We know no ground on which it is just to say that these colored people had come within, and were within, British territory, in such sense as that of the laws of England affecting and regulating the conditions of persons could properly act upon them. As has been already said, they were not there voluntarily; no human being belonging to the vessel was within British territory of his own accord, except the mutineers. There being no importation, nor intent of importation, what right had the British authorities to inquire into the cargo of the vessel, or the condition of persons on board? These persons might be slaves for life; they might be slaves for a term of years, under a system of apprenticeship; they might be bound to service by their own voluntary act; they might be in confinement for crimes committed; they might be prisoners of war; or they might be free. How could the British authorities look into and decide any of these questions? Or, indeed, what duty or power, according to the principles of national intercourse, had they to inquire at all? If, indeed, without unfriendly interference, and notwithstanding the fulfillment of all of their duties of comity and assistance, by these authorities, the master of the vessel could not retain the persons, or prevent their escape, then it would be a different question altogether, whether resort could be had to British tribunals, or the power of the Government in any of its branches, to compel their apprehension and restoration. No one complains that English law shall decide the condition of all persons actually incorporated with [the] British population, unless there be treaty stipulation making other provision for special cases. But in the case of the “Creole” the colored persons were still on board an American vessel, that vessel having been forcibly put out of the course of her voyage by mutiny; the master desiring still to resume it, and calling upon the consul of his Government resident at the place and upon the local authorities to enable him so to do, by freeing him from the imprisonment to which mutiny and murder had subjected him, and furnishing him with such necessary aid and assistance as are usual in ordinary cases of distress at sea. These persons, then, cannot be regarded as being mixed with the British people, or as having changed their character at all, either in regard to country or personal condition. It was no more than just to consider the vessel as still on her voyage, and entitled to the succor due to other cases of distress, whether arising from accident or outrage. And that no other view of the subject can be true is evident from the very awkward position in which the local authorities have placed their Government in respect to the mutineers still held in imprisonment. What is to be done with them? How are they to be punished? The English Government will probably not undertake their trial or punishment; and of what use would it be to send them to the United States, separated from their ship, and at a period so late as that, if they should be sent, before proceedings could be instituted against them, the witnesses might be scattered over half the globe. One of the highest offences known to human law is thus likely to go altogether unpunished.
In the note of Lord Palmerston to Mr. Stevenson, above referred to, his lordship said that, “slavery being now abolished throughout the British empire, there can be no well-founded claim for compensation in respect of slaves who, under any circumstances, may come into the British colonies, any more than there would be with respect to slaves who might be brought into the United Kingdom.” I have only to remark upon this, that the Government of the United States sees no ground for any distinction founded on an alteration of British law in the colonics. We do not consider that the question depends at all on the state of British law. It is not that in such cases the active agency of British law is invoked and refused; it is, that unfriendly interference is deprecated, and those good offices and friendly assistances expected which a Government usually affords to citizens of a friendly Power when instances occur of disaster and distress. All that the United States require in those cases, they would expect in the ports of England, as well as in those of her colonies. Surely, the influence of local law cannot affect the relations of nations in any such matter as this. Suppose an American vessel, with slaves lawfully on board, were to be captured by a British cruiser, as belonging to some belligerent, while the United States were at peace; suppose such prize carried into England, and the neutrality of the vessel fully made out in the proceedings in Admiralty, and a restoration consequently decreed—in such case, must not the slaves be restored, exactly in the condition in which they were when the capture was made? Would any one contend that the fact of their having been carried into England by force set them free?
No alteration of her own local laws can either increase or diminish, or any way affect, the duty of the English Government and its colonial authorities in such cases, as such duty exists according to the law, the comity, and the usages of nations. The persons on board the “Creole” could only have been regarded as Americans passing from one part of the United States to another, within the reach of British authority only for the moment, and this only by force and violence. To seek to give either to persons or property thus brought within reach an English character, or to impart to either English privileges, or to subject either to English burdens or liabilities, cannot, in the opinion of the Government of the United States, be justified.
