The convention thus mutilated was not signed by England, who demanded as the least concession the application of the Right of Search to American waters.  Meantime the United States had invited nearly all nations to denounce the trade as piracy; and the President, the Secretary of the Navy, and a House committee had urgently favored the granting of the Right of Search.  The bad faith of Congress, however, in the matter of the Colombian treaty broke off for a time further negotiations with England.[39]

71. The Attitude of the United States and the State of the Slave-Trade. In 1824 the Right of Search was established between England and Sweden, and in 1826 Brazil promised to abolish the trade in three years.[40] In 1831 the cause was greatly advanced by the signing of a treaty between Great Britain and France, granting mutually a geographically limited Right of Search.[41] This led, in the next few years, to similar treaties with Denmark, Sardinia,[42] the Hanse towns,[43] and Naples.[44] Such measures put the trade more and more in the hands of Americans, and it began greatly to increase.  Mercer sought repeatedly in the House to have negotiations reopened with England, but without success.[45] Indeed, the chances of success were now for many years imperilled by the recurrence of deliberate search of American vessels by the British.[46] In the majority of cases the vessels proved to be slavers, and some of them fraudulently flew the American flag; nevertheless, their molestation by British cruisers created much feeling, and hindered all steps toward an understanding:  the United States was loath to have her criminal negligence in enforcing her own laws thus exposed by foreigners.  Other international questions connected with the trade also strained the relations of the two countries:  three different vessels engaged in the domestic slave-trade, driven by stress of weather, or, in the “Creole” case, captured by Negroes on board, landed slaves in British possessions; England freed them, and refused to pay for such as were landed after emancipation had been proclaimed in the West Indies.[47] The case of the slaver “L’Amistad” also raised difficulties with Spain.  This Spanish vessel, after the Negroes on board had mutinied and killed their owners, was seized by a United States vessel and brought into port for adjudication.  The court, however, freed the Negroes, on the ground that under Spanish law they were not legally slaves; and although the Senate repeatedly tried to indemnify the owners, the project did not succeed.[48]

Such proceedings well illustrate the new tendency of the pro-slavery party to neglect the enforcement of the slave-trade laws, in a frantic defence of the remotest ramparts of slave property.  Consequently, when, after the treaty of 1831, France and England joined in urging the accession of the United States to it, the British minister was at last compelled to inform Palmerston, December, 1833, that “the