fore, Monroe declined the invitation.* Great Britain, however, was too deeply in earnest to be convinced, and in 1819 once more returned to the subject, once more repeated the invitation, and once more received the same firm refusal. But the United States had not been heedless of the purpose Great Britain had in view. One act already on the statute-book provided that a person detected bringing negroes into the United States should be forced to prove to the satisfaction of a court that they were not introduced contrary to law. By another, Congress had given the President full power to do three things for the suppression of the slavetrade:" He could use armed ships to seize and bring into port any vessel engaged in the slave-trade if controlled by citizens or residents of the United States. He could make such regulations and arrangements as he might think proper for keeping, supporting, and removing beyond the limits of the United States negroes, mulattoes, and persons of color brought within its bound illegally; and he could appoint some one to live on the coast of Africa and receive negroes seized on board of slavers. By a third act the slave-trade was made piracy, and any citizen of the United States who landed from any ship's company on any foreign shore and seized or decoyed or forcibly brought away any negro or mulatto with intent to make such person a slave was declared to be a pirate, and, on conviction, was to suffer death. || Acting under these laws, Monroe, during 1820 and 1821, despatched six armed vessels to Africa to patrol the coast and capture slavers. The reports brought back by the commanders of these vessels, the letters written by the agents of the Colonization Society, and the examination of the cases that came before the courts for adjudication, showed the slave-trade to be very far from languishing. More than six thousand captured Africans, it was stated, had been landed by English war ships at Sierra Leone. Not less than three hundred vessels were on the coast busily engaged in the traffic, and protected by two and even three sets of American State Papers. Foreign Relations, vol. ▼, pp. 70–74, 112, 113. Act of April 20, 1818. Act of May 15, 1820. 1821-23. SUPPRESSION OF THE SLAVE TRADE. 17 papers. The common method of proceeding was for an American or English ship to go with a cargo to Havana or to Teneriffe, make a nominal sale of ship and cargo to some Spanish house, obtain regular Spanish papers and a nominal Spanish captain, and with the real captain as supercargo or passenger sail for Africa. Once there the cargo would be delivered to a slave factor on shore, and a contract made for slaves; after which the ship would put to sea for a certain number of days, while the negroes, chained two and two, were brought down to the coast and placed in a rude shed near the beach. On the return of the vessel a signal would be made, and in an hour her hold would be packed with wretched Africans. Shocked at these things, Monroe again brought the matter before Congress, and a House committee recommended that a limited right to search American vessels on the coast of Africa be granted, and that the President be authorized to negotiate with European powers for the suppression of the slave-trade.* Nothing came of it, nor of a similar resolution and recommendation made one year later.† Another twelve months brought better fortune, and, just as the Seventeenth Congress was about to expire, a resolution requesting the President to enter on negotiations passed the House almost unanimously. + # It was then too late for the Senate to act. But, as Great Britain was once more urging the United States to join with her in a convention granting a limited right of search, Monroe took the sense of the House as a guide, and offered to negotiate with a view to making the slave-trade piracy under the law of nations. This Great Britain consented to do, and as soon as possible a convention was signed at London,^ and after much mutilation was ratified by the Senate, but never * American State Papers. Foreign Relations, vol. v, pp. 92, 93. February 9, 1821. +American State Papers, ibid., pp. 140, 141. April 12, 1822. February 28, 1823. Yeas, 181; Nays, 9. * Canning to Adams, January 29, 1823. | Adams to Canning, March 31, 1823. ▲ March 13, 1824. signed by the King. In it was a provision for a limited right of search by officers appointed by the two Governments to cruise "on the coasts of Africa, America, and the West Indies for the suppression of the slave-trade." To come to an agreement with Great Britain on any matter was quite impossible. An act of Russia had suddenly brought up for discussion the question of the ownership of Oregon. In the autumn of 1818, as Mr. J. B. Prevost, the American commissioner sent out by the President to receive the formal delivery of Astoria, was on his way home, he stopped at the port of Monterey, in California. While there he wrote a long report of his mission, described the Columbia river, the climate, soil, and physical features of Oregon, and closed his narrative with an account of an incident which he thought most serious. Until 1816 the Russians, he said, had no settlement south of fifty-five degrees. But in that year, excited very probably by the glowing descriptions of Humboldt, they had established two colonies of an important character. One was at Atooi, in the Sandwich Islands. The other was on the California coast, a few leagues from San Francisco, the northern limit of Spanish occupation. Only two days before he reached Monterey two vessels had left that town for the Russian settlement, carrying to it implements of husbandry and mechanics of every sort. So plain an intention. to acquire a site on the shore of the Pacific by a race but just emerging from savagery, and ruled by a chief who sought not to emancipate but to inthrall, ought surely, Mr. Prevost thought, to excite the serious apprehensions of the United States.