⁰ Colonizationists might well anticipate that the much-needed aid from the federal government could be curtailed, or perhaps even eliminated, once Jackson took office.

In fact, Jackson adopted a less generous approach to Liberia than had his predecessors. An audit by the Department of the Treasury in 1830 had revealed the high cost to the government of the settlement when compared with the number of Blacks of any type actually settled in Liberia. It also advocated a much narrower reading of the March 3, 1819, act than had previously prevailed. Auditor Amos Kendall opined,

It would seem that the terms of the Act were hardly sufficient to authorize the establishment of a colony, owing allegiance to the United States, and entitled to protection, if ever Congress itself possesses a right to authorize such an establishment. In the simple grant of power to an agent to receive captured negroes, it requires broad construction to find a grant of authority to colonize them, to build houses for them, to furnish them with farming utensils, to pay instructors to teach them, to purchase ships for their convenience, to build forts for their protection, to supply them with arms and munitions of war, to enlist troops to guard them, or to employ the Army or Navy in their defense.

The act, he continued, “which seems intended merely to facilitate the return of liberated Africans to their own countries and families, was, by construction, made to authorize the appropriation of the power and means of the Government to their civilization, and to their location and protection in a new community.”⁹¹ Kendall, with his report, indicted the policies of previous administrations: the actions taken in pursuit of colonization in Africa, limited as they were, had in, in his assessment, no sanction in the law which supposedly had authorized them.

In his own report to Congress of December of that year, Secretary of the Navy John Branch wielded Kendall’s report to assure that “understanding the law in the limited acceptation represented …, it will in the future be executed accordingly, and every effort made by the Department to confine the application of this fund within the pale of its provisions.”⁹² To be sure, “further appropriations for the Agency were drastically limited.” Jackson did not take the radical steps of ending the agency or ceasing the navy’s protection of the colony.⁹³ He did, however, manage to frustrate attempts by Clay to gain additional funding for colonization efforts.⁹⁴ The ACS seemed to be practically moribund by 1830: in October 1829 Francis Scott Key had told an assembly of sympathetic Philadelphians that the ACS “had become involved in pecuniary embarrassments, which prevented any further active operations, and rendered it impossible to send out anymore emigrants to Africa for some time.”⁹⁵

By the end of the 1830s the government in Washington had set itself a pair of connected policy goals with regard to slavery: ending the slave trade and ridding the country of freed slaves. Yet in neither case was it willing to expend the resources necessary to achieve its aims. Even more significantly, it proved unwilling to foster the sorts of international connections that would be necessary to accomplish them. Ending the trade could come only with an agreement to cooperate with Britain in its suppression, which necessarily entailed a mutual right of search. This was far more than any American administration was willing to concede. Thus, the slave trade would continue. It was, furthermore, becoming increasingly obvious that colonization efforts would fail if left to private action alone. If colonization were to continue as a viable option, some other means of accomplishing it would have to be found. Washington could adopt external policy with regard to slavery. Without a commitment to engage more actively in the international relations of the Atlantic world, however, it could not bring that policy to fruition.

The Negro Seamen Acts

Yet another difficulty that arose to complicate the Anglo-American relationship was also intimately connected with American slavery. This time, however, the upshot for the respective governments was prolonged embarrassment rather than punctuated crisis. The initial provocation for this misadventure was the passage by the South Carolina legislature in December 1822 of the first Negro Seamen Act. Eventually, all southern states along the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico, from North Carolina to Texas, would enact some version of the act aimed at preventing the entry of free Blacks into their respective states. As a consequence of the strict enforcement of these acts, Afro-British sailors found themselves imprisoned for violation of state laws for the “crime” of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; and, of course, of having the wrong skin color.⁹⁶ Successive British governments attempted to gain the repeal of the laws. At the very least, they wished to see them amended so as not to apply to British subjects. Yet one US administration after another proved powerless to affect the situation. In frustration, London would turn to lobbying the governments of the southern states themselves in order to gain satisfaction. The result was one of the more peculiar episodes in the history of Anglo-American relations.