Suppose that by the law of England all blacks were slaves, and incapable of any other condition; if persons of that color, free in the United States, should, in attempting to pass from one port to another in their own country, be thrown by stress of weather within British jurisdiction, and there detained for an hour or a day, would it be reasonable that the British authority should be made to act upon their condition, and to make them slaves! Or suppose that an article of merchandise, opium for instance, should be declared by the laws of the United States to be a nuisance, a poison—a thing in which no property could lawfully exist or be asserted; and suppose that an English ship with such a cargo on board, bound from one English port to another, should be driven by stress of weather, or by mutiny of the crew, into the ports of the United States, would it be just and reasonable that such cargo should receive its character from American law, and be thrown overboard and destroyed by the authorities? It is in vain that any attempt is made to answer these suggestions by appealing to general principles of humanity. This is a point in regard to which nations must be permitted to act upon different view, if they entertain different views, under their actually existing condition, and yet hold commercial intercourse with one another, or not hold any such intercourse at all. It may be added, that all attempts by the Government of one nation to force the influence of its laws on that of another, for any object whatsoever, generally defeat their own purposes, by producing dissatisfaction, resentment, and exasperation. Better is it, far better in all respects, that each nation should be left without interference or annoyance, direct or indirect, to its undoubted right of exercising its own regard to all things belonging to its domestic interests and domestic duties.
There are two general considerations, of the highest practical importance, to which you will, in the proper manner, invite the attention of her Majesty’s Government.
The first is, that, as civilization has made progress in the world, the intercourse of nations has become more and more independent of different forms of government and different systems of law or religion. It is not now, as it was in ancient times, that every foreigner is considered as therefore an enemy, and that, as soon as he comes into the country, he may be lawfully treated as a slave; nor is the modern intercourse of states carried on mainly, or at all, for the purpose of imposing, by one nation on another, new forms of civil government, new rules of property, or new modes of domestic regulation. The great communities of the world are regarded as wholly independent, each entitled to maintain its own system of law and Government, while all, in their mutual intercourse, are understood to submit to the established rules and principles governing such intercourse. And the perfecting of this system of communication among nations requires the strictest application of the doctrine of non-intervention of any with the domestic concerns of others.
The Bahamas (British possessions) push themselves near to the shores of the United States, and thus lie almost directly in the track of that great part of their coasting traffic, which, doubling the cape of Florida, connects the cities of the Atlantic with the ports and harbors on the gulf of Mexico and the great commercial emporium on the Mississippi. The seas in which these British possessions are situated are seas of shallow water, full of reefs and sandbars, subject to violent action of the winds, and to the agitations caused by the gulf stream. They must always, therefore, be of dangerous navigation, and accidents must be expected frequently to occur, such as will cause American vessels to be wrecked on British islands, or compel them to seek shelter in British ports. It is quite essential that the manner in which such vessels, their crews, and cargoes, in whatever such cargoes consist, are to be treated, in these cases of misfortune and distress, should be clearly and fully known.
You are acquainted with the correspondence which took place a few years ago, between the American and English Governments, respecting the cases of the “Enterprise,” the “Comet,” and the “Encomium.” I call your attention to the Journal of the Senate of the United States, containing resolutions unanimously adopted by that body respecting those cases.4 These resolutions, I believe, have already been brought to the notice of her Majesty’s Government, but it may be well that both the resolutions themselves and the debates upon them should be again adverted to. You will find the resolutions, of course, among the documents regularly transmitted to the legation, and the debates in the newspapers with which it has also been supplied from this Department.
You will avail yourself of an early opportunity of communicating to Lord Aberdeen, in the manner which you may deem most expedient, the substance of this despatch; and you will receive further instructions respecting the case of the “Creole,” unless it shall become the subject of discussion at Washington.
In all your communications with her Majesty’s Government, you will seek to impress it with a full conviction of the dangerous importance to the peace of the two countries of occurrences of this kind, and the delicate nature of the questions to which they give rise.
I am, sir, your obedient servant,
DANIEL WEBSTER.
EDWARD EVERETT, Esq., &c., &c.
1. The British diplomat and financier Alexander Baring, 1st Baron Ashburton (1774–1848).
2. The British politician and diplomat George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen (1784–1860), served as foreign secretary (1841–46) and prime minister (1852–55), among other governmental positions.
3. Lord Palmerston, the British statesman Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865), served as secretary of state of foreign affairs (1830–34, 1835–1841, 1846–51) before becoming prime minister (1855–58, 1859–65). The Virginian Andrew Stevenson (1784–1857), a slave owner, served in Congress (1821–34) and was the American minister to the United Kingdom from 1836 to 1841. Webster refers to cases of U.S. slave ships that had been forced by bad weather or accidents to seek refuge in British territory: 164 slaves were liberated from the Comet when it was damaged near the Abaco Islands in the northern Bahamas in 1830; 45 slaves were liberated from the Encomium when it suffered similar damages off the Abacos in 1834; and in the most famous case, British authorities liberated 78 slaves from the Enterprise in 1835 when it docked in Bermuda because of storms. For the exchange between Stevenson and Palmerston, see Public Documents Printed by Order of the Senate of the United States: Third Session of the Twenty-Fifth Congress, 3, document 216, 12–15. These cases were debated until 1855, when an Anglo-American Claims Commission awarded partial compensation to the ships’ owners.
