Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/115

Rh of the United States, and this story and other stories of like character were sent to the Congress of the United States in House Ex. Doc. 61, 30th Congress second session, and Senate Ex. Doc. 28 of the same session.

Said Consul Wise in an official letter dated February 18, 1845:

"I beseech, I implore, the President of the United States to take a decided stand on this subject. You have no conception of the bold effrontery and the flagrant outrages of the African slave-trade, and of the shameless manner in which its worst crimes are licensed here. And every patriot in our land would blush for our country did he know and see, as I do, how our own citizens sail and sell our flag to the uses and abuses of that accursed traffic. We are a ‘by-word among nations' — the only people who can now fetch and carry any and everything for the slave-trade... and, because we are the only people who can, are we to allow our proudest privilege to be perverted, and to pervert our own glorious flag into the pirate's flag?"

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.

It is a significant fact that there was one slave-ship named Martin Van Buren and another named James Buchanan. It is a pity that these two slavers could not have been preserved in the navy yard of the American metropolis as monuments to the officials whose names they bore, and to remind the shuddering spectator that along with our days of magnificent glory we have had our age of infinite shame.