Unsurprisingly, South Carolina led the charge in banning the ingress of free Blacks. The immediate cause of the legislation was the discovery and brutal suppression of a planned slave rebellion, the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy, in early summer 1822. But these events came against the background of a long history of slave unrest in the colony, dating back well before the bloody Stono Rebellion of 1739. The fact that Blacks had made up a majority of the population in colonial South Carolina had exacerbated the situation. Nor were efforts at banning the influx of Blacks new; in 1787, the legislature had forbidden the importing of slaves into the state for sale. Granted, this prohibition probably resulted more from reasons of economics than racial fears: deeply in arrears after the Revolutionary War, the state could “ill afford the increased debt being piled up by importing slaves.”⁹⁷ But fear soon became the chief motivator of whites in the state. The revolution in what would become Haiti provoked great alarm in South Carolina, along with the concomitant conviction that slave unrest in the state was a result of the “example of San Domingo.” The dread of free Blacks bringing the “contagion” of slave unrest into the state led to the passage in 1794 of the first ban on their entry into South Carolina.⁹⁸ Against this background the Vesey rebellion occasioned the most stringent ban yet on free Blacks.

It was this attempt to limit the spread of the emancipation contagion to the state’s slave population that occasioned prolonged difficulties in Anglo-American relations that persisted until the outbreak of the American Civil War. Although it is an overstatement to say that the difficulties “escalated into a diplomatic battle,” the incident certainly did nothing to improve the already vexing relations between the British and US governments.⁹⁹ That officials in Washington were not responsible for the provocation was of little solace to either side. The episode in fact provided evidence that America’s federal system of government “has within it the possibilities of embarrassment in the conduct of relations between the United States and other members of the family of nations.”¹⁰⁰ This time, slavery was the culprit.

On December 21, 1822, the South Carolina legislature passed the most stringent of bans on free persons of color entering the state. The new law provided that

if any vessel shall come into any port or harbor of this State, from any other State or foreign port, having on board any free Negroes or persons of color … such free Negroes or persons of color shall be liable to be seized and confined in jail until said vessel shall clear out and depart from this State; and that when said vessel is ready to sail, the captain of said vessel shall be bound to carry away the said Negro or free person of color, and to pay the expenses of his detention.

Should the shipmaster fail to do so, furthermore, the “free Negroes or persons of color shall be deemed and taken as absolute slaves, and sold in conformity to the provisions of the Act.”¹⁰¹

This was strong stuff, and resulted in the boarding of both American and foreign ships to remove persons of color. It did not take long for the British government to protest the ill treatment of its nationals and the insult to its flag. In mid-February 1823 the British foreign secretary, Stratford Canning, sent a “brief but vigorously worded note” to Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Canning declaimed against the “most grievous and extraordinary” treatment of Britons in accordance with the Negro Seamen Act and called on the federal government “to prevent the recurrence of any such outrage in the future.”¹⁰² Adams did not see fit to respond to his British counterpart until mid-June. But, though dilatory, he sought to be reassuring. He replied that Washington had already taken steps that Adams thought would ameliorate the situation and prevent such offenses in the future.¹⁰³

For a time, in any event, the act was not strictly enforced. But soon a group of notables, organized as the South Carolina Association, began to press Charleston officials to apply the law stringently. Their particular fear was that contact between free Black sailors and slaves would allow “for introducing among our slaves, the moral contagion of their pernicious principles and opinions.” To allow this would be “to invite new attempts at insurrection.”¹⁰⁴ Advocates of both the Negro Seamen Acts and their diligent enforcement stressed this theme of contagion: certain dangerous ideas were contagious, and free Blacks were vectors for contamination. In fact, the “rhetorical power of ‘contagion’ was immense,” suggesting to some “that governmental officials ought to be much more diligent in sifting through the messages being introduced from abroad.”¹⁰⁵