4. See Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, Being the First Session of the Twenty-Sixth Congress, Begun and Held at the City of Washington, Dec. 2, 1839 (1840), 13 January 1840, 101–2.
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING
from The Duty of the Free States, or Remarks Suggested by the Case of the Creole
Daniel Webster’s letter to Edward Everett, widely reprinted, immediately elicited angry responses from a number of antislavery northerners, including William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), the best-known Unitarian minister of his time. An important influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in the Transcendentalist movement, the Boston-based Channing began arguing against slavery during the 1830s, most notably in his Slavery (1835). His two-volume The Duty of the Free States, or Remarks Suggested by the Case of the Creole (Boston: William Crosby, 1842), the source of the text below, refuted numerous legal aspects of Webster’s letter, but the main point that he underscored again and again is that slavery is a creature only of municipal (state or local) law, whereas the natural law of nations—which many defined as “higher law”—decrees that a human being cannot be regarded as property. Channing died less than six months after completing the manuscript of The Duty of the Free States in late March 1842.
I respectfully ask your attention, fellow-citizens of the Free States, to a subject of great and pressing importance. The case of the Creole, taken by itself, or separated from the principles which are complicated with it, however it might engage my feelings, would not have moved me to the present address. I am not writing to plead the cause of a hundred or more men, scattered through the West Indies, and claimed as slaves. In a world abounding with so much wrong and wo, we at this distance can spend but a few thoughts on these strangers. I rejoice that they are free; I trust that they will remain so; and with these feelings, I dismiss them from my thoughts. The case of the Creole involves great and vital principles, and as such I now invite to it your serious consideration….
This document1 I propose to examine, and I shall do so chiefly for two reasons: First, because it maintains morally unsound and pernicious doctrines, and is fitted to deprave the public mind; and secondly, because it tends to commit the free states to the defence and support of slavery. This last point is at this moment of peculiar importance. The free states are gradually and silently coming more and more into connexion with slavery; are unconsciously learning to regard it as a national interest; and are about to pledge their wealth and strength, their bones and muscles and lives, to its defence. Slavery is mingling more and more with the politics of the country, determining more and more the individuals who shall hold office, and the great measures on which the public weal depends. It is time for the free states to wake up to the subject; to weigh it deliberately; to think of it, not casually, when some startling fact forces it up into notice, but with earnest, continued, solemn attention; to inquire into their duties in regard to it; to lay down their principles; to mark out their course; and to resolve on acquitting themselves righteously towards God, towards the South, and towards themselves. The North has never come to this great matter in earnest. We have trifled with it. We have left things to take their course. We have been too much absorbed in pecuniary interests, to watch the bearing of slavery on government. Perhaps we have wanted the spirit, the manliness, to look the subject fully in the face. Accordingly, the slave-power has been allowed to stamp itself on the national policy, and to fortify itself with the national arm. For the pecuniary injury to our prosperity which may be traced to this source, I care little or nothing. There is a higher view of the case. There is a more vital question to be settled than that of interest, the question of duty; and to this my remarks will be confined�
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In regard to the reasonings and doctrines of the document, it is a happy circumstance, that they come within the comprehension of the mass of the people. The case of the Creole is a simple one, which requires no extensive legal study to be understood. A man who has had little connexion with public affairs, is as able to decide on it as the bulk of politicians. The elements of the case are so few, and the principles on which its determination rests, are so obvious, that nothing but a sound moral judgment is necessary to the discussion. Nothing can darken it but legal subtlety. None can easily doubt it, but those who surrender conscience and reason to arbitrary rules.
The question between the American and English governments turns mainly on one point. The English government does not recognize within its bounds any property in man. It maintains, that slavery rests wholly on local municipal legislation; that it is an institution not sustained and enforced by the law of nature, and still more, that it is repugnant to this law; and that of course no man, who enters the territory or is placed under the jurisdiction of England, can be regarded as a slave, but must be treated as free. The law creating slavery, it is maintained, has and can have no force beyond the state which creates it. No other nation can be bound by it. Whatever validity this ordinance, which deprives a man of all his rights, may have within the jurisdiction of the community in which it had its birth, it can have no validity any where else. This is the principle on which the English government founds itself.
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