I have also thought proper to communicate copies of Lord Aberdeen’s letter of the 20th December, 1841, to Mr. Everett, Mr. Everett’s letter of the 23d December in reply thereto, and extracts from several letters of Mr. Everett to the Secretary of State.

I can not forego the expression of my regret at the apparent purport of a part of Lord Aberdeen’s dispatch to Mr. Fox.  I had cherished the hope that all possibility of misunderstanding as to the true construction of the eighth article of the treaty lately concluded between Great Britain and the United States was precluded by the plain and well-weighed language in which it is expressed.  The desire of both Governments is to put an end as speedily as possible to the slave trade, and that desire, I need scarcely add, is as strongly and as sincerely felt by the United States as it can be by Great Britain.  Yet it must not be forgotten that the trade, though now universally reprobated, was up to a late period prosecuted by all who chose to engage in it, and there were unfortunately but very few Christian powers whose subjects were not permitted, and even encouraged, to share in the profits of what was regarded as a perfectly legitimate commerce.  It originated at a period long before the United States had become independent and was carried on within our borders in opposition to the most earnest remonstrances and expostulations of some of the colonies in which it was most actively prosecuted.  Those engaged in it were as little liable to inquiry or interruption as any others.  Its character, thus fixed by common consent and general practice, could only be changed by the positive assent of each and every nation, expressed either in the form of municipal law or conventional arrangement.  The United States led the way in efforts to suppress it.  They claimed no right to dictate to others, but they resolved, without waiting for the cooperation of other powers, to prohibit it to their own citizens and to visit its perpetration by them with condign punishment.  I may safely affirm that it never occurred to this Government that any new maritime right accrued to it from the position it had thus assumed in regard to the slave trade.  If before our laws for its suppression the flag of every nation might traverse the ocean unquestioned by our cruisers, this freedom was not, in our opinion, in the least abridged by our municipal legislation.

Any other doctrine, it is plain, would subject to an arbitrary and ever-varying system of maritime police, adopted at will by the great naval power for the time being, the trade of the world in any places or in any articles which such power might see fit to prohibit to its own subjects or citizens.  A principle of this kind could scarcely be acknowledged without subjecting commerce to the risk of constant and harassing vexations.