So successful were these efforts to bolster enforcement that even the ruling of Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, sitting in circuit, that the act violated the Anglo-American Convention of 1815 was insufficient to gain redress for the British; South Carolina officials simply ignored the ruling.¹⁰⁶ Now the government in London found itself faced with imprisoned nationals convicted “under the supposedly defunct state law.”¹⁰⁷ This all seemed very much at variance with what Adams had promised the British. The British chargé thus asked the secretary of state to take “immediate measures … for securing British subjects in future [sic] a full and effectual protection against acts so unjustifiable, and so totally at variance with the Convention of 1815.” Adams responded this time with a strong indication that Washington would, if necessary, meet South Carolinian obstructionism “with the arms of authority.”¹⁰⁸

Such “arms” never materialized, however. Decades of off-and-on, fruitless diplomacy failed to alter the situation in the South. Faced with the prospect of further slave rebellions brought on by—it was assumed—the effects of the mingling of free Blacks with slaves, the southern states proved largely unwilling to budge.¹⁰⁹ Nor were successive denizens of the White House eager to provoke a sectional crisis over the rights of foreign Blacks or the sanctity of the British flag.

Having failed to move Washington to act effectively, “the authorities of the Foreign Office became convinced that there was no hope of help from the Federal government.” London for a time would have to be satisfied to warn its subjects of color “of the inconveniences they would suffer if they should violate the laws.”¹¹⁰ The British government chose, however, to make one last effort, and this time it tried going to the source of the laws themselves. In 1850 the British minister in Washington, Sir Henry Bulwer, proposed to the Foreign Office that an attempt should be made by the various British consuls to urge the legislatures of southern states to modify the acts. The consuls would thus serve as lobbyists seeking to persuade state officials to alter the laws of their respective states.¹¹¹ Yet even as the crescendo of “states’ rights” was building in southern capitals in the 1850s, the conviction generally prevailed that foreign relations was the exclusive purview of the federal government. A Richmond newspaper categorically declared in early 1851 that South Carolina could have “no political existence whatever in the eyes of foreign nations.” In a similar vein, a Savannah paper asserted that, if a state could negotiate with a foreign capital on the matter of the Seamen Acts, then it could negotiate with them on any matter. The federal government would thus become “a nullity, and the Confederacy resolve itself into thirty-one separate and distinct sovereignties, each possessing the right to treat with other Powers, form alliances, and declare war.”¹¹² It was a ridiculous prospect. But the only alternative was continued frustration for Britain. Michael Schoeppner’s assessment of legal cases generated by the Seamen Acts can likewise serve as a general coda to Anglo-American diplomacy on this issue: “In the end, we see that the repeated protests of the Seamen Acts’ insult to British sovereignty never affected the administration of the laws. Claims of British sovereignty and Afro-British rights had no impact. Absent any military or economic threats, these legal claims were completely ineffectual.”¹¹³

The entire episode, in fact, underlines the complexity of international relations for a slaveholding republic. The federal government would gladly have seen the affair of Britain’s Black sailors swept away—or at least under the rug. But Washington could not realize this policy goal, despite the patent desire by multiple administrations to reduce Anglo-American tensions and the priority that they put on doing so. Racial slavery was intrinsically interwoven with issues of American constitutional federalism, domestic politics, transatlantic relations, economics, and law. Slavery was not the tapestry itself. But it was a vivid thread running through the whole of America’s foreign relations. And like Irish poet Louis MacNeice’s “woven figure,” it could not undo its thread.

