It is needless to go into the details of the long series of Acts of Parliament and of Congress, treaties, conventions, and naval regulations, which gradually made the outlawry of the slaver on the ocean complete.  In the humane work England took the lead, sacrificing the flourishing Liverpool slave-trade with all its allied interests; sacrificing, too, the immediate prosperity of its West Indian colonies, whose plantations were tilled exclusively with slave labor, and even paying heavy cash indemnity to Spain to secure her acquiescence.  Unhappily, the United States was as laggard as England was active.  Indeed, a curious manifestation of national pride made the American flag the slaver’s badge of immunity, for the Government stubbornly—­and properly—­refused to grant to British cruisers the right to search vessels under our flag, and as there were few or no American men-of-war cruising on the African coast, the slaver under the Stars and Stripes was virtually immune from capture.  In 1842 a treaty with Great Britain bound us to keep a considerable squadron on that coast, and thereafter there was at least some show of American hostility to the infamous traffic.

The vitality of the traffic in the face of growing international hostility is to be explained by its increasing profits.  The effect of the laws passed against it was to make slaves cheaper on the coast of Africa and dearer at the markets in America.  A slave that cost $20 would bring $500 in Georgia.  A ship carrying 500 would bring its owners $240,000, and there were plenty of men willing to risk the penalties of piracy for a share of such prodigious profits.  Moreover, the seas swarmed then with adventurous sailors—­mostly of American birth—­to whom the very fact that slaving was outlawed made it more attractive.  The years of European war had bred up among New Englanders a daring race of privateersmen—­their vocation had long been piracy in all but name, a fact which in these later days the maritime nations recognize by trying to abolish privateering by international agreement.  When the wars of the early years of the nineteenth century ended the privateersmen looked about for some seafaring enterprise which promised profit.  A few became pirates, more went into the slave-trade.  Men of this type were not merely willing to risk their lives in a criminal calling, but were quite as ready to fight for their property as to try to save it by flight.  The slavers soon began to carry heavy guns, and with desperate crews were no mean antagonists for a man-of-war.  Many of the vessels that had been built for privateers were in the trade, ready to fight a cruiser or rob a smaller slaver, as chance offered.  We read of some carrying as many as twenty guns, and in that sea classic, “Tom Cringle’s Log,” there is a story—­obviously founded on fact—­of a fight between a British sloop-of-war and a slaver that gives a vivid idea of the desperation with which the outlaws could fight.  But sometimes the odds were hopeless, and the slaver