"Neither James Buchanan nor James K. Polk, nor any other member of any administration from and including that of Andrew Jackson down to the Civil War, did anything that could in justice be called an effort to stop the use of the American flag for covering such atrocities." The slave-trade at that time had come to be the foulest, the rankest species of piracy, yet few there were who assailed it.
The profits of the slave-trade were simply enormous, single trips clearing as much as from $20,000 to over $40,000. These are net profits. In one case, the net profit made in six months by a small vessel amounted to $41,438.54, and she succeeded in getting only 217 living slaves over.
In 1835, a Baltimore clipper, the Napoleon, made on one cargo a net profit of over one hundred thousand dollars ; but such facts have but little to do with the object of the present work. They simply show the incentive that kept up the filthy enterprise, and made men blind to the trouble they were heaping up in this country for following generations to get out of the best way they could.
That many of the colonists long foresaw the evils that would some day come from the interbreeding of the blacks and the whites in the United States, there can be no manner of a doubt. Even as early as 1705, Massachusetts imposed a tax of £4 on each slave that came within her jurisdiction, and this was distinctly "for the Better Preventing of a spurious or mixt Issue." It was rather remarkable that the young Puritanic colonists of those days were so given to cohabiting with the captive black women and girls of a race of cannibals. They not only seemed to revel in
