The laws abolishing the foreign slave trade and prohibiting the introduction of African slaves (after 1807) into the United States even helped to rivet slavery more firmly therein. They more than doubled the value of a slave, and, therefore, incited slave-breeding to supply the increasing demand in the cotton States, and in time this proved so profitable that the South sought new territory whence slavery could be extended, and out of which slave States could be formed.
The "Declaration against the Slave Trade" of the world, signed by the representatives of the "Powers" at the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, and repeated at the Congress of Paris at the end of the Napoleonic wars, was potential enough to abate but not to end this most inhuman and sinful trade.(32)
Even as late as 1816, English merchants, supported by the corporations of London and Liverpool, through mercantile jealousy, and pretending to believe that the very existence of commerce on the seas and their own existence depended on the continuance of the slave trade, not only opposed the abolition of the black slave traffic, but they opposed the abolition of white slavery in Algiers.(33)
This nefarious traffic did not cease in the United States, although at the Treaty of Ghent (1815) it was declared that: "Whereas the traffic in slaves is irreconcilable with the principles of humanity and justice," and the two countries (Great Britain and the United States) therein stipulated to use their best endeavors to abolish it.
The revival of the slave trade was openly advocated by leading Southern politicians, and the illicit traffic greatly increased immediately after the admission into the Union of Texas as a State and the aggressions on Mexico for more slave territory, and especially just after the discussions over the Compromise measures of 1850 and the Nebraska Act of 1854, followed by the Dred Scott decision in 1857. It was principally carried on under the United States flag, the ships carrying it denying the right of search to foreign vessels engaged in suppressing the trade. British officials claimed in June, 1850, "that at least one half of the successful part of the slave trade was carried on under the American flag." The fitting out of slavers centred at New York city; Boston and New Orleans being good seconds. Twenty-one of twenty-two slavers taken by British cruisers in 1857-58 were from New York, Boston, and New Orleans.
"During eighteen months of the years 1859-60 eighty-five slavers are reported to have fitted out in New York harbor, and these alone transported from 30,000 to 60,000 slaves annually to America."(34)
The greed of man for gain has smothered and will ever smother the human conscience. The slave trade, under the denunciation of piracy, still exists, and will exist until African slavery ceases throughout the world. So long as there is a demand, at good prices, this wicked traffic will go on, and in the jungles of Africa there will be found stealers of human beings.
(30) Rhode's Hist. United States, vol. ii., p. 372.
(31) Official Records, etc., Navies of the War of the Rebellion, vol. i., p. 11.
(32) It stands to the eternal credit of Napoleon that on his return from Elba to Paris (1815) he decreed for France the total abolition of the slave-trade. This decree was confirmed by the Bourbon dynasty in 1818. Suppression of African Slave Trade U. S. (DuBois), p. 247.