Escaped Slaves and Anglo-American Relations

There was certainly no shortage of slavery-related issues to complicate relations between the two English-speaking powers. One of the nettlesome controversies concerned the escape of American slaves to the Bahamas, and thus to freedom. The British government had ended slavery on the islands on the first day of August 1834.¹¹⁴ In practice, this meant that a slave who managed to make land in the Bahamas was forever free under British law. Remarkably, an unknown number of American slaves risked the journey, which was a testament to the compelling appeal of freedom and the ingenuity of slave resistance. Yet what strikes one today as grounds for admiration was, to American slaveholders, a cause for great anxiety: their “property” was stealing itself away across the so-called Saltwater Railroad. If they could not get these slaves back, then they at least demanded compensation from Britain for their loss. The result was a “little-known but disruptive foreign policy dispute between the United States and Britain.”¹¹⁵ As with other Anglo-American disputes precipitated by slavery, this one was the cause of much frustration and recrimination, and, in the end, produced results not entirely satisfactory to the Americans.

Ideally for the American slaveholders, the British would return any slaves who made land in the Bahamas. But there was no British law against slaves running away. As a result, London would not return slaves who reached British territories. In fact, according to Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen, it legally could not do so. Once slaves reached the Bahamas, they “at once became free” and the government had “no legal power or authority to restore them to a state of slavery.”¹¹⁶ Given that escaped slaves thus had a safe haven a short distance from Florida, it is no surprise that the “lure of the Bahamas … represented a persistent foreign policy issue for proslavery Americans.”¹¹⁷ The issue led to something of an uproar with the Creole Affair. While it is an overstatement to declare, as does Arthur T. Downey’s study of the episode, that the affair “led the U.S. and Great Britain to the brink of war,” it certainly introduced further complication into an already charged bilateral relationship.¹¹⁸ And though it is not nearly as famous as the earlier case of the slave uprising on the Spanish-flagged ship La Amistad, its impact on American relations with Britain were far more significant.¹¹⁹

The “affair” began on the night of November 7, 1841, as the brig Creole was sailing from Norfolk, Virginia, to New Orleans with 135 slaves aboard. Shortly after 9:00 p.m., a “portion of the slaves”—more precisely, nineteen—rose up. Led by a slave named Madison Washington, they seized control of the ship, in the process killing slaveholding passenger John Hewell, who “was employed with the officers in resisting the mutiny.” Four members of the crew, including the captain, were also wounded in the melee. The self-liberated slaves then forced the crew to sail for Nassau, Bahamas, where they arrived on November 9.¹²⁰ According to British law, all of the slaves on the ship were now free.

The cry quickly went up from the mainland that the nineteen former slaves who commandeered the brig should be returned to the United States to be tried for mutiny and murder. It was self-evident that the remaining slaves who had been on the Creole would never be returned to slavery by the British. But the ship had been involved in the legal interstate slave trade, as opposed to the illegal international trade that the Amistad had been plying (as a small part of what Michael Zeuske has labeled the “Hidden Atlantic” of the period). In consequence, “most southerners believed that the slaveholders who lost their property in Nassau were entitled to compensation from the British government.”¹²¹ It thus fell to two New England Yankees to seek redress from London.

Both Secretary of State Daniel Webster and the US minister in London, Edward Everett, gave it their best shot. There was an irony to this, since southerners—“determined to use this foreign policy appointment to further a Southern domestic agenda”—had opposed Everett’s confirmation to the Court of St. James’s.¹²² True, it went against the grain for the Boston pastor’s son to play the role of advocate for southern “property rights.” Everett, however, was no antislavery radical, as his biographer Matthew Mason demonstrates. Rather, his views on the issue harmonized “with the moderate brand of British antislavery thought.” Believing that slavery was heading toward extinction “was part of what kept Everett from agitating the issue himself.”¹²³ Southerners who feared a feeble assertion of slaveholders’ interests from the erstwhile Harvard University professor of Greek must have been pleasantly surprised by Everett’s diplomacy in London.