* But it did not excite the apprehensions of the United States, and neither the President nor Congress cared what went on in Oregon. In December, 1820, attention was for a moment drawn to the country by a motion for a committee to inquire into the situation of the settlements on the Pacific Ocean and the expediency of occupying the mouth of the Columbia river. * J. B. Prevost to the Secretary of State, November 11, 1818. 1820. THE FUR TRADE. 19 The committee were diligent, and soon made a long report and presented a bill to authorize the occupation of the Columbia and regulate trade with the Indian tribes. The report began with a careful review of our title to the country, told of the discovery of the river; of its exploration by Lewis and Clarke; of the building of Fort Clatsop at its mouth; of the founding of Astoria; of the establishment by Astor's men of five sub-stations between the mountains and the sea; and dwelt at length on the value of the fur trade. It told of the wonderful energy displayed by the Hudson Bay and Northwest Fur Companies in their search for furs; how they carried the supplies intended for the Indians and the traders across the continent from Montreal to the Rocky Mountains, and brought back the furs by a route three thousand miles long, paddling their birch canoes through innumerable rivers, across more than sixty lakes, and carrying them over one hundred and thirty portages from a few yards to thirteen miles in length. Many of the establishments of the Northwest Company were within the limits of the United States. To bring to the people of the United States all the profits of this fur trade it was only necessary, therefore, to put a few troops on the upper waters of the Missouri, and confine the British to their own domain. If the Canadians could carry on their trade in spite of such natural obstacles, how much more easily and profitably could the citizens of the United States conduct theirs along the deep and smooth Missouri, running through a soil of boundless fertility, and separated by a portage of less than two hundred miles from another great river flowing into the Pacific! This portage was not a matter of doubt. In several places the Rocky Mountains were so smooth and open that ten men in twenty days could take a wagon loaded with furs from the navigable waters of the Missouri to those of the Columbia. All that was needed to develop Oregon was a small and permanent post at the mouth of the Columbia, and this was provided for in the bill. To the majority of Congressmen who listened to the report, Oregon and the upper waters of the Missouri seemed farther away and less accessible than Africa. That the United States could ever want a foothold on the Pacific seemed pre posterous, and, having heard the visionary report of the committee, their bill was laid on the table. There it lay when, one day in February, 1822, the Chevalier Pierre de Politica, the Russian Minister, placed a most alarming document in the hands of the Secretary of State. It was an edict of the Emperor Alexander, and set forth that the pursuits of commerce, whaling, and fishing, and, indeed, of all other industries, whether on the islands or in the ports and gulfs of the northwest coast of America from Behring Strait to fifty-one degrees, were exclusively granted to Russian subjects. Foreign vessels were therefore forbidden not only to land on the coast and islands, but even to come within one hundred Italian miles of them. So unexpected an attempt to define the boundary of the two countries aroused the President, who demanded of the Russian Minister the grounds on which it was based. Why had not the boundary been arranged by treaty? Why were vessels of the United States excluded beyond the limit to which territorial jurisdiction extended? He answered that the Russians had long maintained a settlement at Novo Archangelsk, in latitude fifty-seven, and that fifty-one degrees was about midway between Novo Archangelsk and the mouth of the Columbia. The restriction forbidding an approach to the coast was laid in order to keep out foreign adventurers who, not content with carrying on an illicit trade injurious to the interests of the Russian American Fur Company, had supplied arms and ammunition to the natives of the Russian possessions in America and incited them to revolt.* Against these doctrines Adams protested; † but Politica cut short the discussion by the statement that he had no authority to continue it.t This curt answer gave a new aspect to the matter, and Monroe, in his annual message to Congress in December, 1822, suggested that the time had come to think seriously of occupying Oregon. The House at once called up the old bill of 1821, Politica to Adams, February 28, 1822. |