Following Webster’s detailed guidance, Everett addressed a lengthy note on the Creole matter to Aberdeen on March 1, 1842. In summarizing the case of the administration of President John Tyler, Everett found that the issue called “loudly for redress.” After all, the ship had been “passing from one port of The United States to another on a lawful voyage” with slaves on board who were “natives of America and belonging to American citizens.” Such persons were “recognized as property by the Constitution of The United States, in those parts of the Union in which slavery exists.” Anticipating a counterargument regarding the universal evil of slavery, the American diplomat quickly added that “this species of property, far from being unknown to the law of nations, or peculiar to The United States, exists in the colonies of all the States of Europe, who have colonies, excepting Great Britain, and has but recently been abolished in a portion of the colonial possessions of the British empire.”¹²⁴

Having established this to the satisfaction of official Washington, Everett went on to charge British colonial authorities with behavior “contrary to every principle of maritime law applicable to the case.” Given all the violations alleged, Everett was “instructed to say that his Government will deem it a clear case for indemnification and redress.” True, former prime minister Lord Palmerston had previously staked out the position that slavery “being now abolished throughout the British empire, there can be no well-founded claim for compensation in respect to slaves who, under any circumstances, may come into the British colonies, any more than there could be with respect to slaves who might be brought into the United Kingdom.” But to this seemingly conclusive statement, Everett responded that the US government did not concede “that the question depends at all on the state of the British law.” Nor could Everett admit that “the influence of local law can affect the relations of friendly Powers in any such case as this,” adding, “No alteration of the local laws of England can increase, diminish, or in any way affect the duty of her Government and its colonial Authorities in such cases, as such duty exists according to the law, the comity, and the usage of nations.”¹²⁵ Webster and Everett had put forth what can only be called a detailed and forcefully argued case for compensation.

Additionally, the Tyler administration “never called for the return of the actual mutineers.”¹²⁶ Hence Webster “was frustrated by British politicians’ apparently willful misinterpretation of the American position as asking for return of the actual people involved rather than monetary remuneration.”¹²⁷ He must have found Aberdeen’s response to Everett’s March 1 note irksome indeed. The foreign secretary replied as if the Americans had demanded a return of the freed slaves, and argued accordingly. To add insult to injury, he reminded Everett of the ringing words of the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the inalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In this case, it was British law that had “pronounced these rights to be indefeasible” and had thus “deprived Her Majesty’s Government of all discretionary power by which [the former slaves’] condition could be affected.” Having thoroughly dismantled the straw man, Aberdeen concluded that it was “impossible” to “acquiesce in the claims of Mr. Everett on the present occasion.”¹²⁸ Everett would “gamely” continue to seek reparations from London, but he would do so in vain. Meanwhile, in the United States, North-South divisions were hardening over the issue of reparations, with southerners insistent on recompense for the slaveholders financially injured by the mutiny.¹²⁹

In fact, the Creole case was soon threatening to derail the delicate negotiations between Lord Ashburton and Daniel Webster in Washington. This was yet one more cause of frustration: the issue of the Creole was never included in Ashburton’s instructions, and the Briton thought that the whole matter was best negotiated in London rather than Washington. The two men managed to save their pact, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, with a well-timed if vague guarantee from the British side. After more than a decade of controversy, the Creole Affair, along with a set of related controversies, was finally settled in 1855 by an Anglo-American claims commission that awarded payments to both sides.¹³⁰ But the ruckus over the liberation of slaves in the Bahamas had stirred domestic sectional dispute while imperiling the conclusion of a treaty that was crucial to establishing amity in Anglo-American relations. The omens were not auspicious.

Conclusion: Constrained Options

By the 1830s slavery had been the cause of multiple difficulties in Anglo-American relations and had exacerbated others. It was particularly frustrating for both sides when issues related to slavery had stymied their attempts to achieve shared policy goals (such as suppression of the transatlantic slave trade) or threatened a thaw that was in the interest of both (as had the Negro Seamen Acts). But Washington was not in a position to determine on its own America’s exterior relations. On the issue of colonization, Washington would for a time cede leadership to the states. And with regard to the slave trade, the United States would have to sacrifice its long-held policy against the right of search in order to achieve a more pressing goal in the Civil War, which was also brought on by slavery.